Sunday the 19^th May 2013, the Mozilla Kenya community Localizers gathered at Naked pizza in Westlands to continue with the journey of ensuring the mozilla products including their favourite browser is available in swahili language; a language that is widely used in East Africa region.This would enable the people in the region to access technology in the language they understand best,preserve the swahili language and also improve customer acceptance and usage of the products.

Everyone had arrived by 1.30 P.M 15 people who availed themselves for the localization were all set with their laptops ready to start. After introductions and catching up a bit as we placed orders for pizza, Steve being the lead of the event guided us on how to translate and gave us additional materials to assist us in the translation.We had to reming ourselves of our goals which inluded;

• Shipping A Swahili Firefox Version in 2013
• Having translations of Mozilla websites
• Shipping a Swahili version of the Firefox OS
• Having a swahili version of the manifest

Having all this in mind,we all started on the days activity and we set a goal of translating 1000 words within 4 hours. We need to encourage each other so as to meet a target and therefore decided the one who gathered majority translations gets the TShirt.

All you could here is people discussing the new words they are learning and trying to consult for any new words they came across. For the words we were not able to translate we had to write them down so that we could research further and consult so as to give the best translation for the words.

The Pizzas arrived and this did not deter us with the translation, people took bites of pizza as we continued with the days agenda of ensuring the dream of having Mozilla products in Swahili language being realized.

By the end of the event which was around 5.30 P.M we had made over 300 translations. Fabian Kithusi had the most translated words hence getting the Tshirt. It was an interesting and successful event which made us to to talk on the way forward so as to reach our goals on the localization. Ever localizer was to continue translating and we decided to check on the number of translations one will have by the time we will have our next meeting.

The aim of the event Nairobits Class 2013 webmakers that happened on 23rd of April at Nairobits school of Digital Design was to introduce the students to Firefox OS platform and Open Web Apps development. The students are currently learning web development so it was easy to lure them into mobile apps development using web technologies that they know and on the process of mastering them. By the fact that the students do not need to learn any other new programing language other than what they already know they were very willing to venture into the business of developing web apps.

To start of the event I introduce Firefox OS, the technologies used and needed for app development, the opportunities that it presents and how web developers can tap into them. We had a chance of discussing a few APIs that have been expossed by Firefox OS to the developers and explored the possibility of developing apps that target the local market.

In the third hour of the event we were ready to dive in to code, so I showed the students how to set up their development environment, demonstrated web developer tools provided by Firefox and the Firefox OS simulator. Now it was for me to launch my Aptana Studio and start putting together a simple app for illustration purpose. In about an hour and a half we had a simple web app up and running.

Through the highly interactive session the students had a chance of learning what they need to be able come up with working web apps that can be deployed on the Firefox OS market place.

On 12th April 2013, the Mozilla Mombasa Community had their first MozCafe meet up at the splendid Cafe Aroma. The scrumptious coffee and yummy cookies was just more than enough to get us started.Guess what? 15 people from different universities who are the leads of different IT clubs in Mombasa attended the meet-up.

We mainly discussed about the past and future events of the Mozilla Mombasa community specifically highlighting the HTML5 Hackathon and Firefox Flicks event. The meeting started off with the attendants giving brief introductions about themselves, what they do and their views about the Mozilla Mombasa Community. We also discussed about the various challenges facing most students when it comes to tech related events and projects and yes this was really interesting...so, the conclusion was, many think "Mozilla is just the browser" and "coding is difficult, it's only for the professional programmers"And that is why we were there to discuss on ways to motivate people and encourage them to actively participate on development and also further establish the growth of the community.

Said Fuad and Alifiyah Ganijee warmly welcomed 4 new recruits to the Community who have been actively participating in the planning and organizing of events; Musa Alfan, Andrew Mwangi, Taqqiya Hamada and Zahra Jalalkhan...Keep it up guys!

...HTML5 Hackathon and Firefox Flicks was the next and most interesting part of the agenda, we brainstormed for ideas on making these events really successful and planned for dates and venues to host them.And we could not just end the meeting without mentioning the Mozilla's 15th Anniversary party, well yeah, I personally can't wait for it, this will be a mega party of the two most active and vibrant sub communities of Mozilla Kenya; The Mozilla Community in Nairobi and Mombasa.

Lastly, we also emphasized the use of our social network channels and the importance of keeping them alive...and yes, please do join us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/mozillamombasa and follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/mozillamombasa

Some of the attendants suggested that we should have a token of appreciation (Could be a Certificate, a phone, a T-shirt or even a round of applause) for the team/person that develops the best App for the Firefox OS ...Around 4 members of the Mozilla Mombasa Community are working on their apps, interestingly keeping it a secret between their groups so as to motivate each other to produce the best apps, let's wait for results...

In a nutshell, the day couldn't have been any better, everything was just WOW!

Twitter hashtag: #mozillamombasa #mozcafemombasa

NAIROBI MOZCOFFEE EVENT.

The event was pushed forward to Sunday 14^th April after guys requested that it be held on the weekend instead of a weekday. The event kicked off at around 1:30pm at Naked Pizza in Westlands with a total of 14 people present of which 6 were Mozilla Reps and the other 8 recruits under the mentorship of the reps. We started with introductions and catching up with what other people in the group were up to while we waited for the pizzas.
After the first pizzas arrived and everyone had a slice we started discussing the Agenda of the day. The following is a summary of what was discussed.

Firefox Flicks – Led by Alex (My Mentor) he started off with a brief introduction of what Firefox flicks is. He went over the requirements for the competition, the theme for this year’s competition and one of the videos we submitted last years. He was able to get some volunteers onto his team to aid with spreading information about the competition throughout the country with the aim of getting more videos from Kenya submitted to the competition this year.

Webmaker training and 2013 – this discussion was led by Hezron and Cliff, two of our dedicated reps who were recently in Europe for Mozcamp where they were able to interact with staff from the webmaker project and learn more about it and how they could effectively contribute to it. They shared all the information they had learnt and as a result we were able to get two of the recruits to jump onto their team and plan for two events that will be held later on this year.

Open Game Development – led by Alex and John Amba (new recruit). Alex talked about some of the open platforms available for creating games for html5 and the importance of trying to grow this field which is largely non-existent here in Kenya. Amba the new recruit a game developer enthusiast talked about his experience with one of the JavaScript game development platforms and committed to finishing a demo game that could be used to teach other how to develop games.

MozTour 2013 – Led by Kelvin and George (new recruits). They shared their idea to have a series of events that toured the country spreading the Mozilla message and why Firefox is the best browser. Stephen a rep joined them and committed to helping them to ensure the success of their events.

L10N – led by Stephen. He reiterated the importance of having a Swahili version of Firefox by the end of the year. He indicated that with nine thousand words already translated and only 6 thousand remaining it is a realistic goal. He managed to get three of the new recruits Maria, Morine and Jane Rose to help him out with translating the rest of the words

15 Years of Mozilla – Led by Alex. Alex pointed out that it was Mozilla’s 15^th birthday and we were to celebrate all that Mozilla has managed to achieve to date together with all our community members. Several ideas were thrown out for the event and more is to come later once the details have been finalized.

The event was a success and we managed to talk a lot and make good plans for the rest of the year. Special thanks to all the local reps who brought their mentees/recruits to the meet up and participated to making it a success.