Day 2 at Community Education for Mozilla Women In Technology

So I was finally here on Day 2 of Community Education for Women in Mozilla at Collab House Hyderabad.

I was very happy to see all these enthusiastic Women who came here from around the country to attend this event.

We started our day with the discussion on “Why Womoz? and How it would benefit a Woman?”

Have a look at the points everyone suggested and discusses on

We did this Speak Up activity called “Genie game” . The goal for the activity is to make the women attendees speak up and get comfortable in the new environment by making a wish at the moment which can be anything related to the expectation from the event or related to their career. The whole activity turned out to be fun because at the start nobody was ready to speak up but when one person started others got encouraged and they also started sharing their wishes.

We discussed about the Day 3 agenda and collaborated together on the presentations we are going to present the next day.

In the evening I started with Train the Trainer session on Information Footprint and Related Privacy Concerns for the girls so that they can also teach the attendees next day and after that in their region.

The session had 5 sections:

• Introduction:
  • We started with talking about what privacy is all about? Why it is important and Why still people don’t care about it much? And What’s happening currently.
  • I used this teaching kit I made to explain them what Information footprint is?
  • And how they can use this teaching kit to spread awareness about it by using these two apps: Ready or Not? and EXIF Placer.
  • How their data is aggregated and then mined to generate a picture of their digital behavior.
• Tracking:
  • We discussed about what tracking is?
  • We discussed on what questions we can ask attendees questions to our audience to engage them more into your session like: Is tracking bad always? If no/yes share one moment where you were or weren’t OK with sharing your data.
  • Discussed about the ways you get tracked by third party websites.
  • Basic ways you can prevent yourself:
    • Look for HTTPS in url(s).
    • Understand Cookies and Delete them regularly.
    • Create strong pass-phrases instead of passwords (like “Iam110%Sexy!”)
    • Use search engine that does’nt track you like Duck Duck Go.
    • Read at least one Privacy Policy while signing up on any website. or downloading apps.
• How Firefox help as a Browser:
  • We discussed about How Firefox as a browser help you in keeping your privacy protected. They can talk about and demo the audience:
    • about:privatebrowsing.
    • about:permissions.
    • Forget Button.
    • Options —-> Privacy , Click option Do not Track me!
    • Much more ..
• Add-Ons:
  • We discussed about the must use addons which they can show or demonstrate to the audience and can also take hands on those add ons.
  • Few of them are:
    • LightBeam
    • μBlock
    • Adblock
    • Ghostery
    • Web of Trust
    • Disconnected Search
• What Mozilla is doing?
  • We discussed about:
    • Policy & Advocacy Task Force
    • Privacy Teaching Task Force
    • Teach the Web Campaigns
    • Privacy chat on Twitter at #PrivacyChat

After the session we had a feedback session on the whole day where everybody agreed to How important privacy has become now and How our future can get affected by the concerning issues related to privacy and security.

So the day was a bit exhausting but fruitful as we had a lot of things to do and discuss about. To get some fresh air we went to Charminar , a famous monument in Hyderabad and had a proper Hyderabadi Biryani 😀

Find pics for Day 2 below:

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Celebrated Int’l Women’s Day on 8th March

While International Women’s day was celebrated globally, Pune womoz community also decided to celebrate it with local females from Pune.

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So we hosted a women specific event in Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research.

As planned, started with the Introduction to Mozilla and FOSS.

• And what Mozilla is doing to bring up more women contributors in FOSS regardless of their technical knowledge.
• How it is a myth that contributing to Mozilla takes strong technical knowledge.

• Why there is a different section as WoMoz and how are they helping us in achieving this goal.

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We had Manjusha Joshi Mam as our guest speaker. She is a teacher and a freelancer in the field of Scientific Computing and Data Analysis. She shared her inspirational journey in open source with the attendees. She told us, how difficult was the time and situation 17 years back for a woman to step into technology; What difficulties she faced and how she stand her ground firmly on the and moved on in the world of technology and achieved success in her field.

As Priyanka Nag and I attended this year’s Adacamp in Bangalore we learned a lot of new things which we can include in our Womoz events. So, as suggested by Larissa too we included the Imposter Syndrome session in this event.

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Priyanka started with the session and clearly explained with relevant facts:

• What it is?
• Why does it afflicts Women more than Men?
• And How can we overcome it?

She conducted a paper based activity in which there were 4 exercises, one can have a look in the pictures below.

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Most of the attendees were from non-technical background. We had nice discussions with them. Some shared the problems they face in contributing to technical world; what demotivate them to stop trying while some gave probable solutions to those problems with their experiences. Some of those were very helpful like:

• Concentrate more on what “You” want to do but not what “Others” want you to do.
• In open source world people are very straight forward so try not to take the comments personally regarding the work instead improve and move forward.
• Try acting instead of reacting in the situations where someone has offended you based on the gender.
• Prefer not to prove yourself as that job is not yours; its your work which will prove everything.
• Avoid saying “I am so lucky” wherever you can as you “deserved” that.
• And many more its a long list…

Suchita Aggarwal, an FSA from Pune, shared story of her FSA club on How they started and their club became the most active FSA club in Pune. She told everybody that they can also start their own clubs in their respective colleges and start contributing.

I took a session on Privacy and Security on the web. I started with asking questions like

• Do you feel safe on the Internet?
• Is Privacy important on the Web?
• Why should we care?

Their responses were as expected:

• No, Internet is not at all safe the way we use it as we don’t know how we can protect ourselves.
• Yes, Privacy should be the main concern. Regardless of keeping strong passwords our accounts have been hacked many times.
• Unnecessary calls from different telecom companies.
• I assure the list is very long…

We know that there are severe issues concerning our privacy and security, what important is to know that YES there are basic solutions to these problems. Few of them are:

• Create secure passwords. (most prior action)
• Always look for https in the url(s).
• Switch to Private browsing (firefox) or incognito (chrome) when you don’t want to be tracked or while using online banking where your data is very crucial and must be kept private.
• Understand cookies and there is a reason you should clear them timely.
• Start using search engine that doesn’t track you i.e. Duck Duck Go instead of Google.

The attendees had no idea how much they get tracked daily.

I told them How Firefox helps in protecting your privacy and keep you secure by showing them some addons like:

• Demo on Lightbeam surely was an eye opener 😉 .
• Adblock plus
• Web of Trust
• Https Everywhere
• Disconnect Search
• Better Privacy
• Ghostery

Although we expected more women to attend the event, having a smaller pool brought a different kind of fun and experience with more interaction.

Finally we ended the event by cutting this beautiful Womoz cake 🙂 .

Here are some more pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/126218234@N08/

Mozilla India in hillhacks: Hacking and Making in the Himalayas

This year, Mozilla India marked its presence at hillhacks ,a tech conference of Hacking and Making in the Himalayas from 15th October to 21st October in Dharamsala, India.

Akshat and I returned back few days ago and our experience is Awe-inspiring. This was completely different experience from what we usually have in other events. We first planned to conduct three Webmaker workshops each followed by Privacy & security session and a Firefox OS talk but we did more than what we planned which makes our experience best.

16th October: Webmaking with Jagori Rural Charitable Trust: A Women’s initiative

• This workshop worked out really great because these guys were educators at Jagori which is why they were more amazed and interested to know about open web and How Webmaker can help them to learn all about it and educate their students.

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17th October: Webmaking with Kangra Govt. Polytechnic College Students.

• These students aged 16-17 but they knew a lot more than expected.
• Hats off to Akshat, being a technical person gave an awesome introduction to Open Source and Mozilla in a very simple way that everybody could understand. Even I and Abdul got to know new things from his talk.
• Any regional Mozilla community is not formed in Himachal yet but the best part was their professors and HOD already knew about Firefox OS phones. 😀 😀

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18th October: Whole day Trek and  Firefox OS talk by Akshat at pre-event in Club House, Dharamsala

• We went to the awesome trek. So sad couldn’t make it to the top but yeah Akshat did 🙂
• After whole day trek, It felt amazing when he started with Firefox OS features and people started talking about apps and ended up in telling about Appmaker! 😛

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20th October: Webmaking with TCV (Tibetan Children’s  Village) students:

We did few LoFi NoFi(Low fidelity and No fidelity) activities with them which were Awesome. I enjoyed a lot.

• Spectrogram:
  • We started the session with a Spectrogram on privacy and security.
  • It turned out to be great because we had different opinions of students and teachers.

• Tags Activity:
  • We did a small activity to make them understand What tags are and their importance.
  • Students were asked to move around the room and tag the real objects like guitar, wall, door, etc.
  • These students were very smart they added properties in tags \o/.

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• HTML Thimble Tag Puzzle Activity:
  • We used this teaching kit, helped a lot I must say.
  • We made this simple web page using thimble.

Finally the session which is my favorite of all was with Wood Whistlers school kids. This visit wasn’t planned. We had heard about the school kids a lot so we decided to go there and it was the best experience for me of Teach the Web. We got to interact with these kids about very basic things like

• Do you use INTERNET? if yes what do you think it is?
• Which is your favorite website?
• Do you know what Firefox is?
  Their Answers
  • No but we guess something related to INTERNET.
  • Yes, my mom use it to access facebook and youtube 😛
  • Yes, I use it to see maths tutorials on youtube. 🙂

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We explained them what browser , client, server, request and response are; with very basic and real life examples. And success is: they understood almost everything.

Thanks Abdul and Bernadette for inviting and helping us throughout these 5 days.I am glad that we represented Mozilla India at hillhacks. It is a different community with the same mission of spreading openness of web and free culture.

init() #Makerparty2014 @PVG, Nashik

The day Mozilla Webmaker announced the dates of Makerparty 2014, an FSA Aanand Pant reached out to me and showed his interest to host one in his college. So, we with Ankit Gadgil and Awesome community members from Nashik started planning a Makerparty. We decided that this event would be more like a testing for other makerparty(s) of this year. We also organized an online meetup on 10th July at this etherpad.

Mozilla Nashik Community @Makerparty

We planned to do something different this time so Ankit came with his Awesome idea that we will change the structure of the event. We decided to have parallel sessions on each webmaker tool including Appmaker like HIVE events with one difference that each attendee will have hands on for the tools they like or interested in.

So Finally on 12th July we started with our first maker party of 2014 in Nashik. We Kicked off with spreading awareness about Mozilla, FOSS , Open Web and What Internet is!!!

Me with Ankit Gadgil, Mayur Patil and Vishal Chavan spreading awareness of Open Source

Following the introduction to Webmaker, we gave a short (5 mins) demo of each tool to everyone and then we gave them choice to go for any tool they are interested in.

Aanand Pant giving demo on X-ray goggles.

The idea of having a parallel session worked a lot. Thanks to Ankit Gadgil 🙂 .

Hands on each tool simultaneously.

For the first time we introduced Appmaker as a fourth Webmaker tool and the scenario was really amazing and surprising that the Appmaker session was most crowded of all whereas initially x-ray goggles session was empty which is totally opposite from the previous event scenarios. Ankit and Mayur Patil conducted a UCD(User Centered Design) for appmaker and they really did a good job (y) .

Proposed App ideas, Appmaker suggestions and UCD

As this was a testing Makerparty , we got many ideas, suggestions and learning which we are going to implement in coming MakerParty(s).

Also, as the webmaker banners weren’t available, I made few posters of webmaker tools.

Maker Party handmade posters. Try these in your too. 🙂

@diwanship oh, love the handmade #makerparty posters! you might want to share them here: http://t.co/ByIFRoYvZu #teachtheweb @codekat

— Michelle Thorne (@thornet) July 14, 2014

Eco- Friendly Webmaker chart which works as a banner too. 😛

@anknite Ohhh, pretty #makerparty sign – love the writing! @diwanship @MozillaIN

— Amira Dhalla (@amirad) July 13, 2014

Here are some useful links from the event:

• Event page:  https://events.webmaker.org/#!/events/3457

• Makes from the event:  https://india.etherpad.mozilla.org/Makerpaty-PVG-Makes

• Pictures :  https://www.flickr.com/photos/126100932@N02/

 

Lets Craft for Mozilla “MozBags”

Few months ago, after PAN Community India meetup I was very eager to do something crafty for Mozilla Crafting Community. And so I did.

Craft needs your thoughts, imagination power, interest, efforts and finally art of your hands to implement it. Before making anything I had few things in my mind that whatever I make it would be great if that is:

• Crafty as well as Eco- Friendly.
• Easy to learn and follow by others.
• Something useful and enhanceable.

So I am presenting a small effort I made to make these Handbags. I have named them MozBags.

Lets take a look How I did it:

Materials needed:

• Orange Pastel Sheet, PVC Glue, Scissors, cutter, Ruler, Pencil, Punching Machine.
• Sketch Pens, Pencil Colors or Wax Crayons, Glitter Pens.
• Small ropes.

Steps to be followed:

1. Take a pastel sheet, fold it and paste the end with the glue.

2.  Fold the side you have just pasted vertically by 1 cm.3. Fold the 2 vertical sides by 4 cm and press them. Leave the top and bottom as it is.

4. Open the fold and try to push the folded edge inside.

5. You will have something like this. Repeat the same with other side.

6. Cut the chart paper from the middle into 2 parts and you can make 2 bags.

7. If you repeat step 2 to step 5 with bottom side, you will have something like this.

8. Take 2 small strips of chart paper and paste them on the top from inside.

9. Punch 2 holes on each side of the top and pass a rope from them and tie a knot.

10. You can Draw or write anything you want related to Mozilla on front.

10. And back can have some quotes on it.

Its very easy to implement what you think. The first step is “to think”.  So anybody can make things like these or I should say better than this.

This is the first contribution as a craft from my side but there are a lot more to come……..

 

 

Mozilla Crafting Community: A “Crafty” Initiative

This PAN India Community Meetup 2014, Hyderabad, I had this wonderful opportunity to introduce a completely different and very interesting community “Mozilla Crafting Community”  in India.
As I am a Web developer and a Craft lover , the idea of building a community of people who love the web as well as art & craft inspired me quite well. So I took this initiative to take this community further in India.

The overall mission of Crafting Community is to

• Connect new people to the mission that haven’t had a way to connect to in the past.
• Cool way to recognize people.
• Doing crafty projects together at events.
• Creating a new community in Mozilla that crosses interests.
• Recognize creative crafty output of contributors

Ideas:

• Through this community we can gather people who don’t know anything about Mozilla but a name of an Open Source Organization.
• For small events we can also make handmade swags in case of urgent need which can be possible with the help of more contributors.
• Many contributors may not be technically strong but Wonderfully creative.
• This list is not restricted to these ideas only, there are a lot of different ideas one can have.

I am currently working on few handmade crafty items, I hopefully plan to showcase them in MozCamp Beta, Bangalore.

I have created a etherpad , any one can share ideas there and also can add their names and contact to the I am interested list.

References:

Wiki:

•  https://wiki.mozilla.org/Craft

Join Mailing List and share your “crafty” ideas:

•  https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/community-crafting

IRC : 

• Channel #crafty On irc.mozilla.org

Community Calls:  

• https://etherpad.mozilla.org/creating-mozilla-knitting-community

 

#Makerparty @ DICER

   When Mozilla officially launched Maker Party 2013 for three months, DICER (Dnayanganga Institute of Career Empowerment and Research) was waiting for its turn to host one and finally the time came for makerparty @ DICER on 10th of August 2013. India’s 66th Independence Day was near so how could have we not celebrated it our own way. we Mozillians from Pune decided to host a Webmaker Event with the Independence Day theme and throughout the whole day it went as if we were celebrating 15th august. Event Started with truly “WEBMAKER” Welcome.

Rangoli made by girls for the Welcome of Webmaking @DICER

   The event started with an introduction to mozilla and FOSS by me, this helped those who were new to OpenSource world. The complete idea of Open Web was talked about and discussed among the attendees.

What is the open web, why is it important to know about it? and alos why should we care for it? were among the most popular questions discussed and answered.

Ankit Gadgil, MozRep from Pune took over the space and gave a talk on OpenWeb and Mozilla Webmaker. Thimble helped alot in boosting the interest in students.

Ankit Gadgil explaining thimble to everyone

   We told the attendees to express their love for our nation and the things they love about India, on the papers and to implement it using Thimble or Popcorn which really worked well.

   We told the attendees to think of something they love about India and put that down on the paper as a webpage. With this theme, we found out that a wave of interest is generated in the maximum of the attendees if they are given a theme to work on. And with the event centred on Independence day makes, the attendees enjoyed the comfort of making with webmaker tools. We used thimble principally to build, remix and share the ideas.

Paper Prototyping

Everybody was so much into Webmaking that day they even forgot to take their lunch break even after announcing thrice. The webmaker templates are amazing and so helpfull. Even the people who did not know HTML, CSS learned it from the templates.

So much into webmaking

   We collected all the responses in a spreadsheet. When they were being sorted out, we moved to a quiz on Open Source and Mozilla. Prizes were distributed to all the winners of best thimble makes and the quiz.

The maker party experience is proving to a joy ride for me. With the help of fellow mozillians in Pune this event was successful. I really enjoyed the experience of making-learning-sharing using Webmaker. My urge to spread the word about the open web and webmaker did prove fruitful with many showing interest in further contributing to webmaker, Mozilla and Firefox Student ambassadors program.

Here are some useful links from the event:

• Event page: https://webmaker.org/events/703

• Makes from the event:  https://etherpad.mozilla.org/maker-party-dicer-makes

• Pictures :  http://www.flickr.com/photos/ankitgadgil/sets/72157635046581119/

Do checkout the Webmaker blog on Indian Independence Day: https://blog.webmaker.org/india-independence-day

The amazing HIVE-India website:  http://hive.mozillaindia.org

hive.mozillaindia.org