Deb's Blog

This week marks 1 year of radical participation in Mozilla India towards MLS contributions. We've started and sustained activities to make India more and more visible on the Mozilla Location Service's map & now it's one of the brightest region for MLS, globally (especially Kerala - you guys deserve cookies... and nutella... and more battery packs).

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, ...

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...

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...

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...

The Event The Mobile Developers' Summit is an annual event hosted by Saltmarch. This year it was at Bangalore, last 10-11th of October, 2013 at the NIMHANS Convention centre. I was invited to speak on behalf of Mozilla about the "Firefox OS and the power of HTML5". [ Slide Deck ] The Talk The talk revolved around the idea, how Internet as a Platform changes the game, what myths do we have around it and pointers to what changes in direction we can already see. To some extent, it compared the capabilities of Native vs. Web applications - with little brief on how easy it is to make web applications to be device-compatible, and how the market ecosystem is different & more meaningful than the rest. Showed a couple of demos, insights about the platform & gave some contexts of WebApp development.  In the end, tried to demonstrate the world map, where Firefox OS has already launched, and the opportunities of Indian Freelancers & Startups in the glob...

So it begins... Hundreds of Mozillians from all over the Asia has already started taking off for Santa Clara, California to attend the Mozilla Summit 2013 - the largest Summit we've ever had! This is historic; THIS IS EPIC! Not because of the numbers, but for the enthusiasm, reach & impact it will create. Prologue There are also two other locations where the summit will be hosted parallel to each other, with (almost) same tracks & schedules - in Brussels & Toronto. Grossly, Mozillians from Europe attending summit in Brussels, Mozillians from Latin America, Africa & Middle East and Canada attending are in Toronto, and the ones from Asia and USA will be rocking at Santa Clara. Participation According to the list of invitees, Mozillians coming in heavy bunch are from India, Indonesia, Phillipines, Japan, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Sri Lanka etc. which is almost proportional to the strength & activities in those respective Mozilla communities. There are plenty of...

WIP title: Releasing Krakens... an entire army of them! Peek-a-boo: New visual identity of Mozilla India... Yay! Well, the idea of Foxy hugging the Ashoka Chakra as the logo had to be thrown into the gutter - too many objections about potential abuse of the country-emblem. Though, I fail to see how hugging your mother can be considered a nefarious act! Now, to the main topic; TL;DR: The new Mozilla India websites is live & kickin', also it has got some new platform-integration (& underlying infrastructure upgrade). The Mozilla India developers have been at work for a while now & things have started to shape up. The Platforms & the Infrastructure I'll be mentioning these two terms way too often below, so I'd rather give a brief: Platforms : a software stack on an OS, allowing us to achieve some task in particular. Some lose examples would be blogging, content management, documentation, API, content serving etc. Infrastructure : the hard...

August 1st, 2013: I've got 178 actionable emails in my inbox. A partial snap of my inbox of this evening with the emails which dodged all the 50+ filters, headed directly my way & need quick attention — it's not a sudden spike, and there're some emails missing inbetween, which I've replied to, archived, before thinking of taking the screencap — but you get it, right!

The Task Force leaders of Mozilla India gathered last week(end) to sit together & brainstorm about the intra/inter-taskforce operations in our community, and thus to carve the foreseeable-future pathway of Mozilla India. ============================================================ Event Page : https://reps.mozilla.org/e/work-week-india-2013/ Task Forces : https://wiki.mozilla.org/India/task_force Responsible : Priyanka Nag Accountable : Soumya Deb Support : Event Task Force, ProTravels Consulted : William Quiviger, Pierros Papadeas Informed : Vineel Reddy Pindi ============================================================ N.B : Event report preparation has been delegated to Documentation Task Force, starting with this event, and moving forward (allowing me to go nuts in my own blog post). Expect the complete report by the end of this week (which requires summarizing dozens of etherpads of the teams).