Hace 20 semanas que colaboro en el departamento de Marketing de Mozilla y creo que, cuando haces las cosas con pasión, es cuando las cosas se dan de forma que puedas ser mejor persona.

Fui seleccionada para dos cosas: ser parte del programa piloto de Women in the web de la Fundación Mozilla - Women and Web Literacy y para ser Mozcaster del evento más genial sobre innovación, open source e internet abierto.

Mozcaster, es alguien que reporta todo lo sucedido en el evento por medio de las redes sociales de la comunidad de Mozilla a la que pertenece, en este caso, yo pertenezco a la comunidad de Mozilla México.

En el camino de preparación para Mozfest, se dio la oportunidad de iniciar México Mozilla Club, un espacio en el que las personas pueden aprender sobre alfabetización digital, privacidad, seguridad, entre otras cosas.

Al crear el Club, tuve mi tercer motivo para ir a Mozfest: recibir capacitación por parte de la fundación en temas de web literacy, science y compartir conocimientos con mis compañeros de Kenia, Francia, India, Estados Unidos, Brasil, entre otros.

Un día antes de iniciar Mozfest, asistí al programa piloto de Women in the web, aprendí sobre problemáticas locales en otros países y desarollé prototipos de proyectos que saldrán próximamente en las diferentes plataformas de women and mozilla.

Al día siguiente, inició Mozfest y, durante todo el fin de semana, compartí numerosas sesiones con mis colegas de Mozclubs, conocí personas de otros países, intercambié experiencias de cómo trabajamos la educación digital en México y asisté a sesiones en dónde pude analizar datos abiertos de problemáticas en México, conocer cómo se hace radio por internet con un kit de Raspberry Pi y apoyar al impartir una sesión de #TheArtOfCoding.

Asistir a este evento, fue para mi, una gran experiencia de aprendizaje ya que hace un largo tiempo que no convivía con comunidades de educación digital de otras partes del mundo.

Conocer las similitudes entre México y Kenia, fue un parte aguas para mi, ya que el conocer contextos sociales parecidos me ha otorgado una gran pauta para trabajar en equipo. Muchas veces creemos que el contexto de México es similar a otros países de LATAM, pero en este caso no fue así y estoy muy contenta de haber recibido aprendizajes de mujeres que también trabajan con temas de inclusión de mujeres en la tecnología.

Mozfest significó inspiración, aprendizaje, nuevos retos y sobre todo, establecerme nuevas metas para poder construir una mejor web, potencializar la educación digital en México y traer nuevas técnicas al equipo del club en México para poder incrementar la cultura digital en mi país.

Espero volver el próximo año, pero para poder brindar resultados de lo que aprendí un año antes, compartir una experiencia más extensa y contribuir con alguna sesión o proyecto que inspire a los demás, así como me sucedió a mi.

Mozfest 2016: Inspiración y magia sobre una web libre, abierta y segura. was originally published in Mozilla Open Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What are FOSS, Free Software, Open Source, and FLOSS?

Adopted by noted software freedom advocate Richard Stallman in 1983, free software has many names — free and open source software (FOSS or F/OSS), and Free/Libre and Open-Source Software (FLOSS) are umbrella terms that are used to include both free software and open source software. As defined by the Free Software Foundation — one of the early advocates of software freedom — free software allows users to not only use the software with complete freedom, but also study, modify, and distribute the software and any adapted versions, in both commercial and noncommercial form. The distribution of the software for commercial and noncommercial form however depends on the particular license the software is released under. The Creative Commons licenses have recommendations for a wide array of free licenses that one can choose for the software-related documentations and any creative work they create. Similarly, there are several different open licenses for software and many other works that are related to software development. “Open Source” was coined as an alternative to free software in 1998 by an educational-advocacy organization Open Source Initiative. Open source software is generally created collaboratively, made available with its source code, and it provides the user rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.

Supported by several global organizations like Google, Canonical, Free Software Foundation, Joomla, Creative Commons and Linux Journal, Software Freedom Day draws its inspiration from the philosophy that was grown by people like Richard Stallman who argues that free software is all about the freedom and not necessarily free of cost but provides the liberty to users from [proprietary software developers’] unjust power. SFD encouraged everyone to gather in their own cities (map of places where SFD was organized this year) to: educate people around them about free software, promote it on social media (with the hashtag #SFD2016 this year), hacking with free software, organizing hackathons, running free software installation camps, and even going creative with flying a drone running free software!

In South Asia, there were 13 celebratory events in India, 8 in Nepal, 1 in Bangladesh and 4 in Sri Lanka.

South Asian countries have seen adoption of both free software and open source software, in both individual and organizational level and by the government. The Free Software Movement of India was founded in Bengaluru, India in 2010 to act as a national coalition of several regional chapters working for promoting and growing the free software movement in India. The Indian government has launched the open data portal at data.gov.in, initiated a new policy to adopt open source software, and asked vendors to include open source software applications while making requests for proposals. Similarly, there are many free and open source communities and organizations that are operating from the subcontinent also promote free and open source software like Mozilla India, Wikimedia India, Centre for Internet and Society, Open Knowledge India in India, Mozilla Bangladesh, Wikimedia Bangladesh, Bangladesh Open Source Network, Open Knowledge Bangladesh in Bangladesh, Mozilla Nepal, Wikimedians of Nepal and Open Knowledge Nepal in Nepal, Wikimedia Community User Group Pakistan in Pakistan, Lanka Software Foundation in Sri Lanka.

We promote open source and open web technologies in the country. We are open to associate/work with existing open source or other community-run, public benefit organizations.

“Internet By The People, Internet For The People” (from Mozilla India wiki)

Mohammad Jahangir Alam, a lecturer from Southern University Bangladesh argues in a research paper that the use of open source software can help the government save enormous amount of money that are spent in purchasing proprietary software,

A Large amount of money of government can be saved if the government uses open source software in different IT sectors of government offices and others sectors, Because government is providing computer to all educational institute from school to university level and they are using proprietary software. For this reason government is to expend a large amount of many* for buying proprietary software to run the computers. Another one is government paying significant amount of money to the different vendors for buying different types of software to implement e-Governance project. So, the Government can use open source software for implanting projects to minimize cost of the projects.

This year, a small group of six of us gathered to celebrate SFD in Bengaluru. The group consisted of FOSS contributors from communities such as Mozilla, Wikimedia, Mediawiki, Open Street Map (OSM), and users of FOSS solutions. Each participant shared their own stories of how they got connected with FOSS and what component it plays in their day-to-day life — from how a father tries to introduce his son to open source software while migrating from proprietary to open source back and forth as his job demands so, to an OSM contributor who truly believes that large scale contributions to open source can make the software as robust as proprietary ones and even better because of the freedom that lie in it. The participants bounced both technical and philosophical questions to each other to gauge the actual usage of FOSS in real life, and how as a society we are moving towards adopting openness. There is a great disconnect in communicating widely about the work that many Indian FOSS and other free knowledge communities are doing, agreed all the participants. So they planned to meet more regularly and try to connect more people using social media and chat groups so that these interactions shape into an annual event to bring all open communities under one roof.

Check more ideas for celebrating Software Freedom Day, and a few more here.

How we celebrated Software Freedom Day was originally published in Mozilla Open Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While my country works to innovate, we tend to accelerate the steps to be up to part with other countries that have large digital literacy programs; unfortunately in this process, it then passes by the fundamentals of digital culture and we skip ahead to technological developments that are so advanced it generates a huge digital gap. This can also lead to feeling as though the citizens’ participation is biased towards the new civic technology coming out every day, and it presents educational and access challenges in use and adoption.

As a Mozilla community, we constantly encourage and promote an open and safe internet for users, but first we need to understand the local issues that may affect this to happen. I’m truly a believer that web literacy and learning are part of the foundation of professional and personal development. Exploring the web alone is not enough for users to reach the web, or their, full potential. Together we can be amazing content creators and empower ourselves, and everyone around us, to make the internet a better place.

That’s why the México Mozilla Club was created: to help, inspire, and create safe learning spaces, not only for women, but also for everyone that wants to create amazing content for the internet society.

Providing safe learning spaces for women and girls on topics they care about is one of #mozgirls’ main goals. We want to help reduce the digital and gender gap in our country by creating workshops that not only put into practice their coding skills, but also their research, synthesize and contribution.

#Mozgirls is an amazing initiative inside the Mozilla Clubs, and here in Mexico, we work towards creating awareness and solutions for topics such as online violence, cyberbullying, internet usage, women’s participation inside technologies, and privacy and security.

First things first, we want to understand and evaluate our future learning groups by starting with a leadership training for women in tech. Starting Mozilla Club Leadership Training for women, is really challenging because millions of women and girls around the world are victims of cyber violence or threats. We need to understand why and how cyber violence occurs to be able to take a more effective stand in stepping in and preventing it.

Our goal with this approach is to increase the number of volunteers, impacts and projects to develop better teaching methods with Mozilla tools. Who knows, maybe we’ll develop a new tool or discover better ways to contribute.

Every country has their own local issues and México joins this training because we want to focus and adapt our efforts to improve education in our country.

Join in and follow our journey where you can expect lots of brand new data about Mexico’s local issues and how our participants help us to create an open and safe web on September 27th and 28th on the @Mozillagram account!

You can also follow our journey at: mexicomozillaclub.com

México has a new Mozilla Club and it starts with a leadership training for women in tech! was originally published in Mozilla Open Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this article, I’ll look at three copyright tips to keep in mind when you’re thinking about using content — even for academic purposes — you find online.

1. Most of what you find on the Internet is copyrighted.

Except content that clearly indicates the work is released under a free license, or that the copyright has lapsed and the work is in the Public Domain, you can assume content is not freely/liberally licensed. A few popular free and open licenses include GNU General Public License (GPL), BSD licenses, Apache License, Mozilla Public License, and SIL Open Font License. If a work mentions the license, usually the license is explained or links to terms for using the work. Spending a little time to find out what license the work is under beats spending time and money on a copyright infringement case later.

2. Fair use can be your friend, but not always.

Fair use means you might be permitted to make limited use of a copyrighted work without prior permission from the copyright holder. The fair use policy varies from country to country. As explained in the Stanford University Libraries site, commentary/quotes and criticism, and parody are cases that often fall under fair use.

Wikipedia article images related to recent music albums, movies, and even people who are deceased are used under fair use policy. Click on a recent movie poster appearing in a Wikipedia article and check the copyright section for an example explanation of why the use on Wikipedia qualifies as fair use.

Example Wikipedia explanation for fair use of an image.

Fair use also gives some freedom to scholars to use copyrighted work for academic research. To be in a safe side if you are not sure your use falls under “fair use,” reach out to the copyright holder and get formal permission before using their work.

3. search.creativecommons.org helps streamline Creative Commons content searches.

Where do you go to search for images, illustrations, and other content with Creative Commons licensing? Most images turned up using a search engine are copyrighted and not licensed liberally, for example. A better way to search is using search.creativecommons.org.

You can choose Creative Commons-licensed content from several sites, such as Flickr, Google Images, Wikimedia Commons, and Europeana. You can also specify whether you want to use the content for commercial purposes, or to modify, adapt, and build upon work.

Note that you still will need to check which Creative Commons license the content uses. As explained in an article by Richard Fontana:

The Creative Commons suite includes licenses that implement various policies. Some, like CC BY and CC BY-SA, are normatively consistent with corresponding permissive and copyleft families of free software licenses. Others, however, particularly its “NC” (no commercial use) and “ND” (no derivative works) licenses, are in conflict with basic principles of free software and free culture. I am not alone in lamenting the application of the Creative Commons umbrella brand to cover licenses with such disparate qualities. One consequence has been a general confusing dilution of the meaning of “openness” in the context of cultural works. A more specific problem is the evidence of confusion on the part of content authors interested in applying Creative Commons licenses to their works, and resulting confusion by those interested in making use of such works. Too often a work is labeled as being licensed under “a Creative Commons license”, without specifying accurately, or specifying at all, which free or nonfree policy the author sought to apply.

If you still cannot find content — images, for example — with free licenses, but you find copyrighted content that fits your academic need, you can reach out to the content creator or copyright holder for permission. Often copyright holders allow usage of their work for non-commercial purposes, such as academic research and publication.

Do you have other sources you recommend for finding Creative Commons or Public Domain content? Let us know about your favorite resources in the comments.

This post was originally published on Opensource.com under a Creative Commons license.

3 Copyright Tips for Students And Educators was originally published in Mozilla Open Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mozilla is a global community of people who believe that openness, innovation, and opportunities are key elements of our lives. We are expanding open source principles to other areas with community-based approach to create and develop new types of collaboration activities.

Mozilla Open Mic program is a great example of new decentralized communications program that is pushing transparency and participation to new level.

We are doing agile experiments and small tests to help make our strategies and activities stronger and more diverse.

Think globally, act locally.

Every year Mozilla communities organize thousands of events around the world. Being part of global community means that being vocal is essential to your success. This makes the process of translating software user interfaces, websites and other content from one language to another and adapting it to suit a foreign culture important. This process is known as localization or L10n.

The main objective of localization at Mozilla is to improve the world by culturally adapting Mozilla products by region and locale. We try our best to deliver every user, in every region, open source products in their native language. By doing so, we are creating a world where the open web spreads and exists beyond linguistic, cultural or geographical boundaries.

Being an open source project also means we are a global community so we work closely with communities all around the world who care deeply about the fate of open web. Regional gatherings, like L10n hackathons, are important to align all contributors to further Mozilla’s mission.

Preparing an awesome L10n hackathon

When our team at Mozilla Slovenia started planning for this hackathon we wanted to make it productive, fun and a little bit different. That’s why we decided to organize our event with a theme in mind. After discussing several options, we landed upon a of prison break. It was selected because we wanted to present an autonomous social center in Ljubljana, called Metelkova.

We brought the theme to the hackathon by creating graphic materials and a fun photo frame to capture the moments!

L10n hackathon in Ljubljana

Almost thirty participants from Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia gathered for the weekend hackathon. The weekend included:

• A short discussion about the future of localization process and technology at Mozilla.
• Gathering feedback to ensure localization learning curve is as easy as possible.
• Working on goals which were predefined before the event.
• Preparing style guides to improve localization quality.
• Catching up with each other to strengthen our communities.

If you are interested in detailed post about localization activities at hackathon please visit official Mozilla L10n blog.

Instagram takeover

This event was also special because Mozilla Slovenia was the first community to take over the new, Instagram channel — mozillagram.

In the spirit of open source, Mozilla invited our community to takeover their Instagram for the L10n hackathon. By capturing moments from our hackathon and presenting the story behind the event in real-time, we wanted to show other Instagrammers how events are done at Mozilla. Both days we started early in the morning and hacked till the evening. Evenings were reserved for fun social activities which included city sightseeing and karting.

Instagram and Medium are new crowdsourced channels that allow any Mozilla contributor to share Mozilla stories from around the world.

Promoting open source values in different areas is what makes Mozilla different.

Posting on Mozillagram account was a fun experience and we managed to increase the followers by 10% during our takeover. Our posts gathered a lot of engagement which is always a good sign and in my opinion, this experiment was a major success!

Mozilla is extending open source principles in every aspect of brand.

Thanks Mozilla Social Media team for this great opportunity.

Do you want to share your own Mozilla story or take over Mozillagram? Get involved by emailing them at openmic@mozilla.com.

Doing things in the Open, Mozilla style. was originally published in Mozilla Open Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Behind every beautiful blog, site and app there are countless lines of code.

To be a writer, painter, or any kind of artist, really, the process of getting started is generally the same: you need to learn the basics and the rules of the medium before you can manipulate and mold them into something new. The best creatives know how to string perfectly common words, colors, or textures together in an artful, efficient way to create something unexpected.

And still, we don’t often talk about coding as a creative endeavor. We also don’t often think of bloggers as coders. We want to change that.

Denelle Dixon-Thayer, our Chief Business and Legal Officer, wrote something a while back that has stuck with me: “Here at Mozilla, we believe that the Internet is strongest when everyone — regardless of gender or geography — can participate equally.” That starts with access and literacy — knowing the basics.

According to Girls Who Code, the gender gap is actually worse now in tech than it was in the ’80s with girls’ interest in computer science dropping off steeply between the ages of 13 and 17. There’s a lot of work to be done, even in the US, to bring girls into tech, and even more around the world. Raising awareness about digital literacy while teaching simple lines of code in a visual way seemed like a good place to start.

Last month we launched #TheArtofCoding, an Instagram-based campaign leveraging bloggers in creative industries like fashion, art, food, and DIY, to illustrate that learning to code can be a way to open up a new world of self expression online. Their levels of experience with code vary. Some know just enough to be dangerous, while a few were previously engineers or developers before stepping out and pioneering their own creative successes. Many of them shared the first line of code they ever learned along with their experiences.

The response has been really exciting. We see comments like these daily:

“I can code and this post caught my eye, lol. Not an expert by any means, but I manage my own html pretty well. It’s liberating!”

“So beautiful!! I would love to learn how to code! Seems like such an essential skill these days💕 “

“Very cool! Something we’re not very good at either, but maybe this will inspire us to be better! 💛💛💛!”

“I find this so inspiring. I have my bachelors in graphic design, and am going back for my masters in user experience and interface design. This field is so dominated by men. And to see a woman, a woman of color pushing through is such an inspiration. Thank you for sharing!”

What has been really inspiring, too, is how our Mozillian community in Mexico really hit the ground running with this campaign, rallying the most artistic contributions to the hashtag out of any other country, many from girls who weren’t previously connected to Mozilla at all. They even ran a live contest at Campus Party Mexico 2016.

Mozilla México on Twitter

Hey #CPMX7 Participen en nuestra dinámica en Instagram para ganar una mochila de @mozillamx #TheArtOfCoding RT!pic.twitter.com/8m2oxvG04X

Just like any other field: representation matters. If you know how to code, whether you’re in a traditionally creative field or in tech, add your voice to this conversation! Visually represent a line of code in #TheArtofCoding hashtag or share your story in the comments here.

If you’d like to learn to code, check out these learning tools and activities to get started.

Exploring the Art of Coding was originally published in Mozilla Open Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Giving the keys to official social channels might scare some, but openness is in our DNA and we want that openness to extend to every aspect of our brand.

Mozilla Open Mic is a decentralized, open-source brand storytelling program, powered by Mozillians & open to the world. Our hypothesis is that only by embracing our brand heritage of open can we achieve our Mission of protecting the free web.

Open means designed for participation- from collaborative tools to completely open-to-the-public meetings. Transparency becomes moot when involvement is implicit.

We soft launched Moz Open Mic in April and are scaling the program through agile experiments and small tests.

There are three characteristics that we strive to be described as and that guide our strategy:

Networked & Diverse

We have a vast community of people (some 30,000) spread across the globe contributing to Mozilla’s mission. Whether they are coding pages, fixing bugs, running social communities or blogging, this network is extremely powerful when it’s connected and aligned.

Diversity is not a by-product. It is intentional. Only by seeking out and then promoting different voices can we capture authentic stories.

Glocal

To be successfully decentralized means ideas can and will be catalyzed from anywhere. And yet we know that we need common ideas for a united understanding and shared vision.

Mozilla Open Mic seeks to synthesize local interests & global agendas.

Optimistic & Human-powered

We believe that human potential is what will make our technological future bright. By focusing this program on the people we believe we can grow mind-share for the issues Mozilla cares about most.

This Medium publication, like our program, will be crowdsourced, lent out and multi-authored. It will be a home for the progress and the learnings, for the successes and the misses. But mostly it will be yours, so what do you want to share with the world?

Thank you to the people and companies who have been working with us so far to make this a reality: Mozilla Bolivia — Hugo Acosta; Mozilla Brasil — Adriano Cuppello and Cynthia Pereira; Mozilla Egypt — Bahy Mohamed; Mozilla India — Jafar Muhammed; Mozilla Indonesia — Yofie Setiawan; Mozilla Kisumu — Chandi Tome; Mozilla Mexico — Luis Sánchez, Liza Platae, Yuliana, Jusaí Prieto, & Daniella Abarrán; Mozilla Philippines — Robert [Bob] Reyes and Faye Tandong; Mozilla Netherlands — Wim Benes; Mozilla Romania — Ioana Chiorean; Mozilla Slovenija — Nino Vranešič, Mozilla Venezuela — Miguel Useche, Jeff Elders at Wikimedia, Esra'a Al Shafei, Nathaniel Manning at Ushahidi, Ki Coale and Jon Johns from O’Reilly and Jono Bacon.

To find out more and get involved email us at openmic@mozilla.com.

Introducing Mozilla Open Mic was originally published in Mozilla Open Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.