After the successful meet-up a few weeks ago (where we saw the very first Mozilla Firefox Pizza), it’s time to share some of the key points of the community meeting:
- The Mozilla Philippines Community will be at the upcoming Philippine Youth Congress for Information Technology (or Y4IT Conference) this September. I’ll be having a speaking slot at September 16, 2010 and I’ll be talking about Open Web Technologies. Mozilla is also going to be one of the sponsors of the event, which is the biggest IT event in the Philippines to date (an estimated 20,000 college students will be attending the 4-day congress).
- The efforts on the Mozilla Student Reps will continue under the leadership of Joell Lapitan and Jun Barrun. The focus will be on getting more schools in easy to target areas, such as Metro Manila and in the Laguna province. The meeting also attacted first-time volunteers from AMA and De La Salle Canlubang.
- There’s also effort in supporting global Mozilla initiatives in our locale. The Mozilla Philippines Community is promoting sites like Mozilla Drumbeat, Mozilla Hacks, and Rock Your Firefox at the Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs 2010. While each of the sites a long shot to make it the Top 10 at this point, the sites still got some exposure in the Philippines.
- Localization is also picking up, albeit gradually. The localization for Tagalog is now at 15%, up from 6% a couple of months ago.
Not included in the meeting, the Mozilla Philippines Community is now part of the 2010 Software Freedom Day event in the Philippines.
If anyone is interested in having the Mozilla Philippines Community in their respective events, feel free to drop us a line. 
One of the good things about the last Mozilla Philippines Community meet-up is the enormous Firefox Pizza.
The brainchild of Mozilla Student Reps leaders Joell Lapitan and Jun Barrun, the 30-inch pizza was the highlight of the meeting. The pizza itself was a great treat and the community members actually felt the pizza was too awesome to eat. (Well, we eventually gobbled that awesome pizza).
If our research served us right, this is the very first Mozilla Firefox pizza. There have been plenty of Mozilla Firefox cakes baked before, but no pizzas. We hope that this creation will serve inspiration to other Mozilla communities in the world.
Updates on the meet-up will be posted soon.
It’s meet-up time and we’re going to South of the Metro!
We’re going to have a meet-up on July 31, 2010 at the Paseo De Santa Rosa (in Santa Rosa, Laguna) at 10am-1pm. The venue is tentatively set at Big 30 Pizza-Pasta.
Like all meet-ups, the event will be an informal get-together, but there will be a sharing session on what transpired at the 2010 Mozilla Summit. Of course, there will be nice Mozilla swag to be given away, like shirts, stickers, and posters.
Everyone who is interested in being part of the Mozilla movement in the Philippines is welcome to attend, especially college students. To join in on the fun, please sign up at the meet-up’s Facebook page.
See you there!
I’ve recently written my entry to the Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs of 2010 Writing Project and I nominated a handful of new Mozilla blogs.
The first one is this site, the Mozilla Philippines Community site. I think the writing project is a good place to promote the local activities among the blogging circle and hopefully get the message of the open web to the local audience.
The next website is one of my latest faves. Rock Your Firefox is a blog that features cool and useful Mozilla Firefox add-ons. At the end of every month, the site creates a collection of the add-ons and publishes it on the Mozilla Firefox Add-ons site.
Mozilla Hacks is much more developer-oriented than the previous entries but it’s equally coon nonetheless. It contains articles and demos of web technologies that may or may not be included in future versions of Firefox or other Mozilla software.
Finally, Mozilla Drumbeat is last Mozilla-related blog I nominated. From the site, it describes itself as “practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas, solving problems and building the open web. ” But simply put, it’s amashup of common activities (art, play, ideas) combined with web geekery. This received pretty good exposure in the 2010 Mozilla Summit and there’s pretty good reason for that.
I hope you find the time to visit and support the newer Mozilla blogs out there. Heck, if you can nominate them, then all the better.
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Just a quick note: To nominate the Mozilla sites, you must have a blog and:
- Write a post with links to the sites you nominate, plus short descriptions. Then include a link to the contest page.
- After writing the post, the person must go back the contest page and post a comment containing the permalink of your blog post with your nominations.
It was a great 3-day event and The Mozilla Summit 2010 concluded with a great wrap-up party. The great photo above was taken in the concluding event, with a great shot by Gen Kanai.
The day still had great sessions– I attended the ones focused on community participation, communicating well with media, Firefox 4 Beta localization, and community membership models. As you can see from the sessions and discussions I’ve joined, I’ve been putting a lot of effort in learning to make a better, more involved local community and I plan to apply the thing’s I’ve learned here.
Speaking of learnings, here are some of my takeaways from the Mozilla Summit 2010:
- Stand For Something – What makes the Mozilla and Firefox brands effective is that they stand for something, particularly the Open Web. This should be the core for any community marketing activities and the rest will be supplemental pieces and activities.
- Make the Message Local – I’ve realized that I’ve been approaching the Mozilla Philippines Community from an ineffective perspective. I think there should be more effort in making the language and the message more attuned to the local community, especially the language and the flavor. Expect a lot more “Pinoy”-themed activities from the Mozilla Philippines Community in the future
- Strong + Simple = Sticky – Finally, the message to the community should be strong and simple enough to stick like super glue. Looking at the messages Mozilla has been communicating, it’s not really complex despite having deep technology underlying layers.
- The Community should feel awesome – I was thinking about the whole summit itself and it was far from the typical serious conferences. There were Rock Band and Wii Sports stations, places to relax, and areas to discuss while the sessions and keynotes were ongoing. I think these made folks more energized during the day, and not too sapped by the events closed. My point is that all these, along with the agenda items, made people feel awesome and resulted in awesome work.
As for areas for improvement, the weak points of the summit were the Buddy Quest activity, session hi-jacking (like a session that veers way off topic), and weakly organized Birds of a Feather meetings.
Over-all, the experience was great and makes me look forward to supporting Mozilla and help build the community stronger.
By the time Day 2 of the 2010 Mozilla Summit ended, I was very tired. But I was glad.
The second day of the biggest get together of Mozilla-folk this year was filled great activities, starting with great keynotes in the morning up to the very first Mozilla World Expo.
I also attended a talk that focused on the branding research done by a Search Engine 1. One of the funny things they found out was that some folks think that the current Mozilla logo looks like the Toronto Raptors logo:
versus 
After the talks, there was a cool Mozilla Science fair where the cool projects were showcased. Then the big thing for me: The World Expo.
The World Expo is an exhibit of the different Mozilla communities all over the globe and that includes our community. We were given some space, plus an LCD display and a pair of speakers to share to the rest of Mozilla how awesome our country and our community are.
I created a slideshow of the Mozilla Philippines Community’s past activities, plus some nice tourism photos of the Philippines. I also set-up a sampling station of Filipino delicacies. The best seller was the dried mangoes.
After packing-up at the World Expo, I attended a roundtable discussion with Mozilla Foundation Chairperson Mitchell Baker along with all the local community leaders. The informal session centered on Mozilla topics and local communities.
By that time, I was very tired. But it was well worth it as people liked the Mozilla Philippines Community booth and I got to interact with yet more Mozillans.
We had the Mozilla Firefox Localization to Filipino Webinar led by Seth Bindernagel of Mozilla yesterday morning and it was a great session.
Around eleven folks attended the first webinar to tackle Mozilla Firefox localization to Filipino. (Props to John, Kevin, Bob, Joell, Charmaine, Gian, Juned, Marvin, and other folks who made time for the webinar. if you were there, please let me know! 
)
Seth introduced a tool called Narro and it’s a web-based translation/localization tool developed by Alxandru Sasz. Seth showed us how to translate a couple of strings and showed us how to install language packs.
I just realized then that localization was a tricky thing. One phrase we were supposed to translate was “Manage Search Engines” which spurred a little discussion because there’s really no word that directly matches “manage” in Filipino. We agreed on “Pamahalaan ang mga Search Engine.”
One feedback: I hope Narro will be able to show the context of the strings to translate because in Filipino, there are different forms of verbs. Example, the string “Add Search Engine” by itself could mean to add a search engine right now, or an option add a search engine.
One learning I had is that we need some hard-core language and grammar folks to edit and make suggestions for un-awkward versions of English words.
In any case, this is a good first step for the community and we will follow this up with a translate-athon.
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Seth has a nice blog post on the chronological events that happened during the webinar.
