2nd Event on Common Voice, Kolkata

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After getting huge success on the first event of Common Voice, we plan to organize another event on Common Voice for the Bengali language. This time the event was a little bit big, 70 people came up.

According to our last event plan, this time we first demonstrated about Common Voice. Then we have shared our criteria for writing sentences.

Here are some criteria to help participants write their own sentences:

  • Ideally, it should take 5 seconds to read each sentence and no more than 10 seconds. So aim for sentences around 5 to 10 words.
  • 1 or 2 words sentences is also ok, but not for all sentences! Try to have a mix of short and medium-sized sentences, but try to keep them all under 10 seconds.
  • Try to use as many different words as possible. This will help the machine to enrich its vocabulary.
  • Including sentences with punctuation (ex !,?) is also great to have but do not stress yourself if you can’t think of any.
  • If your language is using any special symbols (ex.â, ü, ß, š) that’s great. Using those actually helps the machine to distinguish different sounds.
  • Try to include proper nouns (first names, streets names, places, etc).
  • Numbers are fine, but please spell the number rather than write the digits (ie. “five-hundred twenty-seven” is rather than “527”)

Then we distributed the white papers. They started writing down sentences with full enthusiasm.

This time again me and few Mozilla volunteers (Mahay Alam Khan from Bangladesh, Shiladittya Paul, Shouvik Mukherjee, Debraj from India) who is still trying those sentences for digital submission. Special thanks go to you guys.

This time we got also a huge success. Thanks, Mozilla for again giving us a nice opportunity to engage a general audience in this event. At last being a  professional Bengali linguist, it’s pleasure to work with this project.

Hopefully next time we can organize another big event.

 

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Global Sprint Kolkata – Focus on Common Voice

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Sorry to come late into my blog. Due to my personal problem, I could not get time to blog about this event.

We all know this year Mozilla organized a two-day collaborative hackathon, the 2018 Global Sprint, which was really fun around the world. As a part of this global event, we also organized one small event in Barasat, Kolkata on Common Voice for the Bengali language.

As we all know that Mozilla’s one of the biggest initiatives is to teach machines how real people speak, that’s the Common Voice project.  During this Global Sprint, they asked the world to help launch Common Voice in new languages by writing or collecting non-English sentences for people to read. We were glad to take part in the Bengali language.

Here I organized this event in a different way. First I invited general people who are not tech savvy. Some kids also were present there. Total 25 people came. Then I gave a brief introduction on Common Voice. Then I asked them to write at least 50 sentences for each person. Each people came up with 50 new sentences by writing down those in a paper. Few people have written double. We got more than 1500+ sentences from the whole event.

Then me and few Mozilla volunteers (Mahay Alam Khan, SM Sarwar Nobin from Bangladesh, Shiladittya Paul, Shouvik Mukherjee, Sayantan Dutta from India) who typed those sentences for digital submission. Special thanks go to you guys.

Participants were highly inspired by this event. We got great success. Thanks, Mozilla for giving us a nice opportunity. I am a professional bengali linguist. It’s pleasure to work with this project.

 

 

Privacy education for smartphone user

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Recently I organised one event on “Privacy education for smartphone user”. My focus is to create internet privacy awareness among very new smartphone users, where most of them started using smartphone a few months back.

In this event, I started with very basic things like smartphone features, social app etc. Then I jumped to the basic of internet privacy. There I have discussed how our data is being sold, how other internet users are tracking us when we are surfing internet etc.
Not only that, even I told them why people don’t care about their data privacy. After that, I have shown them various solutions which can help them to save their internet privacy.

Also, I shared how to protect privacy on Android.

Here is my slide.

Thanks DuckDuckGo for helping me to organise this awesome event.  27 people came up during the event. After the events, all participants showed that they have learnt somethings new which help them to enhance their online life.

 

 

India uses Firefox Nightly: Kick off on May 1, 2017

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In my last blog, I have announced that Mozilla India is going to organize a special campaign on Firefox Nightly Usage in India. RSVP here.

Everything is set. Gearing up for the campaign.

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BTW Recently we have organized one community call on this campaign. You can watch it to know more about how to organize events and technical things.

  • How to get involved:
    • Online Activities
      • Telling and inviting friends!
      • Create the event in social media!
      • Writing about it on Facebook & Twitter.
      • Posting updates on social media when the event is running.
      • Running an online event like webinar for this campaign. Please, check the event flow.
      • Blog posting regarding Firefox Nightly technical things, features and events.
    • Offline Activities
      • Introduction to Mozilla
      • Introduction to Firefox Nightly Release cycle details
      • Why we need Firefox Nightly users?
      • Showing various stats regarding firefox
      • Installing Nightly on participant’s PC
      • WebCompat on Firefox Nightly
      • How they can contribute in Nightly (QA and Promotion)
      • Swag Distribution
  • Duration of Campaign: 2 months
  • Total Number of offline events: 15 only. 
  • Hashtag: #INUsesFxNightly
  • Duration of each event: 3-5 hours

Swag is ready! 

 

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Swag for offline events

For requesting swag, please read here.

Also, we have the budget for these events. You can request it. Know more here .

Other than that if you want to know more about activity format, event flow, resource and more thing, please read the wiki.

If you have a special query, please send a mail to Biraj Karmakar [brnet00 AT gmail DOT com]. Don’t forget to join our telegram group for a realtime chat. 

 

 

India uses Firefox Nightly – A Campaign especially for India

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Fellow mozillians, I am super excited to inform you that very soon we are going to release a new campaign in India  called “India uses Firefox Nightly“. Behind this campaign, our mission is to increases Firefox nightly usages in India. 

Why India?

As we all know we have a great Mozilla community around India. We have a large number of dedicated students, developers and evangelists who are really passionate about Mozilla. We have seen that very few people in India actually know about Firefox Nightly. So we have taken an initiative to run a pilot campaign for Firefox Nightly throughout India. Firefox Nightly, as a pre-release version of Firefox targeting power-users and core Mozilla contributors, is a glimpse of what the future of Firefox will be for hundreds of millions of people. Having a healthy and strong technical community using and testing Nightly is a great way to easily get involved in Mozilla by providing a constant feedback loop to developers. Here you can test lots of pre-release features. So it needs little bit of general promotion, which will pump to bring a good number of tech-savvy, power users who will be our active community members.

Few Key points

Time Frame: 2 months Max              Hashtag: #INUsesFxNightly

Event Duration: 3 – 5 Hours              Total events: 15

Who will join us: We invite students, community member, developer, open source evangelist to run this campaign.

Parts of Campaign 

Online activities:

Mozillians spread the message of this campaign around the India as well as through social media (facebook, twitter, Instagram), blog, promotional snippet, email, mailing list, website news item etc.

Offline activities:

Here any community member or open source enthusiasts can host one event in his area or join any nearby event for helping organisers. The event can be held at Startup Company, School, University, Community centre, Home, Café. 

Goals for this initiative

Impact:

  • 1000 Nightly Installed
  • 20 New Active Contributors

Strength:

  • 30 Mozillians run events
  • 500 Attendees

BTW have you tried Firefox Nightly yet, download it now?

More details will come soon. Stay tuned!

We need many core campaign volunteers who will help us to run this initiative smoothly. If you are intersted in joining campaign team, please let me know.

Have design skills? We need a logo for this campaign, please come and help us here.

GNOME 3.24 Portland Release – Kolkata Meetup

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Again another open source community, now it is GNOME…….

Two days ago, I have successfully organised GNOME 3.24 Portland Release party with few open source community member around Kolkata. Yes, this was the first ever GNOME community meetup in Kolkata.

Meetup Agenda:

  • Introduction What is GNOME?
  • Why are we celebrating GNOME 3.24 Release Parties?
  • Changes in GNOME 3.24
  • What are areas they can start contribution?
  • GNOME Kolkata group formation
  • How to engage new contributor in GNOME Kolkata
  • How to spread awareness around Kolkata
  • How to engage local people in GNOME Kolkata
  • Future Meeting planning

We had a fruitful discussion on every topic. This is just a start.

Here is group photo.

 

My dream project – Digital Literacy Camp 2017

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Sorry, for posting this late. Actually last few months I was so busy. That’s why I could not write this here.

As you all know, the world has now transformed into a global village and the digital literacy movement will touch every city one by one. Lack of web literacy can push young minds to the darkness of ignorance, where no dreams prosper. That’s why I started this initiative called “Digital Literacy Camp 2017“- this is my dream project.

So let me introduce you all to my Dream Project – Digital Literacy Camp 2017 – aim to reach 100 students in my city and make them powerful web citizens, transforming the little part of our whole country.

I started my campaign in various crowd fudging site from December 1st week’16.

Our training period starting from 1st Mar to 31st May 2017. So we already started our training……..

This is three months staggered campaign to educate 100 underprivileged students on and prepare them for a better tomorrow. Here we have 100 Students from the unprivileged community. 1 Common dream. The Desire to learn – Basic Computer Learning, Internet & Web Literacy, Spoken English and Smartphone usage.

Why this 100 students from the underprivileged community:

Some children are born to lead. But at some point time, these students are always used to hear “NO”, because of their economic condition but we are saying “Yes” to their dreams. Our goal is to open a whole new world to these underprivileged children by fueling their curiosity. It is not just about education, we will help these kids learn effective skills through fun activities. Let’s work together to empower a generation of digitally literate citizens. They are here to make a difference in the lives of others.

Our campaign video:

Our goal:

After three months’ training, the students will:

1. Understand the working of a computer and know about the various programs.

2. Use English while communicating with others. 50% of the content produced on the internet is written in English, so the spoken English skills will come in handy.

3. Utilise the power of the internet to understand the world in a better way. Explore the new way of learning through the Internet. They can know more about privacy on their online life. They must know how to connect online and utilise the online resources.

4. They can know how the smartphone can transform their life. Also, we have selected some fun activities which will not only keep them interested but also develop a learning spirit in them. These beautiful minds will; get the best resources from us and that included proper infrastructure, skilled trainers, study material, the internet and skill-based class training.

Impact:

Students are bombarded with tonnes of information every single day and it is very hard for them to retain the right information. We must concentrate our efforts on making them effective consumers of information. Digital footprints are permanent and if they lack digital knowledge, they will never develop the ability to differentiate between what is trustworthy on the web and what is not. As they are proceeding down this path, these young students are growing their vocabulary, learning how to do research and most importantly their critical thinking skills are developed. The little joys are priceless. The smile on their faces encourages us to work harder. If a little move can create so much difference in their life, we can definitely do bigger things for them. Bigger things can bring bigger changes. Teaching with a difference can make learning easy.

We already started our training

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Our students with guardians on 1st day of class | Date 01 March 2017

 Few photos from our training classes

 

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These are all our trainers, taking classes

For more photos, please follow our facebook and twitter. Campaign hashtag is #digitalcamp2017.

We have not raised sufficient money from crowdsourcing platform. Still, we need your help. Every contribution is equally important to make this initiative successful. Your gift can give them a hope to live and become educated digital citizens.

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           If you are outside of India then this link for donation.

People staying in India can donate us through these

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We would like to thank all donors and supporters. Want to know more about this program, please read here. Help us to make these kids proven Digital Literate persons.

If you have any suggestions or comments please share with us.

 

 

 

Web Compatibility Sprint at NITDGP

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As a part of MozActivate initiative from Mozilla, we, from Kolkata community, organized an event at NITDGP  campus on  Web Compatibility on 5 Nov, 2016.

Participants were from 1st year, 2nd year, 3rd year and 4th year engineering students.

Our event agenda was

  • Introduction to Mozilla mission
  • Intro about Web Compatibility
  • Environment Checking 
  • Help install the developers install Firefox  (Mobile / Laptop)
  • Installing Web Compat Add On
  • Focus on the India’s top local websites 
  • Explore ways to become even more involved in the WebCompat community:

We started our event as per agenda.

 

After our brief introduction, we asked students to download latest Firefox Beta in laptop or in mobile.

 

After Web Compatibility hands-on session, students were really excited. Then they started hunting bugs in India’s top local websites.

At the end of the event, we showed them how they can more involved here.

Then we invited them to join our Mozilla Kolkata community.

We got great success at this event!

 

 

 

Report from Mozilla India Planning Meetup 2016

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Hope we all may aware that Mozilla India Planning Meetup 2016 was held on 09-10th July 2016 in C-DAC Pune, India. This is an invitation only event hosted by Mozilla India Community with people from different sub communities based on gender diversity, regional representation, activities and leadership in community. This event will mainly focus on developing options for the direction, vision, strategy and roadmap of the Mozilla India community, and undertaking detailed planning of the second phase that involves the tentative Mozilla India Gathering in Pune, August 26-28, 2016.

Here I am going to write the full report of each and everything that was happened in the event.

This event was super excited for me because of two reasons, I was happy to part of this event for revamping the structure for Mozilla India as well as it was great opportunity to meet some enthusiastic Mozillians around our Mozilla India community.

Here is event agenda.

We started our very first day by filling out one survey based on our experience as a Mozillian – this looks like we are giving an exam. Our awesome fellow mozillian Ankit collected all the survey papers.

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Then we were taking opportunity to introduce ourselves.

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First of all a big thank you to  for coming here and facilitating this event.

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Then Haiyya organized a fabulous session on story telling – how we can inspire, motivate other mozillian by describing our story.

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After that George started sharing about the direction of Mozilla, and 5 important areas of Mozilla’s future strategies.

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Reference docs for 5 important areas of Mozilla’s future strategy

      1. Firefox/Context Graph/TestPilot
      2. Future of Platform/Servo
      3. Connected Devices
      4. Mozilla Issues Agenda and Advocacy
      5. Mozilla Leadership Network

Then we have been divided in five group and worked on future strategy. Then we showed our  working templates to others.

 

Here our team was showing our strategic planning on Mozilla Leadership Network.

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After that Veteran Community Mentor and Leader Vineel shared growth story of Mozilla India, that was inspiring.

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At last we had a discussion on redesigning of Task Force though different ideas.

Here my team was proposing tightly structured design of Task Force. Though this is not final structure. In next week or so, we will open it for every community members to vote or comment on the available proposal/structure to make it more transparent and open. Stay tune for that.

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After that we concluded this event by sharing what we have learnt from that day.

This is how the event was ended. Then we headed to Mainland Chaina for dinner.

On the second day, we were gathered in opening circle by sharing our insights of last day event lessons.

That day was truly focused on main meetup. So we immediately started planning on goals.

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Then Vineel, Ankit, Vinisha and Kailas helped to categorized it in few topics.IMG_0412.JPG

Then again we were divided in 5 teams and each team worked on each. Here are the draft sheet of each goals.

At a glance – drafted goals for the meetup

  1. Develop a strategy, direction and plan for the future of the community
  2. Re-structure the Mozilla India community — structures and processes
  3. Increase the leadership/mobilizing skills of the attendees (and develop strong onboarding programs for new community members)
  4. Improve communication processes and tools, and transparency
  5. Build strong teams
  6. Build strong recognition practices
  7. Create accountability systems and a code of conduct
  8. Build a plan for increasing diversity and inclusive practice across the community

After working on planning, we started working on criteria of participant’s selection for the main meetup. Though this is not final. We are working on this.IMG_5915.JPG

Then we selected date and place for the upcoming meetup. Name has not been selected yet. Hope very soon we announce name of event with every details.

After that we started creating working groups for planning the main meetup. Every working group has built a roadmap for the next 6-weeks.

(1) Communication

Biraj, Vishal, Ashish, Siddhartha, Shaguftha

(2) Logistics

Prathamesh, Chandrakant, Sayak

(3) Regional Coord + Invitatations

Mehul, Akhil, Viswaprasath

(4) Staff/functional coordination

Sayak, Anivar

(5) Documentation

Ankit, Kailas, Harsha

(6) Content/facilitation

Mayur, Anup, Priyanka, Meghraj, Diva

(7) Strategy/Structure for Mozilla India

Deb, Vnisha, Prathamesh, Vineel, George

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 Communication working group’s draft roadmap for 6 weeks is here

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This working group is focused on Strategy/Structure for Future Mozilla India

Deb, Vnisha, Prathamesh, Vineel, George +2 people (from the broader Mozilla India community who show great interest and meet).

Then we concluded this event by committing to bringing this meetup back to our local communities. That’s why we need to host MozCafe as soon as possible with every regional community.

Special thanks goes to Grorge Roter, Umesh Agarwal, Faisal Aziz, Shahid Ali Farooqui and whole pune community  for organizing this wonderful event.

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After all, we got huge success in this event. But we have to do lot of work.

“We have rebooted now!
Let’s run the program” — This is my quote.

Yes Mozilla Kolkata is going to arrange MozCafe@Kolkata on 17 July, 2016, Sunday,  4 PM to 6 PM and place: An Idea . RSVP here .

Looking for tweets and facebook post from the event?

All Pics were taken by me and Harsha.

Though this is very long but I tried to keep it more productive by using more pics and less text.

Hope you enjoyed reading my blog.

Thanks!

 

 

Mozfest 2015 Report

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Yay!! This year I attended my first Mozfest 2015 which was held at Ravensbourne College, London, 6-8 November 2015.

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MozFest is an annual celebration of the world’s most valuable public resource: the open Web. The Web unlocks opportunity, spurs creativity, teaches valuable skills and connects far-flung people and ideas. With over 1700 participants, 300+ sessions, 8 spaces, 50+ pathways, Mozfest is awesome. In the whole weekend we were building and teaching the web. I was interested to  attend Mozfest to build my leadership and skill development.

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This time I was selected for Mozfest as a part of Global Gatherings by Mozilla participation team.

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In mozfest, first day most interesting thing was that  I attended Science fair. There were plenty of stalls with innovative ideas. I have almost explored every stalls. I learned new technology, met the pilot behind the technology.

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I have totally understood Mozilla’s Vision and Strategy. Other than that I attended  Community Leadership Summit–( a great session I have ever attended), Facilitation Skill Building Workshop,Participation Leaders meetup.

In next two days, I tried to focus mainly those session which are under this “pathways: leading and building community through participation“. Other than that I attended some technical session. Also I attended “Tech Speaker program” and “Mozilla Campus” and few very important session for me.

Also I have several discussion with program community manager as core contributor for those program like FSA, MDN, Mozilla Science Lab, SUMO, QA etc. I have shared my 2016 goals related to that program with respective person.

From those activities and conversion in Mozfest, I started my voluntary work as per my goal. For my first goal “Increasing QA participation In india”, I have already started preparing for this. Hopefully by this, we would started activities for that.

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My all those activities are relevant to Mozilla because it supports Mozilla’s Goals, strategy and community.  Those things will help to build strong community, increase more participation in Mozilla, enhance community members’ leadership and skill development and community development.

My call to actions are

  • Building QA community in India
  • Organize tech speaker program in local community
  • FSA regional community development
  • Helping Mozilla campus program
  • Organize some events which will enhance community members’ leadership and skill development

Increasing more participation in local community by learning program.

Before attending Mozfest, I have shared Why Mozilla, Why Now, Why  and My mozfest experience

Our participation team is here

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I would like to thank George, Emma, Francesco and whole participation team for giving me this opportunity to attend Mozfest 2015.

All pics source: Mozfest 2015 Flickr album.

Hope you all like the blog.

You can find more blog on Mozfest 2015 here .