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CyanogenMod Bootcamp in Hanoi

Arky r (noreply@blogger.com) on November 25, 2012 02:35 AM

Back in Hanoi after a long trip, it is time to do yet another hack event. This weekend I organized an CyanogenMod Bootcamp. If you haven't heard about CyanogenMod project, it is an aftermarket firmware for a number of cell phones based on the open-source Android operating system.

We got two Samsung Galaxy S2 mobile phones and a Nexus 7 tablet to work with at the bootcamp. The goal was to try to install CM10 Android Jelly Bean on devices without bricking them. The three teams worked in parallel and jotted down their notes on etherpad.

Before you start, Understand the basic terminology. Now Get, Set .. Go!

Nexus 7 running CM10 Android Jelly Bean

Samsung Galaxy S2 I9100 running CM10 (Nightly release)

Samsung Galaxy S2 I9100G running Android 4 Jelly Bean CM10 (Stable release)

Keep watching this space for detailed instructions on how to install Android 4.0 Jelly Bean on these devices.

Session on “How can Open Source apply in research”

bacharakis on November 23, 2012 01:33 AM

Το κείμενο ακολουθεί και στα Ελληνικά.

Next Tuesday along with other two great FOSS contributors we are having a session regarding “Open Source and research” in the Aristoteleio University of Thessaloniki.

The audience is going to be pre and post graduate students from different schools of the University.

In general we want to prove that open source philosophy/software  is a more efficient and can help in all kind of problems. From the personal side of life till the academic one. We want to present a lot of FOSS projects which are used in academic research, well known project which were a result of academic research and generally the idea that Free/Open Source software is the future (pre/post/ graduate – research).

Finally we want to provide them FOSS product solutions and generally empower them to use Free/Open Source software in their personal and academic life. As a Fedora Project contributor and a Mozilla Rep I am going to present them Fedora and Mozilla products which will cover all their basic needs in personal and professional life.

More details are going to be published after the session.

See you there!

In Greek

Την επόμενη Τρίτη το απόγευμα στο Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλονίκης μαζί με δύο εξαιρετικούς συνομιλητές θα μιλήσουμε για το ελύθερο/ανοιχτό λογισμικό στην έρευνα.

Το κοινό θα αποτελείται από προπτυχιακούς και μεταπτυχιακούς φοιτητές από διάφορες σχολές του Πανεπιστημίου. Στόχος μας είναι να εισάγουμε το κοινό στη φιλοσοφία του ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ, τις χρήσεις που έχει στην καθημερινή μας ζωή και πως θα μπορούσε να χρησιμοποιηθεί στην Πανεπιστημιακή έρευνα. Μέσα από παραδείγματα χρήσης ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ στην έρευνα θα προσπαθήσουμε να αποδείξουμε ότι τόσο η αποδοχή και εφαρμογή της φιλοσοφίας του, όσο και η χρήση διάφορων project είναι ένα αναγκαίο, αναπόφευκτο αλλά εξαιρετικά χρήσιμο γεγονός.

Τέλος θα προσπαθήσουμε να παρακινήσουμε ακόμα περισσότερο τους φοιτητές να χρησιμοποιούν προϊόντα ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ τόσο στην καθημερινή τους ζωή, όσο και στην ακαδημαϊκή τους. Σαν μέλος και άνθρωπος που συνεισφέρει στο Fedora Project και Mozilla, θα παρουσιάσω τόσο τη δομή και λειτουργία των κοινοτήτων τους, όσο και τα προϊόντα ΕΛ/ΛΑΚ που μπορούν να χρησιμοποιήσουν στην καθημερινή και ακαδημαϊκή τους ζωή.

 

Σας περιμένουμε λοιπόν σε αυτό το ταξίδι της έρευνας την Τετάρτη στις 18:30 στην αίθουσα Α31 του κτηρίου της Φυσικομαθηματικής σχολής του ΑΠΘ.

 

 

I appreciate…

Benjamin Kerensa on November 20, 2012 11:49 PM

Today is Ubuntu Appreciation Day and I want to thank the following people not only for their contributions to Ubuntu and Open Source but also for their unending mentoring and encouragement. Daniel...

To read the rest of this visit benjaminkerensa.com

Events of Taiwan community: challenges, evolutions, and survivals in 2012

Irvin Chen (noreply@blogger.com) on November 20, 2012 05:39 PM

I'd just joined >MozCamp Asia 2012 in Singapore (Nov 16~18), and had a session Events of Taiwan community: challenges, evolutions, and survivals in 2012, here is the slide and my speaking draft. I hope that our experience could make some help to my beloved Mozilla worldwide community.

Irvin Chen / Volunteer / Mozilla Taiwan Community TW community liaison since Nov. 2011

MozTW Brief intro

In the beginning, I'm going to give a brief intro of Mozilla Taiwan community. Established in 2004, making contribution by maintaining product localization and & localized product sites, MozTW turned out to be a project-oriented community: including online/offline marketing campaigns, evangelism talks, localizations, and contribution in different Mozilla projects.

The challenges of MozTW: From my point of view

Before I start of the challenge part, I'm going to make a DISCLAIMER: Ideas below may or may not representing other MozTW member's idea. This is what I observed from my own contributing experience, others might not think it's a big problem, or the problem might not exist at all.

Community age problem

As time passes, if a community doesn't grow with enough younger participation, the average age of community contributors becomes older. Also you'll find out you have no that much time after graduated, and the same situation happened across all the active folks of your community. Many of the communities are formed by a herd of college students, so you can foresee such a problem in 4~5 years if the community were newly burned in your region.

Market Changes

I feel that the change of the browser market / OSS environment makes us harder to recruit these days. When we begin, there are only several browsers in the market, Firefox represents innovation and creativity, it's a little rebel and hacks culture, it's cool. At that time when a people wanted to join some internet interesting group and contribute in a non-programming field, you don't have so many oss/software communities choices like today. This day there're other browsers which thinks to be cooler than the old fox across tekies, the opportunity to contribute, with the spirit of the social action are much more.

Take events for example, 5 years before, there were not so many events for geeks like our Firefox Party in Taiwan, I think it's easier to gather hundreds of attendees and have much attention to our campaigns, but it's much harder today. Taiwan has population about 20 millions, and In this year we have more than 10 houndries attendee conferences, subjetive on OSS and web. The growth of internet and globalization OSS projects also have some effect, one can easily find events, communities, reach and contribute remotely to non-local project. I think it's make us harder on our recruition today.

The "Official Mozilla" problem

We now face challenges from new "official" player on Firefox marketing / representative, and I expect company is going to grow its new community in the marketing strategy.

Mozilla office in Taipei was established last year right after MozCamp, before that, we had discussed some of the problems we may face across core contributors of Taiwan. In this year, I have seen many things we were worried at that time, which I don't really want to see, resulting in much more challenges. Which may happened again, if mozilla is opening new office, then we may want to avoid them.

1. You're no longer the "Mozilla representative"

MozTW was the de-facto "Mozilla representative" before. After the local company opens, when people want to contact Mozilla, they'll directly contact the company, and since it's related to end-use marketing, if the infomation doesn't been bounced to community, which means much less co-operation opportunities and much less eyes attracted on community.

And there is a branding problem, if your community use "Mozilla-country" as your name, you may have to prepare for the naming traisition, for that this is the offices' formal name. In fact, we don't really have the choice deal with this situation, this problem had been foreseed by BobChao, our previous community liaison many years ago, so we'd used MozTW and Mozilla Taiwan Community bi-branding for years. But when we actually deal with the situation today, it's still hard to come out with a good enough branding stretergy, weather to promote the "Mozilla Taiwan Commuity" on our events? Or to use "Mozilla Community" only? Or using "MozTW" preventing distinguish to "Mozilla Taiwan", the official name of office?

As my own observing, people just couldn't understand. In fact, thet don't find there is several Mozilla depart at all.

2. You're losing your volunteer while the company recruit

Once the office is open, you may find out your hardly-working community guru to be hired, and they had much less time contribute to community projects. The better they had done before, the harmful it would be. In conjunction with the age's problem of community and recruitment problem, it'll became hardest challange you'd like to deal with.

It's true that the problem will natually begin to exist as the time pass, whether the offices open or not. Community always lose core contributors as they graduate from school and if they are not luckily enough to find the job which can have enough leisure time to contribute, but I was hoping it may be difference when it comes to Mozilla. It's seems that it's my too idealistic wishes when our community contributors joined the local office.

3. You'll see competing campaign/sites/community appear

While the local company doing end-user promotions, as time passed, many events/campaigns rolled out one by one. You'll begin to see the competing projects to what your community were doing unavoidable.

Campaign

From online campaigns such as facebook pages to offline events such as workshops and speeches, I'm frustrated for that with the full time employees, engineers and budget suppliment, their campaign seems eventually more successful than what communities did. <- their campaign would be probally more successful than what communities did. ??

We used to translate news from Mozilla and Mozillian's blogs to a Trad. Chinese Mozilla Links, since it's a community volunteer project, we could not control the effectiveness but quality. Nowadays, when local office can publishs the "latest" news in synchronize with Mozilla Press blog, that's the efficiency we can never archieve ever. How could our campaign compete with the company's similar one, for that you can only exchange your sleeping time while they're working on a daily basis? It turned to be no choice but to give up translating and spreading the news, also on many campaigns which local office may be interested in, and choose what they're not.

Websites

Second is about websites. After the local company opened their site, your community portal are no longer the second Mozilla sites anymore. Users will see 1) localized mozilla.org, 2) local office's mozilla.com.country and 3) community's site. All 3 different sites are shared with similar contents and same propose - to spreading information about Mozilla, and the same action - to provide Firefox download. If one user could found that there're more than one site exist, he'll be frustrated with them no doubt. I think most of the users don't really figure out there are.

Even further, one day you may surprisly found that mozilla.org been redirected to local office's website, instead of the normal localized mozilla.org in your language. It has not happened on zh-TW yet, and I'll never eager to see it happened. Why bother to do so when l10n contributors are taking good care of mozilla.org, when it comes to One Mozilla concepttion?

Anything more to expect? Has your community ever built a forum? What if you found that one similar section appear at local official site? What would the originnal forum users thought? That's the best negative message from "One Mozilla" that we could convinced our users regionally.

Community

With the local company's some kinds of campaign begin, you may expect the other "more official" community begin to exist, while they started recruit volunteer/students. The worse thing is that you're still facing the recruit problem we mentioned before, and you may have to keep thinking "how to recruit new contributors on community's projects, from our already recruited local office's contributors." How weird is it.

It turns to be the original community are not the only Mozilla community anymore, although it was, it's not, maybe for some employees POV.

How about from the One-Mozilla POV?, the overall community is growing while your formal community weakening on behavior of above problems. It's true that our own community may not include all of the Mozillians in our region, and an alternative communities may have been running more systematically with the direct instructions from local company, and the overall perceptions of Mozilla and Firefox to audience may increasingly. But for me, the problems are more emotional than rationally.

I couldn't questioned my believed methods to making Mozilla stronger. For the love of my community of which I begin to contributed, for the different expectation from Mozilla manifesto I believed in - "the trust of our transparent community-based processes, and the way we use to build communities that support the Manifesto's principles. To saw a community been weakening from above problems, I found that I couldn't be as proud to mention the openness and our community approach as I was before.

The evolutions and survivals of MozTW

Next is the quick review of evolution and survival of MozTW this year

Offline events of 2012

In 2012, we had several offline events, such as a co-hosting Firefox-Ubuntu party in April, and Webmaker Pop-up party running joinly with local Mozilla office.

We kept running weekly MozTW Lab Cafe and Gathering routined meetings continuously, for community members to gather and share with each other. It seems more people are attendeding regullary this year.

The campaign of browser pairs game

And about online events, besides regularary updating of the our portal site, our main brick-and-click campaign this year is "Browser Pairs Game" as mentioned in the earlier session by the author WM and LittleBtc. We promoted Firefox for Android, the responsive design of our community sites our mascot Foxmosa and HTML5 all in one single joyful game campaign, not forgot to mention how happy to see the audience react, when they found the unique design of the game. I could not forget to thanks for the Firefox Mobile marketing team on supporting the campaign.

And We're planning to keep running the campaign, also roll-out more games to promoting the mascot and the delight of HTML5, and have more fun this year.

The l10n challenges

Due to the challenges I'd mention above, I believed we have to avoid doing things which the local office began to work on, that is, we have to decreasing the translation of blog article and building l10n product sites, divert our attention to other fields. One of the approach we tried is the video subtitle translation with Amara. After finish several short videos such as "A Different Kinds of Browser", "The Mozilla Story" and "Looking Ahead", we challenged to hosting a 2-day workshop translating "Code Rush".

With the total attendance of about 20 contributors, and several days of over-night working on adjusting the subtitles, and with the gracefully supporting from Tara Hernandez with her video clip, the screening of <Code Rush> at local cinema with houndries of ateendees on Soft Freedom Day turned out to be the most success events of this year.

From passive to active recruit, try to target the different audience

In the past, most of the core contributors of MozTW are recruited from workshops and events such as school tour. But it costs to prepare the event and contents, and it's hard if we don't have someone at desired schools to help. Also the opportunity of arranging the speech at schools are more difficult these years. Consider the costs to recruit of each contribotors, it seems not a good way for us to perform.

We do have a contribute page on our website, but it's not working well, not many people join us with that page (I can't even remember any), it's obviously we need to be more active on recruition.

We tried recruit new contributors at several offline events, we prepared a questinaire with the option to choose from website, l10n, arts, campaign planning and programming, trying to target the different contribution field of portential contributors. Then we could point the appropriately project for them to begin. It's kinds of offline version of "whatcanidoformozilla".

We had not focused on programming before, this year we began to recruit students to try the good first bug, with the help from Thomasy, (whom is Mozilla rep) and Kenny (The web specification guru), and we had several success cases on that.

Another trial I performd last month is set a booth on an Donjinji event (which named comikon at many country, the spare-time comic-er exhibition), displaying illustrates of Foxmosa and Browser Pairs game, try to recruit voluntary illustrators, I indeed got many attendees sign-up for more information, but not getting active contributors yet. But just like recruit programming students at OSS conference, I think to target the specific audience is one of the possible solution to decrease the difficult of recruition.

The 2012 of MozTW and me

We may faced many challenges and decisions made to try hard on evolution, at least, we survive and I'm standing here to share our experience with all of you. It may be a hard year for me to try, and to explore to be a competent community liaison, but it seems we still alived good, maybe we're doing better than I wonder?

What I dream of…

When I reading the Mozilla Manifesto, and when I watching "the different kinds of browser", I dreaming a community that full of people toward the same goal: working together to growing the web to a better place, to bringing the awareness of important things we value high, and to helping users browsing happily, social with their friends and to realizing their dreams online. and I know, in the mean time, we're also growing ourselves.

I dreaming that while I give up my sleep time, translating the latest news of Mozilla, some other contributors are working at the other side of the planets Earth, Whom I have not met, but I can see them on IRC, on mailing list, and I can hear them argueing for some most important decisions we had to make, according to our core values, and to our users' best.

I dreaming that I can be sure when I was tired, community will still exist for long, my friends will still happily contributing to the projects, and I know the cooperation will be our strongest support for now and ever.

I can dreaming that when I leave, the Internet will be a more friendly place, and the world must be better, even though we only improve it once a small bit... That I can proudly to said I was in the project, and I'm the lifetime Mozillian.

For all the dreams of mine, giving my sleeping time and my life, keep think and try to find the solutions, of all the problems and challenges above, try every hard to keep community exists, alive and growing, then maybe I can be here next year once more time, and to share our successful experience with all you my friends here.

Thanks

Webmaker BC Forum

admin on November 19, 2012 04:32 PM

This summer we organized two Mozparty events:  Victoria Hackjam – Hackasaurus!  And Mozilla Popcorn Hackjam .  Both events sold-out with wait lists, both were a LOT of fun, and  learning happened on all sides .  Kids quickly grasped the technology; parents and volunteers (from diverse backgrounds in education, web development, filmmaking, government and beyond) responded with excitement, gratitude but most of all desire to do more in our city of Victoria BC.

I guess you could say the outcome of our event was  ‘More please’ : more events, more opportunities for discussion and  collaboration, more opportunities to learn, and to teach.  Parents and kids were interested in starting code clubs, and bringing the conversation into their schools which is exactly the goal.  Volunteer teachers/mentors are also keen to meetup and share ideas ~ yay!

To help connect and empower all involved, we’ve created a regional Mozilla Webmaker distribution list  for BC.   I’ll be using this list to arrange our first meetup  in early December. Right now, one of our  primary focuses is finding a Hacker/Maker space.

For those in Vancouver and other parts of  BC we hope you’ll join in as well – grow with us.

You can subscribe to the Webmaker BC list here.

*The main Mozilla Webmaker list is still the place to go to for ‘big tent’ conversations about Webmaker.

 

Bienvenu Mozilla Quebec!

Kensie on November 18, 2012 11:04 PM

In August I took the train over to Montreal to support the local Mozillians in their first meet-up. It was a great mix of volunteers and paid staff as well as languages and cultures. Case in point, you can now check out the gorgeous (and still improving) Mozilla Quebec website made by newcomer-to-Canada Fredy Rouge.

 

Keep an eye out for upcoming events and a friendly rivalry with Mozillians Toronto!

 

P.S. Sorry for the missing accents on the french! Need to learn how to make them on my kb.

FUDCon Paris 2012 – review

bacharakis on November 17, 2012 01:41 AM

This year was time for a beloved city to host our annual FUDCon in EMEA. A beloved city with a great community which organized an awesome FUDCon!

This FUDCon had everything and I mean everything!

Marketing, awesome presentations, technical presentations and workshops, swag production (yeah!) and a lot of brainstorming hackfests!

The first day we was part of the “World Open Forum” where we had the opportunity get in touch with contributor from other FOSS projects. Robyn’s keynote was quite awesome, explaining what is FUDCon, presenting the Project, the community, our new tools and some future plans.

After that it was time for some more technical presentations where I had the chance to attend Remi’s workshop regarding packaging. Then I enjoyed Pierre’s talk about Fedora infrastructure’s new cool projects and tools. The highlight of the day was Christoph‘s talk on leadership who tried to analyze with success the difference between authority and power in FOSS projects.

And the first day ended with a lot of beers and Pizza, the annual FUDCon food where I had the chance to eat for the first time in my life, pizza with chocolate! There I had the chance to catch up with old friends and make new ones! Now I have to warn you: “Watch out for the Hungarian community! They rock!”. I totally love those guys! 

On Saturday – this time in our own venue which was AMAZING – was time for the Barcamp! Everyone who wanted to make a presentation or workshop, grabbed a paper, wrote down their title and had some second standing in front of us presenting their idea! Then we took a pen and marked every presentation we would like to attend. After organizing a schedule the sessions started!

There I had the chance to attend in a lot of interesting sessions such as the Fedora User Experience by Spot, Websites from Kevin and Delta Cloud API. But the most brainstorming session was the “Ambassadors: Mentoring and other stuff” held by Fabian. Along with other Ambassadors we discussed details regarding the Fedora Ambassadors mentoring process and the fact that there are few mentors handling a large amount of requests. That’s why Christoph proposed six new Ambassadors (including me) who can help out in the Mentoring process! I am really happy with my new role and more happy that I am already mentoring a new contributor!

Before that session, I had my Mozilla’s hat and run a lighting talk regarding Web Applications, Firefox Marketplace and how could someone install web apps as native apps in Fedora.

At evening, along with the rest of the Greek and Cyprus community we enjoyed a French meal in Montmarte area, in a small but very warm and sweet restaurant.

Monday was a hackfest day where I had the chance to work with pingu on the new event system and build an interface for that. I am still working on that.

In addition we had a swag production workshop where we decided about the swag we are going to produce for EMEA (baseball hats, mugs)!

 

 

It was the first time after Brno that I saw the hackfest room full with passionate people working with determination on their favourite project. It was simply amazing!

After the group photo I left FUDCon for the airport with bitter emotions. Thank you French community and fellow Fedora contributors for this amazing event!

You can check my picasa web album for more pictures of the event. Looking forward for next year’s FUDCon

 

 

CONSEGI 2012 – Confirmado!

Rodrigo Padula on November 16, 2012 07:38 PM

Depois de muito tempo sem blogar, hoje recebi uma boa notícia.

Confirmei o convite para a participação no CONSEGI 2012 onde apresentarei duas palestras representando a Mozilla.

Este ano o evento será realizado em Belém – Pará e contará com uma grade muito rica, com foco em Mobilidade.

Apresentarei duas palestras no dia 06/12/2012

Palestra 1: Mozilla: Projetos para a Open Web

Palestra 2: Mozilla Firefox OS: Plataforma Web aberta para dispositivos móveis

Confira a grade completa: papers.consegi.gov.br/pub/palestras

Em breve mais informações e links

Building a big tent for teaching the web

on November 16, 2012 07:00 PM

Being a teenager who’s witnessed the UK’s shoddy Computing (or, as we like to call it, ICT) education I’m not suprised that according to a recent YouGov poll of UK parents and youth, commissioned by Mozilla, only 3% of British 8–15 year olds are currently being given the opportunity to learn and write computer code, while a majority are interested in it.

Let’s stop wasting kids time with teaching them (for the fith time) how to make a spreadsheet (or, rather, let’s teach them, but teach them in a lesson in which it all makes sense: Maths; the same goes for word processing, English teachers can, and should, teach it), but instead teach them skills which will be useful in the world of tomorrow. As a careers advisor who came into my school the other day said, “many of the jobs you will be going into don’t yet exist.” Many of those jobs will rely on some aspect of Computing.

So, what is Mozilla doing about it, specifically in the UK? Well, just before the Mozilla Festival (which I attended, and will blog about soon) Mozilla announced a new partnership focused at spreading digital literacy and building a big tent for teaching the web, all in the UK. Interested in how we’re going to do it? Or maybe you have an idea on how to get webmaking to reach the masses? Or are you an organisation focused on teaching digital literacy in the UK? If so, you should go read the full blog post here: blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/11/08/uk-partnership/

Wait is that Netflix on Ubuntu?

Benjamin Kerensa on November 16, 2012 01:12 AM

Update: Instructions on how to install Netflix on Ubuntu are available here This year has been big for Ubuntu. In fact, Valve just launched its Steam Beta on Ubuntu and Dell announced a Sputnik...

To read the rest of this visit benjaminkerensa.com

Hello world!

bacharakis on November 15, 2012 08:17 PM

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

2012 update to the 2007 Cost of Monoculture in Korea

Gen Kanai on November 14, 2012 03:13 PM

Back in 2007, I published the cost of monoculture, a blog post that was the first English-language explanation of the situation in South Korea where a series of independent decisions created a de facto monopoly for Microsoft Internet Explorer. The blog post was widely covered in 2007, in Salon, Slashdot, Boing Boing, etc.
Fast forward 5+ years to the late part of 2012 and basically nothing has changed. In fact, things are so bad in Korea that a candidate for the President of Korea, Ahn Cheol-soo, has taken the position that if he were voted in, he would abolish the laws that have locked Korea to Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Ahn Pledges To Wipe Out South Korea’s Outdated Internet Encryption Rule – Korea Real Time – WSJ

Internet Explorer becomes Korean election issue • The Register

Sure this candidate is from the IT/software field, but the fact that his platform has this position says that this is still a painful issue for most people in Korea today. It’s stunning that the Korean government has not proactively moved away from Active-X plugins when Microsoft themselves are deprecating this technology in Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10.