ethic – A Link to the Web

« Open Days », an event about ICTs and the promotion of free software involving Hi-Tech stakeholders was held in the auditorium of the Alliance Francaise of Toamasina.

Open Days is a yearly event that happens in Toamasina. It is organized by JADE and this year, Mozilla Madagascar participated by hosting 3 talks during the event. This year, we talked about Virtual Reality, Rust and Privacy.

A week of training on the « Dev Boot Camp » was offered to enthusiasts from 16 to 23 November 2018, followed by a lively weekend of sharing, conferences, demos, distribution and exchange on 24 and 25 November.

On the evening of November 23rd, the Mozillians set off for Toamasina for their presentation session scheduled for Saturday, November 24th at 2:30 pm. It was a few minutes later that Mozilla’s team spoke to the participants.

The presentations lasted almost 2 hours, followed by a question and answer session. The topics we discussed were: Online Privacy, Rust and WebVR.

Online Privacy

The first topic presented by Mariot and Mihaja was about Online Privacy. Since most of the participants were CS students or students that were already familiar with the Web, it was not a difficult task. But one thing that most of the audience were surprised by was the trackers. They knew about their existence but didn’t know at which extinct they were following and stalking them.

The first part of the session was a simulation of a normal browsing experience (shopping, social media…). During that part, we asked the participants what do they do the most on the web. We also asked what kind of data about do they share willingly. The second part was showing them what data about them has been shared without their knowledge or consent. We showed the companies that had access to their data and what do they do with it. The third part was to teach them how to limit the data that they share willingly and how to protect their privacy online.

We noted during that session that many people were surprised by the amount of data that companies had on them. We are proud of ourselves because we feel that this session helped a lot of people and many pledged to educate their family and friends about these.

Rust

The next session was about Rust and it was presented by Felixie and Mariot. This was a little more difficult because Rust is still a relatively new technology. But we think we still managed to pull it up 🙂

The session was aimed at people who already had some programming background. There wasn’t an extensive training on the language itself, but we presented what makes the language different and what are the features. We were happy because there were a lot of questions asked and the participants were really interested.

We were advised to present a more in-depth session next year, during the Boot-camp. We found that idea a really good one so we are already preparing that.

Rust Télécharger

WebVR with A-Frame

The last session that we presented was about Augmented Reality with A-Frame. Christino was is charge of that one because he has a lot of experience about it.

The goal was to make the participants aware of the new advancements in WebVR and how to use them. The easiest tech in that domain is A-Frame. So we did an introduction to A-Frame and did some demos. Then, the participants were taught the basic principles of it with a step by step tutorial.

This session was very successful because it was such a new thing for them and A-Frame was so easy to learn! It was great 🙂

https://mariot.github.io/aframe-presentation-kit/

What we could have done better

The sessions and presentations went all smoothly and we fulfilled our wishes for that event. But there were also some things that we could have done better. Here’s some of them.

Make sure to have all the intels before filing a budget request bug
Made all the reservations way in advance
Write the blog post as soon as the event finishes

I filed the bug request by copying an old bug (because the event was the same). This was a bad idea because the context and the sessions were not the same. I should have just filed a brand new bug request.

For the reservations, we should have made them wayyy in advance. By not doing so, we got stuck with less choices when traveling or getting an hotel. Especially since there were a lot of tourists in the city at that time.

This blog post comes a long time after the event. This was caused by a lot of procrastination from my part. This is problem that I partly solved by setting goals for each task that I should do in a day. I also rustused a technique that I just learned: The Pomodoro Technique

We dit it!

It wasn’t easy but we finally did it. One of my most anticipated event for our team as we prepared it for a very long time.

Mariot et Tino — The participants, the staff and the coaches

The event

We were coaches for the 3 days event in Mahajanga; our talk was about Ethics in Data Collection. All the participants were divided in 11 teams which had their own startup projects. As coach, we helped them by giving advises according our respective expertise area.

The talk

We had the chance to visit each one of the teams during our coaching. But we had a surprise! We expected a classic talk to every team at the same time but instead, we had to talk to the teams one after another. Also, since it’s not a lecture, we had to adapt our talk for each team according to their project and questions. It was a new experience for us but very fulfilling as well.

We had way more participants than we expected and they were more receptive than we thought! It was great and it was very fun for. We also had the pleasure to learn a lot from the other coaches and the participants.
Participants also showed interest in our community and asked many questions about our mission and objectives. Some signed up to join but less that we predicted.

In conclusion, it was a great event for us and we are planning to do another one in Fianarantsoa as well.