Firefox Aurora Gabz Translation Sprint

"Our mission is to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web"

At Mozilla, we’re a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to keep the Internet alive and accessible, so people worldwide can be informed contributors and creators of the Web. We believe this act of human collaboration across an open platform is essential to individual growth and our collective future.

When I first came across the Mozilla community, at that time open source or why internet matters was not something that I would care much of, nor the friends or people around me locally. Coming from a place where the first question people ask is "what do you get?". It was difficult for me to understand why one would spend their time and energy spreading the word about this community and go beyond their way to do things. The people I saw were doing it for fun, for themselves. One thing that caught me was the passion with which this group of people are working towards something, may be something big.

Our community recently hosted a Mozilla Translation Sprint hosted on the 17 January 2014 at Gaborone, Game City;Wimpy. The event focused on building web literacy and shaping the web in the way we want in Botswana by translating the Firefox browser to our native language.

The rate of innovation on the web is incredible. Mozilla has been at the forefront of this innovation and has been doing so in an open, participatory manner. Firefox is designed for standard compliance, performance, and portability. Mozilla L10N, abbreviated as L10N, tries to help and ease the availability of Mozilla Firefox browser toward different world cultures and languages through the support of the open source community.  Localized to over 80 locales, Firefox is available in the native language to over 97% of the worldwide Internet population.

Living inside the Open Source community of mozilla.org, L10N couldn't be anything else than volunteers driven. If you think one of these products should be available in your language and that helps a large group of people how they experience the web, you're probably the best person to make it happen. Or the right person to help direct the people already working on this task.

Wikimedia Foundation At ICT-BPO International Conference and Youth Engagement Summit in Balaclava

Wikimedia Foundation Logo

Wikimedia Botswana Logo

The grants from the Wikimedia Foundation support individuals and small teams of Wikimedians to participate with new ideas or wishing to travel to events aimed at having online impact on Wikimedia projects. I've learned a lot from the participation  Support committee grantees last month, and i was delighted to have my proposal accepted to attend Youth Engagement and ICT-BPO International Summit in Mauritius held on the 4th December - 6th December 2013.

The ICT-BPO International Conference along with the Youth Engagement Summit were inaugurated by the Minister of Information and Communication Technology, Mr Tassarajen Pillay Chedumbrum at the Intercontinental Hotel, in Balaclava.The two three-day events were organised by the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology in collaboration with the Board of Investment and Extensia Ltd.The conference welcomed more than 250 international and local participants. Participants included IT Ministers of Namibia, Swaziland and Uganda as well as high-level government officials from Malawi and Angola inclusive of open movement such as Wikimedia Foundation, also considered as organization that is playing a greater role in developing the African continent through it free knowledge initiatives and projects. 

However i was participating in this summit as an invited Wikipedia VIP delegate as well as a speaker to give a monologue in a workshop Community Engagement and Development, of which its discussions were more centered in giving insights of how the open movement 'Wikimedia Foundation' is leveraging African communities through free knowledge initiatives at the same time developing the ICT sector. Essentially the main idea of Wikimedia workshop was a forum to influence African leaders in the ICT sector from different countries to realize the need for the deployment of Wikipedia and other sister projects in African communities and the educational sector to develop and benefit all people by imparting ICT knowledge in them.

It was through this event that the foundation was well applauded for its great achivements in driving world communities through open knowledge and not jut forgetting the great  works  done by its active African volunteers. Not just limited to the above contributions to the conference, the attendants were so much thrilled to hear how much organizations in Africa have joined to contribute to the growth of open knowledge such as the WikiAfrica Center. WikiAfrica sustains Wikipedia as a free, open and truly global encyclopaedia by encouraging, supporting and challenging individuals and institutions across Africa to contribute their knowledge of Africa to the most commonly used online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia.

Currently we have a constant followup with some volunteers from Angola Mr Patricio from Ministry of ICT in Angola and one volunteer from Mauritius who are interested to start Wikimedia user groups and work on Wikimedia sister projects. I have been running mentor-ships to both of them and we hope to have a successful agenda after it all.