MozillaCamp Delhi – Within and Without
I am so tired. Its been a tough month for me. A tougher month awaits. First was OSScamp Pantnagar, then was the MozillaCamp (I will be talking about it in this post). Now, upcoming are OSScamp Delhi and OSScamp Chennai. But then, they are immense events in prospects and i do hope to get a lot of community support (unlike the previous times). It would be unfair to add that kudos to the Pantnagar student for the awesome camp they organised in their university. The only thing lacking in OSScamp Pantnagar was the absence of professionals. It was predominantly a student’s camp.
Now about the recent MozillaCamp – How and what of it. (And, I am sorry for writing this post so late)
It all began with a phone call I received from Mohak, when he introduced himself and his idea for MozillaCamp Delhi. The basic idea was that Arun and Seth were coming to India for Techkriti and GNUnify. Mohak talked with Mary Colvig at Mozilla and ensured that Arun and Seth spend a day at Delhi too. Problem was they’d be in Delhi on Tuesday the Tenth. And so started our endeavour to organise a technology unconference for working professionals on a weekday. If anything was supposed not to work, this was it.
Mohak’s first and foremost instruction to me was ‘meet me before you leave for Pantnagar’ and we worked on a number of issues related to sponsorships and venues on phone. Finally, we met for the first time at JIMS (Rithala), to scout it for a venue. In the meanwhile, I had got us our only sponsorship – from OSSCube (my company, but that doesn’t mean it was easy).
In the meanwhile, I also asked Yadu to design the visual assets for the camp and he did a splendid job. Mohak and his team of volunteers did a lot of running job to all sponsors, printers, and supporters. Mohak’s efforts on pre-event promotion paid of really well. But the event was on Tuesday and we had our doubts about the possible attendance. Registrations on the wiki were only about 150.
The biggest challenge for us was to find a venue at such a short notice. We shifted from JIMS (Rithala) to IIT Delhi to finally at Indian Social Institute.
Came Tuesday. Untill 11 only about 10 participants were on the venue. But soon, the hall was full with over 80 participants. It made a grand sight. Arun and Seth were to join us by around 2. So for the morning session, the participants were left at the mercies of me and Mohak. And we ran rampant! The morning session was a drag without any quality session and while breaking for lunch my main concern was – how many will return ?
Return they did from a not-sponsored lunch. (There was hardly any point in sponsoring it either – the venue didnt allow a caterer and their canteen sux). Then, we were joined by Seth and Arun and the rest as they say is history.
The first session was by Pascal Finette on the Concept Series by Mozilla Labs. He talked in length about what is the aim of Concept Series and how is it creatign a better Firefox and a better web. Seth, then, introduced us all to Mozilla and their efforts on Localisation. He discussed emerging issues and challenges in localisation over the web. Then the floor belonged to Arun who talked at length about the new and exciting things coming up in Mozilla Firefox 3.1, HTML 5, Video Tags, and Canvas. His sesion included a number of live demos and was very entertaining event for the non-geeks (a small section of the audeince).Soon it was 5:30pm and we had to wind up.
Mohak and I joined Arun and Seth, then, at the India Habitat Center for a short interview that I recorded for OSSCube, which basically discussed the emerging issues and challenges on the web.
You will find a lot of pictures from the event at: http://tr.im/gd3b and http://tr.im/gd3e
Videos will be uploaded soon at http://youtube.com/osscube . Keep watching that space.
February 15th, 2009 
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