Software Freedom Day-2016

Knowledge is something that can create and initiate a change. We, at Mozilla Tamilnadu strongly believe that our responsibility is very high in taking the knowledge about the Open source to the common people. We are tirelessly working for that too.

We were enthusiastically waiting for the Software Freedom Day, which is celebrated worldwide on third week of September, with a goal to increase awareness about the free software and its uses.

On September 17,We celebrated SFD @ Coimbatore City. We had a great day with two events happening simultaneously. Our two contributors Paratipa balaji and Prasanth were the organizers in their colleges, SNS College and Sri Krishna College of Engg & technology(SKCET) respectively at Coimbatore. A team of 4 Mozillians which included Khaleel, Viswaprasath, Vigneshwer and Karthickeyan joined the SFD celebration as the guest speakers. We had a forenoon session at SNS and a afternoon session in both SNS and SKCET.

Forenoon Session: With a warm welcome given by the management and students of SNS college, Everything was set on track by 9.30AM. We had a bunch of 40 + curious minds waiting to learn. As we had more non mozillians in the team of participants, the day began with the introductory session by the Mozillian rep Khaleel. It was a powerful beginning with the words of bharathiyar insisting about the power within oneself. This created a great momentum in the hall which had a distributed silence. Then the sessions were in a full swing. Our Mozillian Karthickeyan was handling a session about Mozilla Campus club program and a short demo to Webvr was also given to the students.

While these were going on in a view of making the session more practical, IoT Resources were set up in the laboratory by Vigneshwer and parallely, Firefox 50 nightly browser was downloaded in all the lab Computers by the SNS student volunteers and Viswaprasath.

Afternoon Session: During Afternoon we had two sessions one at SNS College and the other at SKCET College. Karthickeyan and Viswaprasath moved to SKCET College by afternoon.

In SNS, the afternoon session was focused on IoT which was handled by Vigneshwer. Later, the students started installing test pilot add-on and were exploring different features in it. Hands-on sessions on Webcompat and testing grabbed the attention of the participants.

In SKCET, we were having a agenda on starting a Mozilla Campus Club and we had team of 100+ Newbies waiting to join, so we felt that a session on the ways to improve ourselves through community would be the apt one to begin with. Hence, Mozillian rep Viswaprasath started the event by discussing on the topic, “How a community helped in personal growth”. He was leading the talk with his own life experience and that marked the basement in the hearts of blooming Mozillians. Following this we had the inauguration of Mozilla Campus Club and various ways to contribute in Mozilla community was discussed in the gathering by Mozillian Karthickeyan. Next, We had a hands on session on Test pilot installation and was followed by introduction to Webcompact by Mozillian rep Viswaprasath.Basic demo and introduction to WebVR was conducted as a group activity by Karthickeyan.

Through this event we were able to

• File 10+ webcompat bugs,
• Make 90+ nightly installation,
• Make 90+ test pilot add on installing,
• Achieve 500+ Mozillatn blog views in a day,
• Interact with 200+ participants.

We were happy to know that the students had a great day by attending this event and we would also like to acknowledge our special thanks to the management of both the colleges and the two amazing contributors who were working tirelessly working for the past 1 week to make it a grand success.

We had Mozcoffee after the event by 7pm in the evening. It was a meet to discuss and analyse the fruit of SFD 2016.

Hey just pass your eyes through the words of our Speakers ( Vigneshwer and Viswaprasath ) and our contributors( Prasanth and Gowtham Venkat ).