Webmaker Party @ CUSAT

Hello all,

Here is the Maker party organized by me with help from Praveen Sridhar (Fellow Mozillian) and a couple of friends who became mozillians after this event  on October 24, 2013 . Being the first event I hosted after being a Mozilla Representative (ReMo) and being the first Mozilla event in my college, this was a very special event for me.

The preparation for the event began 13 days prior to the event. Being the first event in our college, we created an event agenda so the attendees could get to know what was Mozilla’s mission along with the webmaker agenda. We just got an hour and a half to conduct the event at the college.

We had a couple of Keons, so we also included a session on the Firefox OS and a small app development demo, you can call it a micro app day if you’d like :P. We did manage to assign sessions to each of the organizers, except one (he was assigned as photographer), with 4 talks, each of 15-20 minutes duration, we were all set with about 8 days in hand, we weren’t done preparing for the presentations though ;), there’s 24 hours in a day, so left the presentation making part fot the last moment.

Agenda

1. Introduction to Mozilla and the Mozilla Mission ( Anush Anilkumar )
2. Introduction to Firefox OS ( Praveen Sridhar )
3. Sneak peek at the new HTML5 and its impact  ( Athul Raj )
4. Build your Web. ( Binoy Balu )
5. Hands on testing and development with Firefox OS Developer Preview Device

Mozilla 101 on Events Portal

Web Maker : https://webmaker.org/events/2979
Reps : https://reps.mozilla.org/e/mozilla-101/

Pre-registration & Publicity : We opened a registration form on Google Docs 10 days ahead of the event and received 42 registrations, we spread word about this event through social media and by word. We did create a couple of flyers for sharing online.

3…2…1… Let’s go

Lets get started with the event. We started 14minutes delayed of scheduled start ( which event commences sharp on time right?  ) because some participants as well as 3 of the organizers arrived late.

It was me who had to kick start the event with an introduction about Mozilla, how it emerged, evolution and then moved on to the briefing about webmaker and its tools. I also spoke bout how to be a Mozilla contributor and areas where they could contribute.

The kickoff session was followed by Introduction to HTML5 and Build Your Web by Binoy Balu (we were having reapairs on a few optic fibers at college, so internet was down). But Binoy was intelligent enough to come prepared for that too. He managed to teach how to build the web using Notepad++ and gave a hands-on view of the webmaker tools. In between this, I managed to distribute webmaker swags.

The last session was again handled by Praveen . He began by illustrating the architecture of the Firefox OS and the ease at which apps can be built and deployed on devices running Firefox OS. He also demonstrated how to make an app for Firefox OS. He did use this opportunity to publicize his Firefox OS app, though, and mentioned how he got the beautiful Keon.

That was the end of all the sessions for the day.

Swags : Men’s tees went out of stock after distributing to the organizers; I ended up giving the tee I got, to My dad because I simply couldn’t fit into the tee. Anyways, he deserves it even though he’s not a Mozillian. He uses Firefox and was the one who made me a Mozillian.

All the ladies tees was given away after picking lots. We used the random number generator from http://www.random.org/ for this purpose.

Attendees : We planned to have an attendance of less than 50, taking into consideration about the space provided, the initial registration count was 42, out of that 28 turned up; We got another 12 participants who joined us on the spot which brought a total attendance of 40, which was perfect.

Flickr Stream

We do have a lot more pics, the photographer ended up taking pics in RAW format making it impossible to be upload before editing, so here is just a few he has planned to do 3 to 4 uploads a day after editing, the stream is expected to be complete by a month