Mozilla Nepal Meetup III

Mozilla Nepal Community organised Mozilla Nepal Meetp III on 9th November,2013 at SAP Falcha Babarmahal on the ocassion of the 9th annivarsary of the Mozilla Firefox.

Mr. Hempal Shrestha explained about the theme of FOSS Nepal, i.e FOSS for education. Simlarly Mr. Surit Aryal discussed about the themes of the Mozilla Nepal Community. Aryal along with Mr. Aavash Mulmi discussed about the fields that can be contributed by the normal people for the Mozilla Community and the Firefox Comunity. According to their listings, some of the fields that can be contributed are SuMo(Support Mozilla), Localisation, testing and question answer, coding, marketintg, developer documentation, design, user research, accessibility, system administration, add ons,education and others.

Mr Subir Pradhanang too, discussed about the theme for this year,Open Web For Open Education. He pointed out the sucess of the Mozilla and Firefox  due to the lead taken by the community such as Mozilla Nepal and others.  Openness in the source code and the collaboration from different open source community is making the sucess of Mozilla and other FOSS projects, as according to him. He also informed that the non technical persons can also equally contribute in this field via different mediums such as marketing, designing and so on.

Similarly the importance of the localisation was also discussed in the event. Many rural and urban people too are not familiar with the english language. The localisattion of the FOSS products like Mozilla, Firefox would be then very beneficial to those people.

Mr Nootan Ghimire was there to talk about the FSAs(Firefox Student Ambassadors), their benefits and their challanges. Dadhiram Nepal showed the importance of the localisation during the discussion in the event.

Apart from the talks and discussions, the event was interesting due to lucky draw for t-shirts and birthday cake of Mozilla Firefox. 6 lucky participants got the t-shirt printed with Mozilla.

Discussion and presentation on SWOT(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)of Mozilla Nepal and FSA was really amazing.

Presentation by Shristi Baral on FSA Nepal on Women Empowerment with WoMoz was praiseworthy where she discussed abut the challanges and opportunities to women.



// Edited version will be posted soon.

History of Mozilla

The Mozilla project was created in 1998 with the release of the Netscape browser suite source code that was intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market. Within the first year, new community members from around the world had already contributed new functionality, enhanced existing features and became engaged in the management and planning of the project itself.
By creating an open community, the Mozilla project had become larger than any one company. Community members got involved and expanded the scope of the project's original mission—instead of just working on Netscape's next browser, people started creating a variety of browsers, development tools and a range of other projects. People contributed to Mozilla in different ways, but everyone was passionate about creating free software that would enable people to have a choice in how they experienced the Internet.
After several years of development, Mozilla 1.0, the first major version, was released in 2002. This version featured many improvements to the browser, email client and other applications included in the suite, but not many people were using it. By 2002, well over 90% of Internet users were browsing with Internet Explorer. Not many people noticed at the time, but the first version of Phoenix (later renamed to Firefox) was also released by Mozilla community members that year with the goal of providing the best possible browsing experience to the widest possible set of people.
In 2003, the Mozilla project created the Mozilla Foundation, an independent non-profit organization supported by individual donors and a variety of companies. The new Mozilla Foundation continued the role of managing the daily operations of the project and also officially took on the role of promoting openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Internet. It did this by continuing to release software, such as Firefox and Thunderbird, and expanding to new areas, such as providing grants to support accessibility improvements on the Web.
Firefox 1.0 was released in 2004 and became a big success. In less than a year, Firefox had been downloaded over 100 million times. New versions of Firefox have come out regularly since then and keep setting new records. The popularity of Firefox has helped bring choice back to users. In 2008, Firefox reached 20% worldwide market share and renewed competition has accelerated innovation and improved the Internet for everyone.
Mozilla celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2008. In ten years the community has shown that commercial companies can benefit by collaborating in open source projects and that great end user products can be produced as open source software. More people than ever before are using the Internet and are experiencing it in their own language. A sustainable organization has been created that uses market mechanisms to support a public benefit mission and this model has been reused by others to create open, transparent and collaborative organizations in a broad range of areas.


Source: mozilla.org

Mozilla Nepal Meetup III Coming..

Mozilla Nepal is going to organise its 3rd version of the Mozilla Meetup in the country. First two meetup were mainly focused for the introduction of the Mozilla and Mozilla Nepal Community to the public. But in the 3rd meetup, it is aimed to gather more contributors for the Mozilla in the country. There will be gathering of the all Firefox Students Ambassodors(FSAs) in the event.

Venue SAP Falca, Babarmahal
City Kathmandu
Region Central
Country Nepal