On 23rd Feb 2014 1500 hrs IST, the IIITA Firefox Club laid its baby steps with their first event, “Mozcafe”, which was to introduce the IIITians to Open Source and its powers and the projects helmed by Mozilla that try to help is in all our dealing with the open web. Also this was the launching pad for our club, where new bonds were formed and old ones rekindled. With regular contributions from the community, we strive to reach a position, where our club would be counted in the revered ones at Mozilla Foundation.
But all this didn’t happen at once for us. It was a long journey to traverse, but the fruits were worth the hard work. We all were just discussing about our future and what we want to achieve, the one most important point being that we want to work on what we want. Lo and behold, Rahul Ranjan starts telling us about GSoC and what it tends to achieve. Well we all were quite impressed, but nobody just steps up and does something. We all went still with the unknown, booted up our screens, and started playing CS. However, we came back to our discussion, and started up our web browsers and started searching on GSoC. We have our lovely Quora to thank for giving us the true experiences of various users. That led our minds on a journey thinking what if our friends also do something like this, so we went and talked to a bunch of them. Alas, no one knew of its wonders, the next week we met up again and we decided to form a club to inform others about this and similar stuff.
However, what came into our mind the foremost was the backing power, well our heavenly Internet again came to the rescue. Behold, from the first result we learnt about the Webmaker Kitchen Party, taking place at Allahabad hosted by ReMo Shahid Farooqui. Four of us went there, and we discussed with him about our college, and that led to the establishment of our club. The idea was quite fresh for our college environment, where Open Source contribution was a farcry.
So we put together a teams consisting of Mozillians Rahul Ranjan(Club Lead, RMA), Aditya Chaturvedi, Ankit Goswami, Charul Agarwal, Jatin Mehta, Sunil Rana, Ashoka Chandra Wardhan, Atul Kumar Verma, Pawan Burnwal, Sachin Chopra, Abhishek Menon, Anurag Das, Aayoushee Garg, Vishnu Ks. After much consideration, and keeping the enthusiasm and timeline in mind, we decided that in February ’14 an event must be held, that would mark the inception of the club as well as introduce the crowd here to the Open Source community.
After a lot of persuasion and persistence, we finally achieved the permission letter from our college administration to organize the event in the Auditorium. We were happy, but alas we were pennyless. So, we took out our pens to draft a letter to Mozilla Rep Kate Naszradi for approval of funding for our event. There were a lot of revisions that took place on the letter alone. However, we were succesful in getting the funding, and we worked on the event with a new vigor.
Then came the daunting task of designing an effective poster for propogating our Mozcafe. We nearly pulled our hair off in frustration when it came to poster-designing, deciding on the perfect poster that described our event, yet was so visually appealing that people took a moment to read the whole thing. Finally, Rahul came up with a design, that was quite cool as well as perfect for the event.
If still not sure how we thought it to be perfect, well what we thought was, as smoke can’t be trapped truly, so can’t be the open culture. Whatever may occur, there would always be one strain of developers, working to eradicate the tyranny of the oppressors.
Another open source empire came to our help, one which we all use like its the true internet. With the help of Google Forms and Docs, we were prepared for jotting down the participation for the event. The event was announced in a major number of forums, Facebook Groups and pages. Thus, a quite large number of people registered for the event. Seeing the responses, we took a rough estimate of about 400 attendants, and things planned according to that.
Well here came the day that we would be tested to our brims, and where we learn about the workings of the real world. All the respondents were not there, but still we were proud of the fact, that 75% of them reported at our venue. So started, the event with a lot of enthusiastic faces all around.
With Aayoushee and Anurag taking the stage, we started with a reference to a geek’s beloved movie, The Matrix. They entertained the crowd, and told about what was to come. They then handed over the stage to ReMo Shahid. He told us about the Mozilla Foundation and how it has been helping the users reach the Internet. Then he gave a description about the various projects under Mozilla Foundation. He gave away goodies. One was given to the person who had Firefox Mobile on his Android Smartphone. While the other was bagged by a person explaining about Thunderbird. The questionnaire round seemed quite wonderful where a lot of people cleared there doubts about various Mozilla Products.
Then after a few quirky comments by our anchors again, the stage was handed over to Abhishek and Vishnu to use visual medium of video to tell the people about Open Source. Well the video was well received and you can hear quite a number of whispers applauding them. They then fired of a couple of quick questions, and more goodies were distributed. Video
Then we called upon the stage Charul to tell us about her experience as a pursuer of GSoC ’14. Well the people listened quite intently as they had just been told they get to earn to do what they love. The OPW seemed a nice idea, and we are sure many more girls from our college would apply for that. The talk proved quite a success, judging from the questions asked just after the talk and even quite a lot of round-up questions throughout the event.
The stage was retook by our beloved anchors, and they had a question that led everyone to think about how much open source do they use without even thinking. Then Jatin was invited to talk about the upcoming project from Mozilla, Firefox OS, that tends to revolutionize the mobile world again like the works of Android OS. We do think that a web based OS however good, in developed countries quite useful, however in others, due to low coverage of networks, can take some amount of time to be truly effective.
Next we invited our club lead Rahul and Aditya to tell us about how to contribute and about revision control systems. They told about GitHub and how you can apply various commands to the same. Also we were given a live viewing of the process for patch requests, editing and etc. Also we were told about the wonders of IRC, and how they connect us to the community and other developers and mentors. A hack was told to use IRC even when due to proxy servers, the application for IRC doesn’t work. Slide
We all have heard about the wonders of Blogging. Many of us didn’t give it a second thought, thinking it was for those superficial ones who had nothing better to do the whole day than just write about their daily boring life. However, there comes Ankit Goswami to shatter those beliefs and tell us the true powers of blogging, and how it can be used to better yourself and to help others through some fender benders. Alas, blogging does need you to be a good writer, so he also tells us about some tools and stuff to help you along with your journey. SEO being one of the primary ones that are widely used, but still quite an effective tool. Slide
Well we closed off our event, with a final video that gave a overview of the event, and invigorated a belief in everyone to work on open source and contribute as much as able.
Oh wait, I forgot to tell you about one nifty idea of ours, the IDEA BOARD, we asked everyone to fill in those sticky notes telling us about what they would like to work on in the future. Some were so funny that they gave us quite a laugh (Play DOTA was one of them), while some took us into a brain ride thinking about the creativity of the people, that ends up being oppressed.
After that refreshments were distributed to all the people, under the guidance of Ashoka. The staff of the auditorium were thanked profusely for their contribution to the event and asked to join us for refreshments. The ALC team of our college also proved to be a major contributing factor for the success of the event and a major thanks goes to them again from our side.
For the highlights of the event visit Highlights
IIITA Firefox Club 