Mombasa B2G Tour

Joseph Bosire

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So picking up a week later fresh from the Kampala B2G Tour we first headed to JKUAT University taking advantage of the JKUAT TEch Expo to hold a booth and talk about Firefox OS, the Firefox Marketplace and how to deploy apps there. As usual, our booth generated tonnes of traffic with some guys already aware of B2G’s developement while otheres heard of ti for the first time. I gave a taklk as well about Mozilla communities in Africa and plans for 2013…more on a differnt blog post on that.

So, moving on to Mombasa. This was the final desitination for our Community B2G Tour. We were here back in March where we met with the Mombasa Tech Community lead by Alifiyah Ganijee, Saeed Faud and Ahmed Maawy  who took up the responsibility of organizing Mozilla activities in the region. Since then, they’ve held a Mozilla Summer Code Party and now did all the ground preparations for the Mozilla Tour.

The Mombasa Tech Community is a group of tech enthusiasts based of the Coast of Kenya with a goal of exposing individuals in the region to various tech advancements. You can find the here:

Google Group mailing list
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/msa-tech
Google +
https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/105153400962376532068/105153400962376532068/about
Twitter

@MombasaTech
https://twitter.com/#!/MombasaTech
Facebook

MsaTech Mombasa

OK, back to the tour, venue: MEWA IT Center. We had an attendance of around 60 guys mainily from the Mombasa Tech Community and Camara who were gracious enough in providing a venue for the event. Hezron, our hacking guru was sick and sadly absent for this but Vicky and Steve were upto task in taking up his presentations on Mozilla’s QA (Qaulity Assurance Talks) and HTML5 apps development.

We started off with Alifiyah talking about the Mombasa Tech Community and their future plans with calls for volunteers to assist in developing their website as well as join the community. I picked up from there with my talk focusing on the mentorship methods (ReMo, Student Reps) we use to involve people in our projects and touched in detail over various Mozilla contribute areas with Vicky backing me up on a couple of questions that popped up from the audience upto a break session for lunch.

This was quite a mixed group as we came to realize over chats we had during our lunch break, with a game developer in the house to system developers, network technicians, students and even tonnes of guys who had quite minimal IT skills and were asking for programs that would teach the real basics when it comes to web making. Actually turned up to be a perfect crowd for peer review and mentoring. So we settled on a plan to have Webmaker events at the same space being lead by the Msa Tech team.

After lunch… Steve spoke, lights were out :( so he briefly covered Mozilla’s QA (Qaulity Assurance) contribute areas and the tools used for this. Ali, from Camara was up next speaking about their volunteer program where they train volunteers on all that’s required in refurbishing and fixing computers who in turn help Camara in refurbishing used computers that are distributed in schools all over Kenya. Along with the Msa Tech Community, we plan to host a series of Webmaker events at Camara’s MEWA IT Center in 2013

We ended the day chatting with Alifiyah and team about the future plans of the Msa Tech community and how Mozilla can be part of that right from building their website to Webmaker, Firefox Os and Flicks events in 2013

More Photos here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.435885733142579.100078.206051646125990&type=3 and like our page :)

Mombasa B2G Tour / Mozilla Kenya by is licensed under a