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Mozilla Philippines Community Update (August 2010)

August 17th, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

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. :D

Mozilla Philippines Meet-up on July 31,2010

July 22nd, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

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! :D

Mozilla Summit 2010: Day 3

July 15th, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

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.

Mozilla Summit 2010: Day 2

July 9th, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

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. :D

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.

Mozilla Summit 2010: Day 1

July 8th, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

I’m here in Whistler, Canada with over 600 Mozilla employees, partners, and community leaders from all over the world and the first day was full of demos, technology, and things to look forward to in the future.

The started off with a nice breakfast here at the Fairmont Whistler Chateau and I sat with Gen Kanai, Cheng and Keng from the Mozilla Thailand Community, plus a couple of interns for Mozilla. The conversations were nice and that set the tone for the day.

The keynotes started and it was pretty cool. Personally, I found it nice that speakers didn’t rely much on slide decks, especially the talk by Mitchell Baker.

Then came the demos– they were simply mind-blowing. (If you follow the #moz10 hashtag in Twitter, you’ll read that a lot of people share my sentiments). There were stuff like 3D and graphics acceleration with WebGL, audio processing in the browser, a 3D movie rendered on the fly, processing optimization that will make Firefox 4 uber-fast, and neat Fennec stuff.

After the demos, we had an extended lunch break to let folks watch the World Cup 2010 match between Germany and Spain. Around that time, I took a nap because I was feeling the jetlag. (Manila is 15 hours ahead of Whistler).

I then attended the breakout sessions:

  • Moving from Local Events to Strong Local Communities – Great session run by event managers from Mozilla. This session had a great discussion on how to keep communities active, and I had great takeaways on event scheduling and topics. It was also a great intro to Mozilla Drumbeat. Here are the session notes.
  • Mozilla’s L10N (localization) Information Architecture – Another equally nice session by Seth Bindernagel, Christopher Howse, and Sta? Ma?olepszy. This session showed how the localization monitoring was optimized using sound information architecture methods.
  • The Mozilla Web Universe – A bit of a letdown of a session. It was a discussion centered on how to manage the 100+ websites affiliated with Mozilla. The session ended with an invitation to a potential Mozilla Web Task Force.

An hour after the sessions ended, everyone had dinner in various restaurants at the Whistler Village. I selected an Italian place and I got to serendipitously meet my Mozilla Summit Buddy. Dinner was OK, and I had a great discussion with the local community leaders from Brazil and Colombia.

I was very tired as the day ended. But Day 1 of the Mozilla Summit 2010 was a great start for an awesome event that it I’m looking forward to the next day.

Mozilla Campus Reps visit Angelicum College QC

December 22nd, 2009 by Ren² Gabás with View Comments

The Mozilla Campus Reps Philippines participated in the IT Week of Angelicum College of Quezon City on Monday, December 14. This event is the first campus event conducted by the Campus Reps, and represents the first of the baby steps of the Campus Reps towards cross-campus event organization.

I accompanied Jun Barrun from the Colegio de San Juan de Letran. We met at the Cubao MRT, where we rode a taxi to Angelicum College where we were met by Josie Santos, the adviser of the Computer Society that organized the IT Week. They were really supportive and helpful.

After the opening ceremonies of the IT Week, Jun spoke on the virtues of Mozilla Firefox and the Open Web Standards.

We were initially surprised at the size of the event, since was also a Family Day for the Angelicum College. Our Firefox booth consisted of two tables, two chairs and the Firefox tarpaulin from the “Fire Years of Firefox in Manila” event. The booth was positioned in front of the gym along with other booths, where we could receive a lot of foot traffic and eyeballs because of the ongoing events held at the gym. One of the most curious comments that we received was from a elementary school-aged girl who lingered about the booth, and told me, “Meron kami niyan sa bahay. Sabi kasi ni mama, mas maganda gamitin ang Firefox.” “We have Firefox at home, because Mom said that it is better to use.” She is one lucky girl who has a capable mom who can teach her how to use a secure web browser. I’ll take a guess that her mom probably works in the IT industry.

We talked with the IT students on how Firefox helps with keeping the Internet free from non-open standards, as well as a possible “Firefox Installation Day” for their computer labs, which are currently using only IE.

We also received inquiries on how Mozilla is organized and operates, and how the Mozilla Philippines Community and the Campus Reps are able to participate in campus events.

We did run out of few Mozilla goodies that we had, and we even had to give away the ones that we were already using. For future events, we created a specific checklist to follow, in order to have a smooth operation of both the booth and the talk.

We are thankful for Josie Santos, and the Computer Society for having us in their event. We hope to attend future events in Angelicum College. We are also thankful for Regnard Raquedan for his support for the Campus Reps. Special mention also goes out to Campus Reps Myra Jill Siason and Joell Lapitan.

Five Years of Firefox in Manila Done!

November 22nd, 2009 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

The Five Years of Firefox in Manila event was held yesterday and it was a great launchpad for the Mozilla Philippines Community.

I, along with Community coordinators Ren-Ren Gabas, Allan Caeg, and Mozilla Campus Reps from Colegio San Juan de Letran Calamba led by Joell Lapitan, came at 12 noon to make the necessary preparations at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) in Makati City. Since the event was scheduled at 3:15, we had enough time to iron out the logistics and event flow. Also, we had great support from the AIM folks in the event management.

People started trickling in at 2:15 and the heart snacks were served. In line with the Philippine community theme, we had Filipino delicacies for the food. (Yum!)

We started a but late at 3:30 with around 70 people in attendance. The program proper was kicked off by Allan Caeg, who had a short welcome message and showed the “Light the World with Firefox” video:

Ren-Ren Gabas then had a short talk about the Mozilla Campus Reps initiative and I then followed up with the Five Years of Firefox in Manila talk and introduced the official Mozilla Philippines Community website and invited the people join.

Globe Telecom also showcased the Web2Mobile add-one where Globe subscribers can send SMS and MMS via the Firefox, with a very intuitive interface. This demo drew a lot of “ooooh”‘s from the audience. On a side note, the app will be launched soon and this was a project by a couple of Computer Science students from the University of the Philippines – Diliman. Then came the most awaited portion: the raffle.

I think most of the Firefox fans who came to the event really wanted the special edition Firefox shirts we gave away, but we could only give out five shirts. :( Maybe we can have more in the future. ;) But nonetheless, no one went home empty handed as we gave everyone little Firefox goodies.

If you ask me, the event was able to introduce the Mozilla Philippines Community in a nice way and it was able to make people look forward to the next set of events. :D

A huge thanks to everyone who came and those who helped, I hope you will be a part of the Mozilla Philippines Community moving forward. :D

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Here are some photos of the event, courtesy of Aja Lapus and Joell Lapitan:

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One final thing: props to my fellow bloggers/Firefox fans who were there:

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