MozCoffee at the Embarcadero

Maray na Aga, Bikol! It's such a great morning in Legazpi City, especially after a good night's sleep on a proper bed. But as with all great mornings, there are great things to do. So off we go to another Mozilla event, just one floor down from the hotel.

As usual, our faithful Bikolano Community Manager met and greeted the participants from Bicol University and the tech community in Legazpi City at the La Mia Tazza Coffee of Embarcadero de Legazpi that overlooks the sea.

After the introductions, we got right into Engagement mode, introducting Mozilla products and projects, left and right, along with the generous demonstrations online and actual. We encouraged them to be web makers as well as to organize their own Mozilla events. Such a great discussion, so little time.

After the MozCoffee, some of the participants helped us find our way around Legazpi City to book our bus tickets back Manila. Such hospitable people. I'm looking forward to the next Bicol event!

What a Great Open Web Day at Naga!

Another awesome day was completed today!

We have just finished the first day of the Bicol MozTour--two grueling days of events across two different major cities in two different provices in the picturesque region of Bicol. We travelled to the Heart of Bicol in the dead of the night, some 389 km south of Quezon City.

The first day was held at the Fr. James O'Brien Library of the Ateneo de Naga University in Naga City, Camarines Sur (also known as CamSur). More than fifty attendees flocked to the computer research center of the library to participate in the Open Web Day, jointly organized by the Philippine communities of Mozilla and Wikimedia. As ever, Mozilla Philippines was lead by its ever-vibrant Community Manager Jun Barrun, and the Wikimedia team was lead by Jojit Ballesteros.

Most of the attendees were Library and Information Science students as well as Librarians from the local librarians organization.

The usual format for Open Web Day was followed, with Wikimedia PHL introducing how Wikipedia works, and how to contribute as well as an online workshop where the participants submitted new content to Wikipedia.

After the Wikipedia workshop, Mozilla PHL had its turn to tell the story of Mozilla, our advocacies and our products and projects. Unusual for Jun, he finished his long keynote in half the time he usually takes. Nice!

Next up, Jean Austin Rodriguez introduced the Boot to Gecko project (aka Firefox Mobile OS) along with the demo phone.

Lastly, I was asked to speak on localization. After my talk, I asked the participants to contribute 220 more strings to complete the strings translation. And they finished the translation in less time than I did to finish my talk! Great work, Naga City! :) Now it's up to the reviewers and approvers of the Tagalog translation to finish the job. :)

We capped off the day by traveling another 119 km to Legazpi City for the second leg of the Bicol MozTour.

2nd Open Web Day

DLSU Manila will be hosting the 2^nd Open Web Day. This event is a joint project of the Mozilla and Wikipedia communities in the Philippines to improve content and localization from Filipino content.
Mozilla Philippines previously featured the 1st Open Web Day, held at Robinson's Place, Manila.  This event will be similar, but will be held in the Bro. Andrew Gonzalez Hall of the De La Salle University, also in Manila.

A laptop or tablet computer is a minimum requirement for joining this event, as unlike the first one, this is not going to be held in a Netopia store.

Should you be interested in joining, sign up at EventBrite. Don't forget to bring your tickets and ID's as security is quite strict at the DLSU.

See you there! =)

Update: 2^nd Open Web Day successfully done. More details on the Mozilla Philippines blog.