Another campus tour will be held down south in the city of Isabela, this time on January 22 and 23 in two big schools namely Claret College of Isabela and Basilan State College with a combined participants of 350 students. This is going to be a very good opportunity to recruit more Firefox Chavacano translators and volunteers.

Wrapping up the first month of awesomeness is the Firefox OS App Day which will be held on January 26 at Makati City, Metro Manila. This is one in a series of events in over 20 countries around the world which will educate and inspire developers to work on apps and create opportunities for local developers to showcase their apps. Tickets have been sold out just 10 days after opening online. That is crazy awesome excitement!

So as we set the pace for 2013, we would like more people like you to get involved. Join us in promoting the Open Web by participating in our future activities and by signing up on our community mailing list.

Here’s to a more web-loving, web-making, openness-promoting and opportunity-creating year!

cross-posted from mozillaphilippines.org

The Student Reps of Mozilla Philippines played an essential role in the local community’s success this year. Since its ‘soft’ relaunch last 2011 by Mozilla, Filipino Mozilla Reps have been actively recruiting students through Campus Tours, MozCoffees, Open Web Days and other events like Y4IT and Software Freedom Day.

Remos and Student Reps from Leyte

Student volunteers per school

Over the next months, we will be holding more awesome events and continue evangelizing hopefully breaking this record. There are so much cool stuffs in store and we need you to be part of it. So sign up now and be counted! http://studentreps.mozillaph.org

I changed all the profile photos of Filipino Mozilla Reps to dinosaur heads. Just for fun… Thanks XRay Goggles!

(credits to Clker.com for the cute prehistoric image)

(I wasn’t part of the first group that went three months ago. I was supposed to join but I had to cancel my flight days before the departure due to urgent matters at work.)

Here are two things why we think these meetings are important:
1. There is currently no Mozilla Representative overseeing the efforts in the Visayas region
2. There are many talented and committed Students Reps in Leyte

You see, much of the efforts are done here in Luzon since the majority of Mozilla Reps are based in Metro Manila and Laguna (with the exception of Zamboanga in south Mindanao which is being led by one of our energetic educator Mozilla Rep). So by re-visiting Leyte, we extend our recruitment to nearby provinces like Cebu and Samar and slowly establish a “base” in that region with the help of the Student Reps. These same students have cited “connections” and plans to meet with a couple of more schools in Visayas. Furthermore, we’re looking at the possibility of having at least 3 Mozilla Reps there in the near future.

Another interesting news we learned is that their provincial government is strongly supporting the use of Free and Open Source Software and is offering various training programs for students and professionals such as web development and Android application development. This is an ongoing effort to attract local and foreign investors to start software businesses in the cities. And we look forward to being part of one of those events. We hope everything will go well as planned!

Thank you very much to our Student Reps in Leyte for the warm welcome! Thanks also to Bebidas Coffee Bar for the awesome cafe/bar experience! Till next time!

Related blog post:
MozCoffee in Leyte (by Marlon Luzano) http://marlonluzano17.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/mozcoffe-in-leyte/

The Summer Code Party might be over but the fun in coding, learning, teaching and sharing continues.

The plan was to make the last weekend of September big and special… and so we did:

Imagine having thrice the number of participants from the two previous events, holding the #mozparty in one of the best universities, partnering with the country’s biggest mobile network… and yes, connecting with fellow webmakers in Asia. Amazingly awesome!

Add to that,
* first time visit of Mozilla Philippines to University of the Philippines Los Banos (UPLB)
* first time video conferencing with our Asian neighbors (Thanks to our friends from PREGINET!)
* first time giving away 20 web hosting subscriptions as prizes (Thanks to Solidhosting.ph!)
* first time to have 8 Mozilla Reps + 3 more volunteers and 3 active Student Reps in attendance/together in one event

That’s one heck of a (bloody) weekend! Indeed!

Yet Webmaking doesn’t stop there.

We, at Mozilla Philippines, promise to keep teaching people how to code till the next Summer Code Party and till everyone we know move from being a web user to a webmaker.

Three cheers for Mozilla! Three cheers for all Webmakers around the world!

You see, I’m a Linux user for about 7 years already and I tell you, I never regretted a day using it. It’s free, it’s fast and it’s secure. I’ve been advocating the use of Ubuntu as an alternative operating system to Windows since getting my hands on it. In fact, Ubuntu has been my primary Linux distribution and my only operating system on my notebook (besides Lubuntu, on the second partition).

I use free and open source software (FOSS) a lot. From browsing the web (Mozilla Firefox) to chatting online, editing photos and more. I use Android as my mobile operating system. I prefer it over its famous closed source counterpart, iOS. And very soon, I will be using FirefoxOS on my smartphone.

I don’t usually just use free software, I also support the use of it.

I’ve been very busy lately advocating the Open Web and Free Software together with Mozilla Philippines all over the country. We went from city to city teaching people about the advantages of FOSS over proprietary software.

I consider myself an active contributor in open source communities. Online communities like Ubuntu Forums, Ask Ubuntu, Launchpad and Mozilla Support are some of my main channels in communicating with users and other supporters.

So offline and online, I support and promote the use of free software.

Last September 15, I had the chance to participate again in an advocacy event. It’s a global annual celebration called Software Freedom Day (SFD) which aims “to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business.” Hundreds of organizations in different places around the world celebrated SFD last Saturday and one of them is the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City. Roughly 1,500 students came from different schools in Luzon to participate. There were also other SFD events held in the country during that day. This one, I believe, was the largest.

One of the highlights of my participation is when I met Congressman Teddy Casiño when he visited our Mozilla booth during the event. He is the co-author of House Bill 1011, also known as the FOSS Act of 2010

which seeks to:
1. Protect the people’s right to access information
2. Lower cost of ICT by reducong dependence on proprietary software
3. Make ICT more accessible to a greater number of users
4. Unlock the potential and develop self-reliant. genuinely Filipino ICT industry
5. Provide greater security for government and private information systems

(Please show your support to HB 1011 by spreading the word and signing the petition here.)

As a token of appreciation for his enthusiastic support, I and the rest of the team presented Representative Casiño a Mozilla Firefox t-shirt which says in the back “This shirt says I support Mozilla”. (He mentioned that he uses Firefox as his web browser and it is one of his favorite applications.)

There are 101 reasons to use FOSS and one of them is meeting passionate people like this man

There are so many ways you can spread FOSS in your community, school or even in your family, so many things to talk about FOSS… My parents mainly use free software when browsing the web, my sister uses FOSS to do her social media work. Many of my friends started using Linux, some of them totally switched from Windows. More and more schools are now being introduced to FOSS. Government agencies here in the Philippines began implementing FOSS on their computers and servers.

You see, change is really FOSSible. It’s in ‘Green’ already. It’s a ‘Go’ already. Come on, hop in and enjoy the joyride!

(Ask me anything about Free Software!)

And that’s what we did last August 21 here in Santa Rosa to celebrate another round of Summer Code Party goodness. About 15 students from Pamantasan ng Cabuyao joined the Webmaker event to meet, make and learn. Filipino Mozilla Reps also participated to share some blogging tips and update everyone about the latest in mobile technology.

Participants got their hands working with Mozilla Thimble and Popcorn and Avatar-o-Matic quickly became their favorite. Look!

They also learned a unique-old school-yet-effective approach, paper prototyping, which our web master Kevin John Ventura use when conceptualizing and making web pages. Localization lead Robert “Bob” Reyes wow’d everyone with a demo of FirefoxOS and encouraged the students to start building their career in HTML5. Lastly, Eusebio Barrun, Jr, community manager, gave an update about the local team’s status plus past and upcoming events.

All of the participants signed up in the Student Reps program and received cool swag from Mozilla. Thanks to Figaro Coffee for the delicious food and drinks and for letting us hold this activity!

I personally believe that this event made an impact on how these students look at the web as a resource, a platform to build their careers. They not only learned about the technical aspects of coding but also the values of being a true webmaker.

Three cheers for Mozilla Webmaker and Mozilla Philippines! Here’s to a web full of opportunities and fun!

(More photos of the Summer Code Party 2 can be found in Flickr and Flickr)

P.S. We are already in the works of a bigger event in the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB). Come on and join!