This post covers my thoughts on our BrazilJS booth experience. Our booth is always one of the most popular ones at BrazilJS, not only because it has free coffee but also because it has a really engaging team and activities, in this brief post I will list some of the sucessful actions that the community team present at the event took that could be replicated elsewhere.

What is your dream for the Web?

Our booth rear (and only) wall was made of glass panes that formed the Firefox logo. Juliana from the Altos Eventos crew had an idea to bring bright permanent markers and decorate the glass. This idea evolved into an call to action for the conference attendees: “What is your dream for the Web?”.

This call to action was spread on our social networks and also word of mouth as attendees visited our booth. It was pretty sucessful and in the end we had a very livelly wall with different languages and messages. This action brought attendees and Mozilla together in their shared dreams for the Web. I believe this should be replicated in community oriented events as it brings a playful tone to otherwise boring corporate booths.

Spoke about building IoT stuff with MicroPython.

The talk is online split into three videos.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

What it is

Rio Web Fest is a full day of practical activities focused on digital skills and technological exploration.

Why it is important

There is a lack of events focused on new digital skills and exploring creativity in Rio. There are a lot of events for professional development and web technology but nothing that caters to this underrepresented group of new digital citizens. People who are just learning new digital skills have no way to network with each other and not many places to connect with mentors and facilitators.

Instead of throwing an event focused on acquiring new digital skills, we decided to run an event focused on producing new original content (through remixing, interventions or exploratory methods). Our one rule was that all activities must be hands-on and practical, learners and facilitators would focus on experimentation and having fun. This was not only a celebration of Rio Mozilla Club, but also an opportunity for learners from different venues to connect to one another and establish new positive relationships.

Organized and run a full day festival in the spirit of Mozilla Festival in Rio.

Memories from the event

In this post we’ll share how we organized our Privacy Day here at Rio Mozilla Club, you can use, remix and adapt this to your own setting.

We have two types of activities going on during one of our club meetings.

• Micro-activities: these are quite simple and only require a flip-chart, sharpie pens or similar and post-it notes. They usually take about 5 minutes to complete.
• Activities: these are the same activities you find at the Web Literacy Basics curriculum. Most activities take about 1 hour to complete. For the Privacy Day we used activities from the Expanded Privacy Curriculum that is currently in testing phase.

In our events we tend to do a little roller-coaster ride oscillating between micro-activities and full activities to keep the pace cool.

Recentemente li um artigo no tableless sobre TypeScript chamado Diga olá ao TypeScript e adeus ao JavaScript e fiquei meio noiado tanto com o que estava escrito quanto com os comentários que eu li sobre a peça.

Eu, assim como o autor do artigo, também sou super fã de TypeScript e acho uma iniciativa mega legal da Microsoft. A linguagem começou a ficar mais famosa aqui no Brasil ao ser adotada pelos desenvolvedores do Angular 2 e assim como tudo mais que acontece no nosso país esse assunto virou briga de torcida organizada onde algumas pessoas parecem acreditar que para gostar de TypeScript é necessário não gostar de JS e vice versa, isso não faz sentido nenhum. Existem vários pontos no artigo e nos comentários que são más interpretações do JS e seu ecosistema. Pretendo falar a respeito de alguns desses pontos.

Planejando para causar impacto

Todo mundo deseja causar mais impacto com suas ações porém as vezes nós não possuímos as ferramentas necessárias para gerenciarmos esses processos. Os Mozillians são muito bons em causar impacto como pode ser visto em nossas ações ao redor do mundo. Neste breve post vamos adicionar uma ferramenta extra na nossa coleção. Ela servirá para desmembrar nosso desejo de causar impacto em pedacinhos pequenos, mensuráveis e metrificáveis. Existem inúmeras metodologías e ferramentas que podemos utilizar, essa é apenas mais uma que você pode adaptar para o seu uso pessoal.

A vantagem principal de utilizar essa ferramenta é que além dela te ajudar a planejar as ações com o foco no impacto que você deseja causar, ela também te ajuda a entender se você conseguiu ou não atingir o seu objetivo. Neste sentido, ela não é boa somente para suas ações futuras mas também para suas métricas. O time de participação utiliza OKRs para o seu planejamento e esses podem ser facilmente extraídos a partir dessas matrizes :-)

More impact through coordinated planning

We all want to cause impact with our actions but sometimes we don’t have the experience or tools needed to manage our actions. Mozillians are very good at causing impact as can be seen by our actions around the world. In this brief post we’ll add one extra tool to our repository with which we’ll break our desire to make impact into manageable and mensurable bits. There are many tools and workflows we can use, this is just a tool that you can adapt to your own usage.

The main advantage of using this tool is that it allows you to plan for the impact you want to promote and also to be sure you achieved it. In this sense this is not only good for your future actions but also for metrics. The Participation Team uses OKRs for its planning which can be easily extracted from these matrices :-)

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated to Imagination Technologies. They didn’t contact me. They didn’t asked me to do this piece. I really like this kit and want to have it too

Link to kickstarter: Creator Ci40 Kit

Internet of Things is cool

The Internet of Things is many things and basically every group of people has a different definition of it but there is one point they all agree which is that the Internet of Things is coming and it is cool.

Analysis predicts that more IoT enabled devices will ship in the next years than the combined smartphones and PCs markets but I am not here to tell you that betting in IoT is a sound business decision, I am here to tell you that hacking IoT stuff is really cool.

Web of Things is cooler

The main bad trend I see forming with IoT stuff is the attempt by large stakeholders to establish vertical domination of the market where the IoT board comes from them and the smartphone device to talk to that board also comes from them and they require their app because it is using their proprietary protocol.

This would be like buying a General Motors car and only being allowed to drive in GM roads and having to fill the tank with GM Gas. Thats not really how we want this new born ecosystem to work.

Now imagine if Smart/Connected devices all played by the rules of the Web. When you arrive at someones house and want to interact with their connected device may it be a TV, garden, lights, whatever, you’d just need to fire up a Web Browser and point it to the correct address and a rich web interface would be provided. This system would be agnostic of Operating Systems, it would not require an app installation. It would just work.

How many times you’ve installed an app on your phone to use just once? For example, you go to a friends house and want to fling some content at his Chromecast. You will need to install the Chromecast app. Even if you don’t have one at your own home and will never use it again. This is not good UX.

What you want is to have your phone, laptop, smart thingy, discover devices around you and talk to them using HTTP. Just firing up a web page and playing with it. This is the Web of Things. A Web that is personal, physical and works the way you want it to work.

The Creator Ci40 Kit looks awesome!

This kit by Imagination Technologies looks awesome to play with the Web of Things for the following reasons: * It has a powerful MIPS CPU and it runs Linux, so it can serve a Web interface pretty easily. * You have Bluetooth (and BLE), WIFI and 6LoWPAN, so you’re extremely connected. * You have so many pins and ports and interfaces that makes it easy to interface with basically anything * Imagination is already doing the Web thing with their software stack.

Bonus point that the kit comes with some clicker boards that can help you interface with the physical world. If you check the price and the potential of that kit then it becomes really easy. Assembling a collection of Raspberry Pis, shields, arduinos, and the necessary connectivity adapters will quickly sum up to similar prices. I am not trying to place this kit agains Pis or start a flamewar, I am saying that this kit alone, when you check how much you are paying and the potential you have to start your own Web of Things projects is really good.

The board will connect to basically anything and has enough power to serve smart web interfaces. You can create lots of cool personal projects with it. From automated watering of your home garden to the first connected laundry machine. This is a very good opportunity.

You still have 23 hours to back up this kit, you may need to hurry.

Link to kickstarter: Creator Ci40 Kit

Spoke about taking back the control over your web experience using Firefox Add-ons.