Mozilla Africa Reps Meetup Nairobi, Kenya

This year Mozilla Community of Kenya hosted the first Africa Mozilla Reps Meetup, the first of its kind on 16^th – 17^th May 2015. The meetup brought together about 30 Mozilla Reps from various Africa states. The meetup was held at Pawa254, a workspace that offers workshops, trainings, forums and events in Nairobi – Kenya.

Mozilla Reps from Africa together for a group photo 

The 2 day meetup was aimed at equipping the Reps with Mozilla’s vision for Africa and as well as training them to how to organize and execute events with focus on creating impact for the years ahead.

Additionally, it also focused on helping establish a real connection between the Reps in Africa; Reps shared their personal experiences and challenges encountered as they mobilized communities in their respective countries.

Mozilla Community Uganda Team

There has not been an opportunity where all Mozilla community Reps in Africa come together And since this was our first meetup, below are three things I liked most.

Working together on common goals

During the workshop, we all agreed to have some common goals and objectives to work on as a region. This initiative would not only drive our communities towards success, but would in-turn a great sense of direction for most of the communities.

The Event Impact Chain Model Session

This was a session on how to organize community events and have impact led by William Quiviger. As opposed to the usual approach of organizing events or activities where we start with inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and last Impact, this time round we reverse the order. And we had to start with Impact.

This got most of our brains working especially when we broke out into groups and  were tasked to do a mockup event and identify what the impact, inputs, outcomes, outputs were.

This was one of my best sessions because most of the times when we get to organize events, we usually find ourselves getting caught up into the nitty gritty of logistics that sometimes Impact is the last thing we think about.

With this new insight where you have to focus all your energies first on Impact and then work backwards, I believe is going help me become a good events’ organizer.  Not only in community events but also in my personal life as well.

Networking and building of relationships

During the meetup, since we were all staying in the same venue and working together most of the times, we got to network and build relationships together. It was really nice and fun because of the diversity of the people.

The stories, experiences, and challenges people shared were really nice. We all learnt something from one another given the various cultures and traditions we were all coming from.

Even after the meetup, we have continued to keep in touch with each other. And I believe with some of these relationships created, they are going to strengthen our communities in Africa.

I guess you’re wondering was it all work,work and work? No! We had  fun too. You can always bet that where there is Mozilla involved, there is always fun too. You just have to be there in person to experience it.

One of the many highlights of my meetup is that not only is Kenya endowed with great wild life, but we also had the privilege to tryout some of the wild game meat at Fogo Gaugo, Nairobi’s authentic Brazilian restaurant.

As the meetup came to an end on Sunday, it was nice listening in to Brian King give a presentation about the future of Mozilla and the Firefox OS, Mozilla Mobile platform. With some of these mobile devices coming to Africa, I believe they are going to strengthen Mozilla’s presence in Africa, as the best browser continues to promote innovation, openness and opportunity on the web.

Link to additional photos by Brian King. Mozilla Africa Reps Meetup Photos 

Mozilla Community Uganda Holds A Small Localization Sprint

Ever since we started to focus on impact and quality, I have come to like small events. I don’t mean to say that big events are that not good. But I have come to appreciate the beauty of small events because of the face to face interaction you get with the participants.

Last weekend on Saturday, we had a two hour session localization sprint organized by Denish Mofire our Lead for Localization in our community. The event was held at Gobal Business Labs on the Sixth floor of the College of Computing and Information Sciences Makerere University. 

We were seven in number and at the start of the event, I had the opportunity to talk to three young guys all students of Computer Science about Mozilla, it’s projects, opportunities within the community and how to get started contributing within the community. I found this fulfilling since am the Lead for Community Building in our community.

The three students then got in touch with Denish who took them through the tools that are required for one to get started with translation. Interestingly, all the participants looked at Lunyakole language for translation which is one of the local dialect spoken by people in western Uganda.

I liked the nature of this event because of the interactions we had with all these participants. Because we were few in number, communication was clear, fun and we bonded so well with them over coffee and a few small snacks!:)

Infact they got excited and enthusiastic about Mozilla and the Localization tools that we can only wait and follow them up to see how far they will go with the translation work.

This being my first Mini event that I have attended within the community, and now that Mozilla is focusing on creating impact and quality, I don’t doubt that if we continue to hold such small mini events that this is going to greatly help us in creating impact as well as improve the quality of our contributors within the community. I can’t wait to attend our next small Localization meet up next month!  

Additional Photos: http://on.fb.me/1qmXazY

My MozCafe Experience

Saturday was a great day for us since we were meeting for our first MozCafe this year. We have had a number of events throughout the year but meeting for this MozCafe was a great opportunity for us to meet informally our Community members and get to know each other better as well as get to hear from them about what they feel about the Community. And what we can do to make our Community better.

This happens to be my first event I have organized since joining the Reps program this year in March. However, it didn't come easy. I had postponed the event twice and I was getting concerned that it may never happen. 

For some reasons, my event happened to be at time where most of the leads were very busy both in the community and Mozilla at large. So with some of the Reps and council members who traveled for the ReMo Camp, there were challenges in communication. So getting hold some of them wasn't that easy. Infact I was beginning to think of canceling the event. But thank God for the encouragement of one particular community member who encouraged me that we needed to meet since this would give us the opportunity to meet our community members.

In an effort to make our meetup informal and interactive, we gave members enough time to interact and get to know one another. People interacted that they didn't want to stop. It's at this point that we decided to get down to business.

We decided to have people get into small groups and discuss on different topics. But before we got into small group discussions, we had San James the community Lead address the members. 

In his address he thanked all members who make personal efforts and time to turn up for all of our events each time we call upon them. He also gave a brief history of how the community got started in 2011 with the translation of Firefox browser in Luganda (one of the local languages spoken in Uganda). However, he stressed the fact that all our events and activities will now be engineered at creating impact and improving the quality our contributors as now is the focus of Mozilla and the community at large. So encouraged the community to make efforts to be good at whatever they commit themselves to so that they can become better contributors.

During our group discussions the following are some of the small summaries of the things that members discussed about.

From Community building;

• some people want to be trained on how to organize events/hackathons so that they can start holding events at their respective universities.
• others want more information about Firefox Student Ambassador program so that they can spread Mozilla at their institutions.
• some what more knowledge about Marketing so that they can market Mozilla to even rural communities.

 From Webmaker

• some want webmakers tools that would work offline in the presence where the Internet is off or inaccessible.
• some suggest the need to create offline tutorials they can use to teach.
• some suggested the need to create slides that they can use during presentation

Ideas and suggestions from Appmaker

•  create a chat application using Chat brick
•  want to introduce Appmaker to friends and students.
• Host Maker parties where they can develop apps with Appmaker
• Online surveying App. (Questions, answer and also processes data)
• Alarm clock app.

These are some of the few things people discussed. At this moment people where called to present there ideas and suggestions. This was one of the delightful moments. Doing presentations over our Pizzas!:)

Our meetup come to a close with final wrap from Lawerence the Community Manager who brought to speed everyone about the all events the community has held from the time it started to date as well as sharing community updates.

With efforts to help organize the community, Lawrence presented the community committee of 5 people to the members. The Committee is headed by Moses Echodu – The Chairman, Michael Abaho – Legal affairs, Emily Namugaanyi– Head of Mozilla and Women, JB Ochieng – Head of Technical and lastly Me – Asa Lugada – The secretary. These serve for period of 5 month and then another team is elected. Committee was put in place to help in the smooth running of the community.

This has been a great learning ev for me. I have been part of a number of planning activities within our community. But being in charge of an event where it's success or demerits rests entirely on you, is a different thing altogether even for a MozCafe where we had close to 40 members who turned up.

I am now more grateful to Mozilla and all my community Leaders who have been at hem of organizing most of our community events.

Link to additional photos: on.fb.me/1mq3aeI

Mozilla And Women Launch - Kampala

Few years ago, I used to see a number of Tech companies trying to promote programs and initiatives engineered at encouraging women participation in Technology but I never knew how big the gap was until I attend this event. For some reasons, being a student and seeing a number of girls enrolled in computer related fields, I had thought many were involved but, I was wrong.

Last week on Saturday was a Mozilla and Women launch party (WoMoz) organized by Mozilla Community Uganda and hosted at Thought Works at Tech Company

JB one of the Reps presenting

This was my first time attending Women Tech event. I decided to go attend and see what happens i.e. see what they talk about and do! :) But on arrival, I was surprised to see only a few girls in the room because this being their event, I had anticipated to see very many of them. Nevertheless, I sat down and hoped that may be many will show up since it’s just only morning.

The event started with welcome remarks from Emiley the Lead for WoMoz Uganda community. Thereafter, JB one of the community Leads kicked off with the presentation about Women and Mozilla, exploring the famous women within Mozilla like Mitchell Baker the Chairman of Mozilla Foundation, the opportunities within the tech industry and Mozilla at large and also stressing to the ladies the fact that you don’t need to know code for you to get involved with the community and the tech industry at large.

We had break away session in groups of three. We were to come up with ideas or an app or anything hack able to motivate or encourage women participation in tech. I loved this session because it was really nice hearing the girls telling us what women think about the industry and there personal experiences as well.

This gave me a personal insight in that just because we see many ladies enrolling for computer related courses, there participation in the industry is a different thing all together. Infact this confirmed to me the stats that JB presented about the gaps between women and men participation in the tech industry.

The event ended with presentations from the three groups and I am happy to say that the group I was part of was the overall winner. Our group idea was around presentation of slides with most of the famous women in the tech industry who have made it both locally and internationally with the message to all the ladies that if these made it, you too can make it.

I am glad I attended this event and many thanks to Mozilla’s program Women and Mozilla - WoMoz. I feel privileged to be part of WoMoz’s shared common goal of promoting women's visibility and involvement in open source communities.

We believe Open Source needs more women! :) Contribute with us :)