Inaugural Event at MIT

BLOG By : Shreyas

When people hear the name MIT, they often tend to think of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But for the ones in Chennai, it’s always Madras Institute of Technology. Such green, much wow!

The last time I went to MIT was again for a hackathon that we organized(http://dunebuggie.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/mit-firefox-os-hackathon/). Indeed, it was a proud moment for me because I still remember, the last time we were leaving MIT, Naresh pointed at me and told the boys-“See this guy, he’ll be the Mozilla Rep from Chennai who would be coming for your next event.”
And I was!Their first event after the hackathon was this one-Initiating a Firefox Club at MIT.
Although Naresh and Viswa could not make it, I promised to myself that I’d go for this one no matter how sick I was(Yes, I was sick). At around 10 in the morning, I got a call from Anna, the organizer and Club lead of MIT.
I told her that I was right outside the college, although the evil intention of telling her that I can’t come, crept into my mind multiple times. We got the whole team inside by 10:15 am and started the event soon.
I started off with a Spectrogram– A wonderful ice breaker activity.

It was really nice to interact with the students and get to learn and know what the think about different issues like Privacy and sharing their data on the internet to Using Open source over proprietary software.

The Spectrogram sure did make the attendees more inquisitive about how the entire session is gonna be.
The session started soon after the spectrogram. Being part of CSMIT , they were all pretty much aware of what Mozilla is, as an organization and as a community.
I told them about the various products, projects and contribution pathways within Mozilla.

A demo on Firefox OS was given with the tablet from the TCP. There was a mixed feedback from the students about Firefox OS.

After my session, Achyuth took over the session by going deeper into Webmaker. He showed a Demo of Popcornmaker and X-Ray Goggles and also told about the Makerparty.

Shashank took over by explaining about SuMo, Localization and Thimble with the help of his teaching kit for Localization.

After Shashank was done, Nikhil then took a session on Firefox OS and Appmaker. He explained how to create a simple application using Appmaker and it’s in-built templates.

The last session was handled by Vikneshwar on Bug fixing. He gave us more insights on the best practices to get started with fixing bugs by showing his own first bug and how he got started. Having fixed many bugs over time, it was really good to have him with us to share his knowledge with the students of MIT.

I would not do justice if I fail to mention that the help extended by the FSA’s from Sathyabama University, is worth a shout!

It feels really good when you have many clubs and FSA’s together for initiating a new club. A true sense of a Community.

We talked to the Chairman of CSMIT who was really interested in the idea of Hive and told us that he would definitely talk to the management to try to organize a Hive makerparty in MIT. Surely, one of the reasons I love what I do is the Networking part.

Wonderful job! to all the organizers- Anna and team, wishing you all the best and good luck for the club 🙂