Monthly Archives: September 2012

Webmaker update: MozFest, future apps, Hall of Fame, hackable games

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Join us for the Mozilla Festival: Nov 9 – 11

Join us for the 2012 Mozilla Festival: Making, Freedom and the Web

  • Nov 9 – 11, London, UK
  • 800 developers + designers + educators + youth + journalists + you…
  • …getting together for three days of design challenges, learning labs and fireside chats…
  • …to make amazing things that can change the world.

Sound like fun? Register here now.

Mozilla Ignite announces “brainstorming round” winners.
Development round now open.

Yesterday, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation announced eight winning ideas that offer a glimpse of what the internet of the future might look like. Next up: invite developers everywhere to make these and other big ideas a reality.

 

Summer Code Party wrap-up: submit to the Hall of Fame

The first-ever Summer Code Party is now wrapped up, and was a huge success:

  • 685 Summer Code Party events
  • spread across 80+ countries
  • reaching more than 5,305 people

The new Webmaker Hall of Fame provides highlights from the summer, and now needs your contribution. What was the most amazing thing you made or saw this summer? Who inspired you, taught you, or helped you most? Who should the Mozilla Webmaker and Summer Code Party community learn about, or get to know?

A great example of “hackable games”

Tuesday’s Webmaker call included a demo from the team at “Craftyy,” a web-based remixable game editor — and a great example of the “hackable games” theme at November’s Mozilla Festival.

Explaining Webmaker crisply

How do we do it even more simply? And tell a clear story around how it fits with the rest of Mozilla? Mark Surman shares thoughts over coffee.

 

Introducing the 2012 Mozilla Festival: making, freedom and the web

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Cross-posted from the Mozilla blog.

Join us for three days of inspired making, learning and celebration in London. Today we’re extremely proud to launch the new 2012 Mozilla Festival web site — and invite you to join us November 9-11 in London, UK.

“We want everyone to tap the full creative power of the web. The Mozilla Festival is a magnet for people interested in learning about — and playing with — the web’s future.” –Mark Surman, Executive Director, Mozilla

Gathering educators, youth, coders, gamers, media-makers and you

This year’s Mozilla Festival will gather more than 800 passionate people with diverse backgrounds and skill-sets. The goal: push the frontiers of the open web, learn together, and make things that can change the world.

Coders, designers, journalists and educators will join with filmmakers, gamers, makers and youth from more than 40 different countries. Together they’ll participate in a series of design challenges, learning labs and fireside chats spread across four floors of the Ravensbourne design and media campus in East London.

Unlike traditional conferences, the emphasis at the Mozilla Festival is on hands-on making and collaboration — rather than passive consumption or listening to other people talk. It’s “more hack, less yack.” And a big tent for everyone — including partners, local communities and you — who shares Mozilla’s vision for a more open, web literate world.

“Technology is at the point where learners don’t just use the tools, but make the tools. This happens at places like the Mozilla Festival, where geeks and practitioners get together.” – Joi Ito, Mozilla Foundation Board Member, Director of MIT Media Lab

This year’s key themes:

Get involved

Webmaker round-up: MozCamp, Hive Berlin, code sprint grants + Hall of Fame

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In case you missed last week’s Webmaker community call, here’s what we’re making together at Mozilla Webmaker:

Mozilla Webmaker and Mozilla Reps: working together

As MozCamp Europe kicks off in Warsaw, we’re sharing highlights of how Mozilla Reps are using Mozilla Webmaker tools and Summer Code Party events to grow Mozilla.

From the recent Hive Berlin “speed geek” session

Hive Berlin starts buzzing

The Hive model is spreading.  The approach: bring together local organizations, museums, libraries and open tech leaders like Mozilla to teach digital literacy, hacking and webmaking.

Hive Toronto is organizing another major Mozilla Toronto event for Sep 22. And last week, an introductory “Hive Berlin” brought local leaders together to offer youth a “speed geek session” where participants “hacked at learning stations and hopped into and making something.”

the future of learning

The goal: “for leaders to showcase their offerings and connect with other individuals and Berlin organizations working at the intersection of learning and digital tools.”

[05.11.2011] MOZILLA FEST

Knight-Mozilla OpenNews session at last year’s Mozilla Festival

Apply for an OpenNews “Code Sprint Grant”

Got a big little idea for an open source journalism tool? The Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project can help.

“We’re looking to help create small tools that make big impacts.” –Dan Sinker, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews

How it works: the program offers Code Sprint Grants of $10,000 to fund small-scale utilities and tools that solve specific, repeatable journalistic problems. News organizations collaborate with OpenNews to define Code Sprint projects, and all Code Sprint Grant-funded code is documented and open-sourced on completion.

How can we become the best in the world at user testing?

Kate Hudson presented the results of some great recent experiments around user testing for Mozilla Popcorn. Testers came into the Mozilla Toronto office, were guided through a script and process Kate and the Popcorn team created, and then offered their feedback on this sneak peek new version of the Popcorn app.

Next up: begin doing regular monthly “User Testing Fridays” in the Moz Toronto community space and elsewhere?

Building a Summer Code Party “Hall of Fame”

We’re approaching the grand finale of the Summer Code Party on Sep 22 and 23. To mark the occasion, The Webmaker engagement team is doing our best to gather up a new “Hall of Fame” with your favorite moments, people and projects from the summer.

The goal: spread love. Celebrate and offer recognition to your favorite community members, instructors, and inspiring people you met through the Summer Code Party.

Building a prototype for “webmaker.org/HallofFame.” Or something like it. Rebeccah and OpenMatt are working on a prototype web page aimed at making it easy to see, submit and share your own favorites from the summer. Lots of this is already on our Mozilla Webmaker Tumblr — it just needs to be sorted and organized into “best of” categories. More on that next week. In the mean time, we’re pulling together some quick and dirty prototypes here.

Growing Mozilla through webmaking: MozCamp + MozParty

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This weekend, MozCamp Europe kicks off in Warsaw. Mozilla Reps and other inspired community members will get together to share ideas on growing Mozilla and serving the mission in their communities.

Some of the 100+ Summer Code Party events held across Europe this summer

To mark the occasion, here are some highlights from Mozilla’s Summer Code Party in Europe and beyond. The goal: showcase how Mozilla Reps are already using Mozilla Webmaker tools and the Summer Code Party to reach out to new communities and advance their local work.

About 44 MozReps have held Summer Code Party events so far — here are some of their stories.

Cluj, Romania: 48-hour hackathon

Mozilla Reps Ioana Chiorean and Alex Lakatos hosted a 48-hour Summer Code Party hackathon with about 25 particpants. Together they built web apps and taught webmaking basics like HTML and CSS.

The Cluj hackathon produced two new mobile apps: Hypnosis and Tic Tac Toe. More great photos from the event are here.

Dundee, Scotland: “Making the web physical”

Jon Rogers and Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellow Laurian Gridinoc gathered with about 50 participants. The focus: physical hacking and linking the web to real objects.

“This is a tech jam Mozilla style – bringing together journalists, coders, film-makers, geeks, programmers and designers interested in turning live data into physical objects.” –Meld Online

Some of what MozParty Dundee made together:

  • Interactive news games. A mash-up of “Have I got news for you” and “whack-a-mole.”
  • Tweetie birds. Daniella Rovira’s Twitter bird flapped its wings whenever someone tweeted “#MozParty.”
  • Street view joystick. Controlling Google Maps street view using a joystick controller.
  • VIDEO: Presenting these and other finished hacks on Air Mozilla
  • Blog posts on the event here, here and here.


Zurich: building mobile apps

Organized by Mozilla Rep Henrik Mitsch, this event focused on creating FirefoxOS apps — like this PDF viewer built using pdf.js — plus sessions on localization, Mozilla Popcorn and “Firefox Source Code 101.”

Pune, India: growing Mozilla through webmaking

Organized by Sayak Sarkar, Faisal Aziz and others, this all-day workshop drew 70 participants to showcase the Mozilla project and teach webmaking. Talks included key aspects of Firefox, FirefoxOS, a hands-on session with Mozilla Thimble and more.

“We are planning on ending the Mozilla Summer Code Party on a high — and we are going BIG for this.” –MozRep Sayak Sarkar

Pune has since gone on to host six more events and is now planning something even bigger: a “Mozilla Carnival” as a grand finale to the Summer Code Party. In conjunction with Software Freedom Day, they’re Inviting Mozilla Reps and volunteers from across India and neighboring regions to participate.

Santa Rosa, Philippines: webmaking in a cafe

Organized by Mozilla Rep Jean Austin, this event gathered about 15 participants in a public cafe to share Mozilla’s mission and teach webmaking. It included a hands-on session with Mozilla Thimble, and a bridge to a MozCoffee event in Manila. Lots of photos here and here.

Get involved