Deb's Blog

Hey Mozilla India, Last one year has been hectic. We all know, it has been. But it was worth it. We've been busy doing things . We've been busy scaling up. May it be the first true 10x participation , may it be the first community launch of Firefox OS, may it be the first Firefox OS bus to reach out to the length & breadth of this big country, may it be the only place where the MozCamp was hosted in 2014, or may it be becoming the largest regional Mozilla community globally (or any FOSS community, for that matter). We've been executing at a scale that magnificently surpasses all the things we've done in previous years. And we did good! BUT, we've somehow forgotten to take care of the community itself . The community grew that large for what all we did in previous years, what we planned for it previously. But in last year, we've given much less attention to the growth and health of the community. The garden of Roses was so beautifully flourished, ...

I'm getting my feet wet with GlusterFS community . If you haven't heard of it yet, it's a distributed cloud file system by Red Hat. It's an open-source project with many goodness within, which empower Red Hat Storage (RHS) server. I was asked to look into the Gluster.org project site & make suggestions on how can we make it better. Better is a subjective term; it depends on the end goal and how far the plan can achieve it. I've set myself a goal & the goal is to radically increase participation in Gluster project. There are several parts to act on this, and all those will be communicated with in apt channels. This post, however, focuses on renovating the website as the public face & funnel to drive participation & contributions.

Continuing Reps' track discussion from the Mozilla Portland Workweek , one key topic that we schemed through & pinned to come back later, was to: Use The Mozilla Reps Program for Regional Leadership Development . Mitchell & Mark is highly interested and enthusiastic about autonomous & self-correcting local/regional leadership setups. A structure* that is highly distributed, interconnected, inclusive, autonomous, propagating and meritocratic in form. * This is my understanding, listening to various discussions & keynotes. In case this is misinterpreted - please do correct me. UPDATE: while I was at it, working on this blog for last 3 days (2G Internet, go figure :P), Rosana has already shared her thoughts on Reps' blog (crazy-weird, even the titles sound the same :D). You may choose to read that first to get the sense of where is it going. Following is my take on how can it be planned and implemented. Why ReMo? Obvious first question comes, why Reps ...

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...

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.....

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...

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...

TL;DR : Now, anyone can register & post on Mozilla India Blog . Let me be straight here : It's nothing new. It has always been there - but general feedback from the community implies, it isn't always obvious to get... Okay, point taken. JUST. PUSH. THE. BUTTON. Dammit! From the very moment of configuring the Mozilla India blog, the new user registrations was set open (OFF, by default) - so that the community members can contribute to it. The default WP configuration puts the SignUp/LogIn links at the bottom of the sidebar - which may be difficult to notice. Although, if someone searched, would've found it - we needed to make it more vivid to the community, that it's not a obfuscated fine-text sitting there just because it has to. We had to make it more prominent, that if community members have a good point to share & need to have their voices heard - they can use this platform. After all, that's what it's for - right? So, there you go... The...

MozTI @ BESU: Organizers From left: Subhasish Kundu, Soumya Deb, Sayak Sarkar, Priyanka Nag, Shambo Bishnu, Amrita Roychowdhury, Gaurab Patra, Ramit Das, Avik Pal, Sankha Narayan Guria, Kaustav Das, Swarnava Sengupta & Arijita Das

Event Links: Talk Slide : code.debs.io/talks/RestartlessAddons GitHub Gist : gist.github.com/3844059 Live Example : addons.mozilla.org/addon/about-pages Tour Summary : twitter.com/Debloper/status/257049363661086720 Code Walkthrough : thecodeplayer.com/walkthrough/making-of-restartless-firefox-add-ons Event Venues: Mozilla Mania, Chennai 6th Oct, 2012 — Velammal Engineering College Tech Carnival, Thanjavur 7th Oct, 2012 — Sastra University Campus Mozilla Mania, Warangal 9th Oct, 2012 — Jayamukhi Institute of Technological Science

=================================== tl;dr ====================================== __________ Mozilla Summer Code Party - SICSR, Pune: 23rd June, 2012 __________ Event Page: wiki.mozilla.org/MozParty_Pune Etherpad : etherpad.mozilla.org/20120623-Pune-Workshop Sayak's post on Mozilla India : mozillaindia.org/node/644 Ankit's Slides: slideshare.net/ankitgadgil/the-mozilla-story Faisal's Slides: slideshare.net/ankitgadgil/using-firefox-like-a-boss Flickr Album : www.flickr.com/photos/kinshuksunil/sets/72157630325471864/ Facebook Album : facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151053643809188.493002.677614187 ================================================================================

=================================== tl;dr ====================================== ______ Talk & Workshop at OSScamp, BVB College Hubli: 11-12th April, 2012 ______ Event Page: osscamp.in/event/osscamp-hubli Talk Slides : debloper.github.com/talks/GearingUpAddons Workshop Slides : debloper.github.com/talks/RestartlessAddons Flickr Album : www.flickr.com/photos/kinshuksunil/sets/72157629471812562/show/ ================================================================================