Deb's Blog

Last week, I cleared up all my schedules and went on to attend the Mozilla Coincidental Workweek in Portland; a massive ensemble of a thousand Mozilla staffs and a hundred Mozilla volunteers. I had minimal clue of the schedule, as it was a constantly reforming piece of work, but mostly an overall idea of which teams I'm gonna spend time with, and for what purpose. Current State of Mozilla Frankly speaking - Mozilla - internally and externally, is under lots of eyes. May it be regarding the switching of search provider partner, unrelated advocacy stance or some significant people leaving. The poster child of successful FLOSS projects globally apparently seemed to struggle on its own. But to me, personally, much of that understanding has changed, watching & listening to the vibe closely over this week. What it seems to me now - Mozilla is a ship with the same good-ol' navigation instruments, but with some seemingly incompatible new-age propellers, installed in a hast

Oct 25, 1730 : Finished co-facilitating session on Contribution Pathways. We had the entire audience broken down in 5 groups, rotating per 8 mins to each focus station (pathways, mentorship, governance, system & data, recognition). Sorry - no device policy - hence, no photos! Oct 25, 1500 : Lunch & catching up with communications. Codepo8 dropped by. Ohai! :D Oct 25, 1045 : Session on Community Diversity & Inclusion. It was great to facilitate with you, Beatrice, Rebecca, Alifiyah, Leo, Ibrahima et al. Oct 25, 0900 : At the venue, Gunner on the stage. Audience in that awesome MozFest formation. Oct 24, 2300 : Beer with the folks, and then a long walk beside Thames. We should go and sleep. BTW, great stories, Manel! Oct 24, 2100 : Reps' community dinner. I'M A CARNIVORE... AWE YEAH!!! Oct 24, 1800 : Science Fair is ON. It's my third time &I'm equally boggled just I was on my first time at MozFest. Some really cool folks with really cool

This blog was drafted on the aircraft back home from MozFest, on 28th October, 2013. It's a shame that it's been lying in the drafts for a year now. Publishing almost as is, many intended details missing. I'm sorry! :( To avoid it this year, I'm live blogging MozFest 2014 . Cheers! Flickr Slideshow : https://www.flickr.com/photos/debloper/sets/72157637170816103/show   0th Day Had a tour around Westminister & Buckingham with Faye, Sayak, San James et al. Took heck load of pics, chased pigeons, saw royal processing, wandered around the green park. A morning well spent. Next up was visiting the mozilla office; had mentors' call, debriefing about the festival. This is where the excitement begins. 1st Day So, the maker party begins with the kick off of the science fair - some interesting pieces of work, some great inspiration. Met an 11yo guy, who's interested about stop motion animation, has his own YouTube channel & been up to it for 3 years..

Note to self : Cut it to the chase. I've been a quite unorganized (which is gradually increasing) for last one year - followed by me stepping down from Mozilla Reps' Council & by now, I've completely overwhelmed myself. Being unorganized was experimentally self induced; in order to suppress my OCPD . It helped keep my traits of the disorder in check (quite successfully by now). However, it came at a cost, I need to repay. I am swamped with things I need to do. I have 50+ actionable tabs open in 5 tab groups. I have 70+ bugs pending actions. I have 100+ direct mails to get back to (a couple of thousands on lists). I have 5+ budget requests yet to be made (10+ unresolved backlog). I have 3 blogs drafted & 10+ blogs semi drafted awaiting to be published. Skipping the enormous number of yak-shaving aside or in parallel. ...and all these backlogs are only for Mozilla. Which would be (realistically) 33.333% of _all_ the things I need to get done. Today, I&#

Two of the Socratic paradoxes say: No one does something wrong willingly or knowingly. No one desires (to be) evil. More one thinks about it, more obvious it becomes how true these statements are. Everyone - invariably what (s)he does - has justification behind their those actions, and trusts that to be the best course of action in good faith (in fact, one gets into trauma, if the brain fails to justify their actions). But we do make mistakes. Lack of data/information/knowledge, lack of expertise, lack of maturity, lack of empathy, lack of responsibility, lack of thought process the action demands, lack of a constructive mood, lack of security, lack of foresight... and for the lack of more affecting parameters on hand, I'll just let the list end here. Having a setup of zero tolerance to mistakes circumvents achievement & innovation. Having a setup of very high tolerance of mistakes ends up becoming counter-productive. Balance is to identify mistakes & revive A

UPDATE : as intended, this has started some good amount of stir - which was half the point of this post. Many questions are being asked in several channels which has the risk of derailing the actual discussion (unifying bn) if answered. So, if there's anything particularly about this blog that bothers you, it'll be best to express it as a comment to the blog-post itself. I'm updating the post with some side-notes (floating right textboxes, in light-yellowish background) & tooltip titles (things deserving less explanations; underlined texts with yellowish background). Apart from internal markup changes, the existing content of the post will not be changed (unless otherwise mentioned); feel free to use DIFF. Post was removed by the author himself (under good faith, to help the situation). Can't be cited anymore. This post is in response to the recent adversities within Mozilla Kolkata Community, regarding the Bengali Localization for Mozilla Projects in general

In this post, I'm gonna briefly raise some key issues & suggest half-baked solutions about events in India. It's heavily focused on developer-events, but some bits are pretty generic. These are from the discussions, experiences and findings under the lights of the following events: MozSetup at IITKGP ProgramIIEST at IIEST (duh!) ...and some more events since the late 2013 Before I dive in - like a side-note, I'd like to mention - since 2012, we've tried to increase developer contributions in India heavily. Some low hanging fruits , to start with; and they have generated results . Now it's time to take some further steps, and evolve further. But there are some blockers. Very real ones. Most challengingly(!), non-technical ones. Thoughts on developer-hosted events They are Procedural They can plan properly and execute efficiently. Something that's not vastly common in South Asian region. They are Innovative Given an opportunity, they m

12:30AM last night, gotten done with the meetings & calls - almost worn off - I was about to get my dinner & call it a day (for such long of a day it was). But what do you know! Got summoned by my Ingress faction for a call of duty - awkwardly eccentric, insanely probabilistic, extremely difficult, and yet immensely confidential task that needs to get done exactly at 4:30 in the morning, at a place 3hrs by road. Hence, I grabbed my gears & rushed for the pick up (with a couple of bread-slices in my pocket; because, Dinner) - and there's no looking back. In simple words - it was a covert operation of ~16 Ingress Agents, to transport an artifact (#2) from the origin portal in Bangalore to the destination portal at Mahabaleshwar (then undisclosable) - lots on XMs were spilled in the process & to defy the Resistance's effort to... well, resist - the process... & keeping it under Enlightened-control, strategically (12hrs) & effectively (4hrs).

I woke up quite late today, and as usual found myself in the flood of device-notifications. Swimming through, I couldn't help but notice that there's one recurrent theme against many of those conversations - actively, or passively; which is, me being termed as the "Co-founder of Mozilla India" in my FOSDEM talk's introduction. Some congratulations, some giving justifications, some asking for justifications, some efforts to clarify the situations, some smug comments & inquiries etc. And I realized, the issue is not as innocent as it first appeared, and something is needed to be done to fix it. For what it's worth, I am not the one who scripted the introduction. I've had very little to do with it. Clarista is such a nice person, it seemed rude to stop her on stage. I made a little hand gesture, "Please, let it go... I'm not that guy." but anyway, that message didn't pass through. I've been anonymously volunteering for Mozil

Foreword For last 2 years, I've been trying to attend FOSDEM, and yet each time found myself to be too late in the process to do anything about it. Missed the last year's Firefox OS awesomeness badly, and thus had my reminder set to wake me up when September October ends. Facts & Figures The Campus Map of ULB, along with the Dev-Rooms FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting) is a developer-centric event, hosted at ULB (loosely translated, Open/Free University of Brussels ) that brings together 5000+ geeks from all over the world. There were quite a few keynotes, main-tracks, and along with that 33 Dev-Rooms - that is project specific focus groups, each diving deep into their topics in separate auditoriums. The entry is walk-in, until/unless the room is full. The event in itself is free of any registration, or other charges. Mozilla had the Dev-Room UD2.218A on Saturday, and there were 16 awesome talks in total . You can get