Pad.Ma, Firefogg, and Mumbai Community

I’ve had the luck a couple times of sitting in on a presentation by Arun Ranganathan where he takes an audience through a guided tour of the Open Web with some really beautiful demos from our evangelism team showing off HTML 5 in Firefox.   Oftentimes, when Arun is presenting the future of the web as a platform, I can see attentive developers begin to imagine a web page and a browser where a set of third-party plugins (like our favorite target, Flash) isn’t necessary.  A very powerful part of the demo is when Arun presses ctrl+U to view source and web developers in the audience see exactly what is happening in the demonstration.   What makes these demos even more impressive is when you meet a company or team of inspired individuals in the audience who is bringing the Open Web to end-users with their project.

Our last trip to India was no exception.

On our first Sunday night in Mumbai (Feb 22), we co-presented with one of these organizations at a Mozilla community meetup.  The group calls themselves Pad.Ma or, in longer form, the Public Access Digital Media Archive.  The project “is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non-commercial use.”  And, right on their website, they state their intentions to align with web standards:

Q:  Which browsers do you support, on which platforms?
A:  We currently support Firefox and Safari, on Linux, MacOS and Windows.  We do not support Internet Explorer. However, if you wish to endeavour to make the site work on IE, please appeal to IE to support web standards in their next version.

(In fact, for some fun, fire up IE and visit their website to view a strong statement from them regarding your present use of IE.)

More on the meetup, but let’s rewind by just a few hours before we met Pad.Ma face-to-face…

After a four hour roadtrip on the Pune-Mumbai highway, we arrived at our hotel in the cool neighborhood of Mumbai called Bandra.  Freshened up in about fifteen minutes, we piled two-by-two into autoricks and motored our way on a humid evening through the snaking streets to the event location.  Arun had treasure map-like directions that led us down narrow alleyways.  “When you see a cross on the wall, proceed a few more feet and you’ll see an apartment entrance on your right…” Arun read as we navigated through the Pali Hill district’s corridors.  Up a few stories and our eyes opened to a rooftop event with a large projection screen, bean bag chairs, a minibar with soft drinks and beer, and two big vats of local food.  We made it.

Invited by a local community member named Sanjay, about 25 people came to hear us speak about the Open Web and how we were building community in India.  After our presentation, the team from Pad.ma followed by showing their amazing work to archive movies on the web.   If you’re a movie person, this site will fascinate you, so please look around it.  The Pad.ma presentation was followed by their demo of the “Firefogg” addon, which allows you to easily convert videos to .ogg theora video compression format.

It was a nice tandem.  Arun chatting about the Open Web and explaining cutting-edge demos.  And, just when we thought we might lose the audience on how the technology could be applied, Pad.Ma presented their work and the Firefogg addon.  It was a nice blend of demos and practice and I believe the group’s imaginations were sparked.  The Open Web had been delivered to a rooftop audience in the Pali Hill neighborhood of Bandra.  Sometime during the evening, fireworks started to explode.  This was not planned.  An Indian wedding was taking place in around the corner.

Mozilla Trip To Pune, India

Over the next few days, it’s likely that Arun, Ragavan, and I will post a few write-ups about our trip, describing all that we did and doing a bit of a postmortem (a very popular Mozilla term that isn’t so literal here since we have so much growing and happening In India).

Our first big event was the three-day conference at gnuNify ’10 held in Pune.  On Friday, February 19, we held an entire track to chat about Mozilla.  Arun gave a talk on web standards that seemed to be a crowd favorite throughout the entire trip.  Ragavan chatted about Mozilla Labs, and, since all of our Indian localizers are there, I invited Axel to join so we could chat about the new project “l20n” which I’ve blogged about in the past.  The rooms were pretty packed, in some cases, standing room was the only option.

I was particularly pleased that about half of our localizers cut out of work early on Friday to see Axel and me.  Not only did we chat about l20n, but we reviewed a new locale (मैथिली Maithilī), worked on moving Oriya out of beta status, and caught up in person with some of our most dedicated community members.

On Sunday, we held our annual entrepreneurs breakfast with local web entrepreneurs in Pune.   Arun lead the morning with a detailed discussion about the Open Web, covering the following:

• The Open Web as a platform
• Future of video on the Web
• Device orientation events in Firefox
• Font issues on the Indian Web
• The geolocation API
• WebGL and 3-D graphics

At the end of session, we held a small workshop where we split the groups into teams of three and asked them to come up with entrepreneurial ideas that encapsulated all that we had discussed.  The groups were given 10 minutes to come up with their ideas.  Then, each team had one minute to present to the audience.  We served as a panel, questioning about the idea, potential business model, etc.  Of the ideas we saw, four stood out:

1. A “Typekit.com” for indian languages – typekit.in
2. e-learning classrooms for physically impaired – using video capabilities of HTML5
3. A video mashup app – something like online maps with text to speech audio and video
4. Using the geolocation API from Firefox – giving users local search results through a map website

Everyone’s ideas were great, but we selected these as standouts and gave the winning team some Mozilla stuff.  We chose the e-learning idea.  We offered to follow up on specific ideas and questions if anyone had them.  The team that came up with the geolocation API use-case has already started their business and intends to experiment with the technology and promote Firefox on their local map website.

In conclusion, the event in Pune was a great weekend for us to kick off our Indian adventure.  We landed into familiar arms since we presented at gnuNify ’09.  Because of that, we saw many faces we already new and were able to really push our conversations to very technical levels and Mozilla-related ideas.