MozTour Bacolod

Team Mozilla Philippines (MozillaPH) held its very first MozTour in Bacolod City earlier today; the very first time Team MozillaPH visited the province of Negros Occidental (around 468 kilometers south of Manila). This MozTour was based on an invitation from La Consolacion College – Bacolod and an awesome team of Mozillians headed by our dear friend Frederick Villaluna.

Team MozillaPH for this MozTour was headed by yours truly, with Mozilla Reps Kim Domanog & Tina Verbo. The team left Manila (MNL) around 0400H today catching an hour flight to Bacolod (BCD). An hour of land travel from the airport (Bacolod Silay International Airport) then you will reach the city proper of Bacolod.

The MozTour was held at the auditorium of LCC-Bacolod, and it was jampacked by the time we started the seminar.

I was first on stage. Gave the participants a background of what Mozilla is, what are we doing here in the Philippines as a community, and how one can be part of the project. Second part of my presentation is about Firefox OS, now that a device is already locally available (heard from our sources in Bacolod that the Cherry Mobile ACE units are sold out in the city as early as end of 2014). Prior to the MozTour, the team of Bacolod-based Mozillians (led by Frederick) were already making buzz about Mozilla’s mobile OS by conducting talks and meetups on creating webapps for Firefox OS.

Next on stage was Kim to give a talk about the Firefox Student Ambassador (FSA) Program. Prior to our trip, we already have an idea on how many FSA’s we have in Bacolod, but only upon reaching LCC-Bacolod when we noticed the dedication of our dear Student Ambassadors: from the awesome stage setup (which was done since the night before of the event) down to the on-site registration of MozTour participants (not just from their school, but there were a lot of attendees from nearby colleges and universities).

After the talk of Kim, there was a 15-minute snack break. During this lull, a series of Mozilla-produced videos were shown on stage (from Firefox Mobile, future of Firefox OS and WebRTC).

Last to hit the center-stage was Tina to give her talk (and demo) about the Webmaker Project and tools to convert web users into webmakers. After her talk, the team accommodated questions (a lot of them) from the MozTour participants. We even gave away from Firefox swags to people who could answer our pop quiz.

We also called on stage the leadership of the LCC-Bacolod Firefox Club and asked them (impromptu) to share their experiences as Firefox Student Ambassadors (FSA) and what made them join the program. It was an awesome thing (as I could not recall doing it in any of the previous MozTours anywhere in the country) as FSA’s sharing to their fellow students being a Mozillian.

The event ended with a photo-op (per batch; per school) with all of the participants.

Complete photo-set of MozTour Bacolod is here.