Festival Back Ground – 2015
We seek out your support to make the second annual Mozilla Festival East Africa a success in 2015. Last year we held a very successful event with your support and we are looking forward to having an even bigger and much better event this year.
The event will bring together different global Tech enthusiasts from the field of Academia, Culture, Health, Education, Energy, Transport, Policy and advocacy, Web and Mobile ,Community building plus many more…
There are so many brilliant innovators in East Africa who have developed web solutions that could make this world even better, but they do not have a platform to show what they have done or reach out for help. We’ve so many children without access to education, internet, clean water, medication, transport, security and so many other challenges that we could solve together at this event. At the festival, we intend to create visibility for existing innovations, new initiatives and brain storm on ideas and build prototypes for these ideas, form teams, collaborations, and networks to drive these ideas to maturity. This will be the biggest annual Tech event that Africa has never seen.
We encourage you to support this Initiative because we strongly believe that Africa has the Potential to over-come these challenges….
Who we are
The Mozilla Uganda Community represents the Mozilla Foundation in Uganda. It has been in existence for five years now since 2010. We are a team of over 20 committed leads in Mozilla Uganda and at least 500 community members. We’re all volunteers who are passionate about the open web, teaching others and innovating solutions for our region. We founded this community on principles of openness, to promote an open web and access to internet using Mozilla’s platform and web maker tools. Mozilla sponsors most of the events and projects we undertake and some universities like Uganda Technology and Management University (UTAMU) and Makerere University Kampala which is the largest University in East Africa.
We started by helping eliminate the last inch limitations to technology posed by language barrier by localizing the Firefox Browser to Luganda and Acholi enabling a significant number of natives more fluent in these languages to access the internet, some for the first time.
Last years Achievements.
· A lot of new innovations were made visible to the public.
· New ideas to solve East Africa’s challenges were hatched and groups continued
to followed up on these ideas.
· Knowledge and skills were shared between local and international partners.
· The event re-invigorated our communities call to create more sustainable
web-maker clubs across other cities.
· The event gave birth to the Hive Learning Network in Uganda-Kampala
· The event deepened our presence in distant cities.
· A firm foundation was created for subsequent annul festivals.
Last year’s Guest list.
· Mark Surman – Mozilla Foundation
· Nyombi Tembo – Minister for ICT
· James Saaka – Executive Director NITA
· Professors and Executive Directors from Corporate Companies.
Activities
The community has held several Webmaker events and campaigns especially in 2013 where we held more than 10 and this year mostly crested with our just concluded East Africa Webmaker Mentor Training facilitated by, the Mozilla Foundations global strategist, Michelle Thorne. These events alone have helped us to train and reach out close to more than 2,000 people about the web and how to make on the web and they are teaching others. We’ve trained close to 100 Webmaker Mentors since last year and have about 10 Super Mentors always at hand to guide anyone willing to learn about the web.
We also held the Firefox Flicks competition in April 2013to try and promote movie making, animation and media skills in Uganda.
We embarked on training developers on how to create web apps for the Firefox OS devices and currently we’re translating the phone to Luganda, Lusoga and Acholi considering that there is high mobile penetration in East Africa especially rural areas but none have local languages, this is one of the sessions scheduled for MozFestEA.
How you can help
We intend to have more than 1000 participants and at least 50+ guests and facilitators from abroad. For a super productive event we have budgeted for $35,000 and so far Mozilla Developer Relations has promised $3000, Participation Team $5000, Reps Program promised to help with some Travel arrangements and MOFO promised $5000. We need Your help in raising more $15,000 and we hope that local sponsors will fund the remaining portion. All the funds you give us will go to making the biggest and most productive tech, science, education and web festival in the whole of Africa.
The Impact
● Create local and international awareness about innovations in the East African region
● Advance technology by building on these innovations and creating new ones during and after the festival
● Create partnerships and communities that can build ideas further by contributing both knowledge and financial resources
● Encouragement of disruptive thinking where participants are no longer contented with the status quo but aspire to improve and advance that which is in existence.
● Enhancement of digital learning through the use of various technologies including Mozilla’s tools such as Thimble, X-Ray Goggles, Popcorn and App Maker.
● Increased trust and confidence in the local solutions and products and as such there adoption.
● Better understand of the technological arena by the participants of the festival
Challenges
We’ve only a month to raise this money and achieve our goal, it’s a daunting task but we know we can make it with your support.
How else can you help?
Please share our campaign with others
Thank you so much for supporting us, on behalf of all the people in East Africa whose lives you’re making a difference in from the sustainable hardware, internet/web solutions, mobile, development, traffic, financial, food, transport, security solutions that will be innovated or built at the Festival.