Latest Firefox Beta Available for Download

Joseph Bosire

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The latest Firefox Beta is now available for download and testing on Windows, seek Mac, and Linux.
What’s New in this update:
  • Redesigned Home Page
  • Redesigned New Tab page
  • Inline URL Auto-Complete
  • Tabs on Demand
  • SPDY Support
  • Developer Tool Updates
To see the full list and more details of the new features, sale please see the Future of Firefox Blog or technical release notes for Firefox Beta for Windows Mac, Linux.
Share the news and invite your friends to download and start testing.
1. Share the blog post: http://mzl.la/If3A3r
2. Invite friends to download and start testing now!
3. You can also now share Firefox Beta by hosting a Firefox Beta Download button via the Affiliates Program.

Mozilla Reps Meetup

Joseph Bosire

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DSC_0102

DSC_0105We are a meeting at steers webera street upstairs talking about how 2011 went and the roadmap for  2012, look its great to see guys from last year well and good and energetic about this year. Watch out mozillans 2012 is going to be better than 2011.

@Mlabeastafrica introduction to Mozilla.

Joseph Bosire

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Hi fellow Mozillians.

I am writing this blog to share with you about an event that we held early this week at the Mlab east Africa. On Tuesday 13th December we had a talk at the Mlab Eastafrica where we introduced the current wave of students to Mozilla Community Kenya, the Mozilla foundation, products and projects. Alex the lead of the Kanyan community was the main speaker of the day.

The aim was to get the students join our community and chip in their ideas and contributions towards the the growth of the Kenyan community and Mozilla at large. The trainees at the mlab come from different educational institutions and we hope that they are going to spread word about Mozilla and it’s products in their various institutions.

Every piece of information was well communicated during the interactive presentation. The hottest topics were the local community and B2G as the audience come form a mobile development background and they are basically interested in opportunities in the mobile industry.

Images taken during the event at this photo stream http://www.flickr.com/photos/54866403@N02/.

Hackjam Nairobi @Nairobits

Joseph Bosire

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Hi All, Once again,

It is my pleasure to blog about the Hackjam session we had at the Nairobits Design School here in Nairobi.

We had a couple of Mozkenya Team members on board namely; Victor Karanja, Alex Wafula, Benji Otieno, Frankline May and myself (Cliff).  Also, a new face, Rafiq Copeland from Filmaid International joined us just to learn about our ‘hacking’ mission following the tremendous announcements made on our mailing list. Mr. Rafiq also attended the 2011 Mozilla Festival held in London and he learned about the existence of the local community from Jessica Klein.

We had to have the session out of the scheduled hactivity designed by Jess Klein, seeing that we lacked a lot of materials involved. But all the same we were keen not to leave out the very important steps involved. 

The session kicked off with a brilliant presentation from Alex Wafula (once again, good job Alex). In his presentation, Alex highlighted key points to the current Nairobits class: about Mozilla, Our Mission, getting involved etc… You name them!

We also had snippets presentations from Victor Karanja (a local remo – member). He really did a nice job in clarifying code stuff and also helped in highlighting the current market trends as far as development is concerned. Kudos Vicky!

We then moved to the moment of the day, ” The Hackjam Session “! Alex kicked us off again with a quick intro to what Hackasaurus is about, the tools and yes, it was a job well done by him.

It was my turn to take it up from Vic and Alex and my session was to take the class through the X-ray goggles. With the help of all team members present, we did a good demo of the wonderful x-ray goggles and the students did marvel at what wonder works the tool  could do.

Then came the moment of truth, we had to test if the kids grasped how the X-ray goggles worked and also test their html and css skills seeing that they had already interacted with the same. To achieve this, we quickly introduced a hacking challenge for all the students and seeing that we had very little left over swag from previous local Mozilla events, we decided that the best ‘hacker’ gets a T-shirt! This went down well, with the four T – shirts we had, two were for two girls and two for the boys.

The hacking session took roughly an hour and we quickly had all participants post their ‘hacks’ on an etherpad including the original site they hacked and their names as well.

The Mozkenya members than picked it from there once again, reviewing all the ‘hacked websites’ one after another. Quite a hectic job but we finally managed to pick the best even  so! Two girls and two boys walked away with the branded Mozilla Kenya Community t-shirts and a bunch of stickers (though  stickers were for everyone who took part in the session).

With all that, we had to call it a day. I gave the closing remarks and we all waved goodbye to the wonderful Nairobits students and trainers!

WordCamp Kenya 2011

Joseph Bosire

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word_campWordCamp Kenya went down over the weekend at CrayFish camp in Naivasha, 80 km from Nairobi city center. At hand to represent Mozilla were Carolyne Mbulwa, Winnie Situ, Stephen Wanjau, Oscar Limoke and myself. Thumbs up to Stephen and Limoke who made it all the way from Juja / Murang’a to Nairobi and finally to Naivasha.

Carol and Situ were the first to arrive (Saturday morning), early birds if you may and from what I heard, they rocked the place! I linked up with Stephen and Limoke later on that afternoon in Nairobi, caught a bus and made our way to CrayFish getting there just in time for some bird watching bylake Naivasha! David Mugo, the event organizer was at hand to welcome us along with John Karanja from Whive – a local social media platform. Well not forgetting Carol and Situ, these two were everywhere!

WordPress being a popular CMS for blogging sites, a bunch of local bloggers were here and you can’t imagine how much these guys tweet and blog, you can check out the WordCamp tweets using these hash tags #wcke , #WordCampke plus I’ll put up a list of some great blogs that were done on the event at the end of this post. We caught up with some old and new acquaintances over dinner, discussed a bunch of stuff among them WebFWD (Web forward) the the new Innovation Accelerator from Mozilla and a need to make its presence felt in Kenya.

Last activity of the day on the schedule was a Lyrical Artistry and Poetry session by Wamathai and Njeri wangari which was supposed to happen by a bonfire but we had to move under shelter when it started raining :( I’m not an avid poetry fun though I found this session quite entertaining and yah, so I had some fun with it! Time to call it a day came, we had a mishap with our sleeping tents so long story short, we spent most of the night browsing the web and “shuffling”. We also discovered that some hippos ran wild at the CrayFish camp area…

We managed to catch some few zzz’s before resuming for the second day of the WordCamp. David Mugo, the event organizer gave a talk about Africa plus WordPress with a demo on Mobile themes and WordPress mobile apps topped up with interesting stats on mobile coverage in Africa. A bunch of talks this day were aimed at pushing for more local content on the web in Africa by showcasing how far we’ve gone. Some included:

You can checkout the entire schedule here: http://2011.kenya.wordcamp.org/schedule/

WordCamp Kenya came to an end at around 4:20 pm EAT . We caught the buses made available by the WordCamp kenya team back to Nairobi. The back bench was dominated by Mozillians, along with one new recruit Bett Kipsang (Beliot), Isaac Kosgei (Wikimedian) and Martin Gicheru (web developer; tech reviewer). We had a great discussion about local web enterprises, their successes and failures along with what they are doing wrong, right and what it takes to make it and survive as a web entrepreneur in Africa.

Some insight by Carolyne Mbulwa on what she picked up about blogging:

Blog your passion

Yeah, the easiest way to blog is to blog your passion. It does give the blogger leverage in that ideas flow, not much energy is spent on research as opposed to a topic you are not versed in. Passion makes you understand your area in order to tell your audience.

Engage your target audience

Talk to them, let them feel like its a one on one with them. When you get an attachment to a few of them, they will feel good sharing your work with others, and that’s like recommending you. You know how recommendations work, word of mouth, word of tweet.

Plan your blogging just like you would do a business

Two of the speakers, Moses Kemibaro and Njeri Rionge articulated this very well, Njeri told us that we need to plan our blogging just like one would do a marketing plan, who are your audience, how will you reach them, is it the numbers versus conversion. By conversion I mean, say you are selling a solution to your audience, you would better have targeted audience 2000 people access your content and 500 of them actually purchase your product, as opposed to an untargeted audience of a million and you don’t get a hundred of them .You should know the people you want to reach and research how best to do this. Taking time to plan gets you right on track, early and saves you time roaming in the desert of unplanned work for 40 years like the Israelites of those times.

Be the professional

Take things seriously. Let you be known in your niche, let it flow from your blog to your tweets, own it. You will find even paid consultations going your way just because you are the person who talks with authority in that niche. Moses Kemibaro does that all the time, and you say blogging doesn’t pay!?

In summary, this was a great event for Mozillians to attend and with the new acquaintances made, we’ll now be on the know of any blogger related events happening as well as look into the future of blogging in Africa (local content). We’ve also made strives in getting guys interested in WebFWD.

Kabarak Open Day

Joseph Bosire

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The Kabarak Open Day was a full day event on 24th September that Kabarak university’s Computer science and IT students attended to learn and hear from various industry players such Mozilla.

Essentially we delivered the following as per their expectations:

  1. A thorough exposition of the resources available from Mozilla to student contributors
  2. Possible collaborations with the university
  3. Opportunities available for students in terms of industrial attachments and projects.

Wikimedia Kenya (wmke) was also invited and we decided to plan our presence here together. The integration (between mozkenya and wmke) worked well; a bit beyond my expectations actually!

We were in constant chats with Steve (wmke) over logistics and the event organizers over the schedule. Steve and Vicky – Steve’s version in Mozilla Kenya :) – came in handy with their knwoledge on Nakuru.

We got to Kabarak uni around 10:30 am and setup a booth. Most of the students were in the auditorium at this time listening to the presentations from various speakers. Notable ones were from Wikimedia Kenya, Google Kenya and ofcourse Mozilla Kenya. Ours particularly aimed at engaging the students in the current projects we are undertaking or plan to do so in the near futre. These included: MoJo, Hackasaurus, P2PU School of webcraft, ReMo, Student Reps program, Drumbeat and Firefox addon  dev workshops

Vicky had the crowds at the booth eating of his hands :) and believe me, there were crowds! Our booths are massive crowd pullers; even other booths visit us :) we should put up strategies around this to better engage people.

The university has a young but very active journalism club and we hope to engage them in MoJo activities in the near future. Great contacts were made so keep on the lookout for Mozilla in Kabarak.

You can find more pics here: Kabarak Open day

kabarak

Thats all for now!

Alex.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.225841867469957&type=1

Road Trip

Joseph Bosire

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So the much talked about Road Trip got focus in today’s meetup and the first steps to making it a reality were taken. Basically, the the main purpose of the trip is an outreach campaign in Kenyan Universities in a bid to have contributors spread over across the whole country.

With the magnitude of this project, this is the first of many meetups dedicated to the planning and implementation of the Road trip. In attendance were 11 Mozillians with a new recruit – so that’s +1 to our contributor base :) – and the ideas began flowing….

Collaborations

So still fresh from Wikimania and the just concluded Kenyan tour of Asaf Bartov, (Head of Global south Relationships, Wikimedia Foundation) collaboration between Mozilla and Wikimedia has been in the minds of many. GlobalMelt has fostered this where both Mozillians and Wikimedians meet to innovate and ideas such as Sparklez become a reality. With the local Wikimedia group looking to have a similar outreach campaign (Road Trip), we thought it would be best to combine our efforts and do the Road Trip together

So What Next…

In order to make this a success, the following suggestions were put up by attendees – 3 of which are both Mozilla and Wikimedia contributors, my self included:

  • Setup activities / projects that new contributors can participate in so as to avoid a situation where new recruits gained from the trip would join but have nothing specific to do. In short, plan to receive new contributors.
  • Have different people coordinate specific aspects of planning eg: Website manager, Swag wrangler, Universities contact etc
  • Big Outreach campaign as a build up to the actual Road Trip. This would involve:
  1. setting up a website specifically for this, backed up by social media channels and frequent updates in preparation for the trip
  2. Pre-visit to universities across Kenya
  3. Printing of outreach materials such as banners, fliers, t-shirts etc

 

January was mentioned as a suggested date for the trip, a time when most universities would be open and either in the middle or beginning of a semester. A final decision is to be made in a combined meetup between Mozilla and Wikimedia.

In conclusion, the main Mission for the Road Trip would be to get an even distribution of contributors across the country (Kenya) with a Vision of carrying out similar projects not only in Africa but Worldwide.

 

Strathmore ICT Conference

Also discussed was the presence of Mozilla in the 12th Annual Strathmore ICT Conference – 2nd and 3rd September – which Mozilla has sponsored. If you are interested in being part of Mozilla’s presence for this, comment on this thread or get intouch with me directly: alex[at]mozilla-kenya[dot]org You can follow the planning page for this over here: Planning Page

Wikimania Days 2 – 3

Joseph Bosire

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Days 2 and 3 ie Tuesday and Wednesday were developer days with most talks and sessions revolving around development of different software and platforms that supported Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. I got to meet the local Mozilla team (Amir and Tomer) as well as Pierros and Nikos from Greece Tuesday morning. Since the whole team wasn’t there and the main conference hadn’t began, we settled on having Mozillians attend various sessions for the two days.

During the developer days, I attended the Global south Meeting, Openzim Meeting and Chapters meeting which revolved around Wikimedia projects that I’m involved in. While doing so, I got to meet with great Wikimedians – Jessie wild, Asaf Bartov, Rich Farmbrough, Emmanuel (Kiwix programmer) that would be a huge part of the great experience I had for the rest of the conference.

Wednesday evening, we had an early comers party over at the Titan college – spectacular view, food and drinks, music and of course awesome people! Got a glimpse of what it’s like partying with Brazillians :) more info to come on the party….

Wikimania Day 1

Joseph Bosire

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wikimaniaI was in Haifa, Israel the past week (1st – 8th August) for the Wikimania conference. For those of you unfamiliar with Wikimania, it’s an annual conference where hundreds of Wikimedians get to meet and share / discuss issues and projects around Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects and yes, I am a Wikimedian.

The Mozilla team was also present, why you’d ask; well because Mozilla and Wikimedia are like minded organizations with strong inclinations to FOSS projects and movements so we thought it would be great to learn from each other and collaborate on future projects. Mozilla’s presence here was by: Tomer, Amir Aharoni, Michelle Thorne, Alina Mierlus, Pierros Papadeas, Nikos and myself

I arrived in Tel Aviv Monday (1st) afternoon and caught a Sherut (shared taxi) with some Wikimedians headed to Haifa. Roads here are great with minimal traffic if any so it took us about an hour to get to Haifa. I got dropped off at Shikma dorms where I’d be staying for the duration of the conference.

The Mozilla team was to meet over dinner later on that evening; long story short, I kind of got lost and never made it to the meetup (no one did)

I got back to the dorms 9 pm, end of day 1. Day 2 and 3 coming up….