Tag - Catalonia

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Monday, September 14 2009

Mozilla Service Week in the local Catalan Community: Part 1

By Alina Mierluș on Monday, September 14 2009, 21:09 - Open source events

Tags: Catalonia, Mozilla Service Week

Mozilla Service Week Mozilla Service Week, one of the newest projects of Mozilla, is all about helping people to discover the Internet and teaching them to use it for improving their community/project/organization. We started to help Mozilla Service Week a few weeks ago by translating it in our language (Catalan). We have been thinking that the project is a perfect opportunity to help our local community and enable good things to happen in our society, and at the same time, offering others ideas about how they could improve their own community.

The Web has been a serious change in our lives. The Web helped a lot of people in many different ways. But, let's think about it: How the world and our local society could change if more people knew how to use it at its “full capacity”? Do people really know about all the benefits of the Web? How and where could they find the information they need? Do organizations and associations really know how to use the social network in order to have more fans or recruit more members, or promote their activities? Do all people really know about the importance of being up-to-date? Or, how using an open source CMS can simplify their work on developing their personal web page? And how about using all that in their own region?

Some days ago, Mark Surman (executive Director at Mozilla Foundation) commented on his blog about Drumbeat Project , where he stated that “Europe is particularly a good place to start with this kind of local events strategy”. We share his point of view, and we would like to approach this to our closer local reality, which we know the most. So, we decided to join the challenges:

We started on Saturday by volunteering 5 hours to help a cultural association to use some social networks, so they can make a better promotion within their local community. Moreover, we have helped them to set up a blog by using an open source CMS.

Next Saturdayday we are going to participate at Free Software Day (Barcelona, Catalonia) by giving a speech about Mozilla's causes, specially focused in Mozilla Service Week program, and a practical Internet support session as well.

We are also currently preparing with Citilab Cornellà, a telecenter focused on innovation and knowledge, a special event devoted to local communities and local Internet society, on September 22th. We would like to celebrate the global One Web Day and discuss about which local community strategies should we follow in order to promote and create an Open Web movement in Catalonia.

We will explain our achievements with a latter post, and we would like to invite all local communities around Europe to write here about their projects during Mozilla Service Week. This could greatly help other local communities with ideas and inspiration and this will also offer us a better future understanding on how Mozilla Service Week developed around Europe.

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Tuesday, July 28 2009

Firefox 3.5 Launch Parties in Catalonia

By Alina Mierluș on Tuesday, July 28 2009, 21:04 - Community meeting

Tags: Barcelona Party, Catalonia, Firefox 3.5

   A few weeks ago, Mozilla Catalan team celebrated the launch of the new 3.5 version of Firefox.

       

   The first community party we organised was in The 1916, an Irish Pub in Cerdanyola del Vallès, a town close to Barcelona and just 2 days after the new browser release. Our local community enjoyed a great time whereas we explained the aim of Mozilla project to both habitual clients and supporters who came deliberately to the celebration.

   Two weeks later, a second party took place at Espai Mallorca, a cultural site devoted to the Mediterranean Island in the very Barcelona city centre. Over 30 people participated and joined in interesting discussions about what Open Web means and the new improvements of Firefox 3.5.

  

   Eduard Gamonal held a short presentation about the new features and showed a series of demos about how Firefox 3.5 actually upgrades the Web.

   Toni Hermoso introduced the new Ubiquity 0.5, localised in Catalan as well, and talked about the new concept of communication with the browser by using the natural language.

   Diana Coromines held a short practical presentation about how to translate articles in SUMO and she invited the participants to get involved by explaining the benefits of having support in your own language.

   Alina Mierluș closed the session by making a presentation about the importance of collaborating, where she presented the advantage of being a community member and also, a few of the newest Mozilla initiatives, in which people from any kind of background or location can join in, such as Mozilla Service Week or Mozilla Creative Collective.

  Afterwards, we enjoyed a Majorcan food snack and all attendees received the new Firefox 3.5, some Mozilla Firefox Goodies and calendars.

  We prepared free USB sticks with Fedora 11 with Firefox 3.5 included and Firefox 3.5 portable for Mac OS X.

  

  We would like to thank our collaborators for making Barcelona party happen: Fundació .cat, Consell de Mallorca and Espai Mallorca, Mozilla Europe and, last but not least, Fedora Linux Catalan Community, which prepared for us a customised and fully-localised distribution with the new Firefox 3.5 up-to-date available by default.

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Friday, December 12 2008

Mozilla Party in Vic

By Alina Mierluș on Friday, December 12 2008, 18:54 - Community meeting

Tags: Catalonia

A bit later, but I would like to share with you the experience I had in the past month. At the beginning of November, eWeek took place in Vic (a little city near Barcelona). This is an anual event dedicated to new technologies. On 6th November a party was organised for its participants and local bloggers and we were also invited (thanks Pep Campas - the organizer).
The party was named "Beer, TIC and blogs - Mozilla Edition". I (from Mozilla.ro) and my friends from Mozilla.cat were there offering in that party an interesting Mozilla environment. With the help of Mozilla Europe, which provided us some promotional materials and posters, we arranged the small (but amazing) place where the party took place - Bar Gravat - into an interesting and captivating Mozilla style ambient. After a glass of cava and some delicious Catalan food, I made a presentation about the Mozilla Project and the activities during this year.

A day later Mozilla.cat participated in a round table where they spoke about the Catalan community and their activity. In conclusion, it was a very nice event and I need to say below what's the importance of organising this kind of parties:
  • as a local community you need to be open and to show people that the community is sustaining them and is present even at non technical events;
  • it is a modality: to share with others (also non tech people) things about Mozilla; to show them that we are open and we can do things like participating or organising parties;
  • it is an opportunity to gather new collaborators - for example, after this event Mozilla.cat recruited a new volunteer who is helping in SUMO articles translation by now;
  • it is a perfect opportunity to keep in touch with local communities;
There are some photos: DSC03232DSC03245DSC03249DSC03261


And the presentation:
Presentació Mozilla Party (Vic)
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

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