This year the Mozilla Philippines Community decided to try something new– stage our biggest event yet! We have been cooking it up since the start of 2014 and it has been a very hectic 3 months for all of us. Finally, last Sept. 13 & 14, our dream has been realized!
Maker Festival Manila 2014 aims to be the biggest gathering of makers in the Philippines, and so far it is the only one yet that is a maker-themed event. This was our own version of a finale for the Maker Party Campaign. I actually got the idea of this when I attended the Mozilla Festival in London last year, and I really loved the open, collaborative format of it. I believe that this format will really be beneficial for learners in the Philippines. It was held at the Glorietta 5 Atrium, c/o our sponsors, Glorietta and the Ayala Foundation, Inc. For this festival we called on to all types of makers and screened who can join the Festival due to the space limitation. We had 22 booths at the Atrium composed of exhibitors, community partners and sponsors.
The Organizing Team is composed of around 30 members to handle the manpower demand that this event requires.
As the mall opens people started pouring in, randomly dropping by the Festival. Some are pre-registered and a lot of them are walk-ins who just happened to be strolling around the mall.
As this event is inspired by the Mozilla Festival, we setup the event in a way where people can choose where they want to learn and people could easily talk to each other. It was like a huge tech fiesta where there are a lot of things going on, you couldn’t just sit and listen to what people has to stay. The Festival is open during mall hours but we have the program only from 1PM-7PM. The event was attended by people of all ages and of varying backgrounds.
Thanks to the awesome exhibitors who made the Festival a fun, collaborative learning venue for everyone! Our exhibitors are as follows:
- 8Layer Technologies, Inc.
- Accidental Rebel Games
- Canva
- Coffee Brain and Full Mana Studios
- DevCon Philippines
- Gobbles: Eat and Run
- HackerSpace
- Keybol
- Komikasi Games and Entertainment
- DLSU- College of Computer Studies
- Globe Labs (composed of various hackathon winners)
- Lifebit
- National Youth Commission
- Mindanao University of Science and Technology Robot Group
- Navotas National High School
- Open Knowledge Philippines
- CrowdNet (OrangeWerx)
- PhilRobotics
- PuzzleBox 3D Printer Philippines
- RepRap Philippines
- Tagcash (Zeresoft)
- Unravel Games
The program was handled by awesome Mozillians Erika at Kevin who managed to keep the stage alive with the talks and games.
On both days, I started the program by talking about Mozilla, an introduction about what we do and how can anyone start contributing to the organization right away.
Amira talked about Mozilla’s education initiatives, particularly the Webmaker project.
Ryan, a fellow Mozilla Rep, then gave more specific details about the project by showing off the Webmaker tools, Thimble, Popcorn, Xray Goggles and of course, AppMaker!
Mozilla Rep Aaron Cajes also discussed about Firefox OS, its features and how easy it is for developers to use being created using Open Web technologies that doesn’t require heavy SDKs and whatnot. The Firefox Marketplace is totally free too!
In the middle of the event, we were also surprised to be visited by a Mozilla alumni, Celina, who originally is from the Philippines who moved to Canada where she worked under Mark Surman on the Web Day, the predecessor of the Mozilla Festival! She is now back in the Philippines for work. Such an amazing coincidence.
Other than talks about Mozilla, all exhibitors and community partners were given a chance to talk on stage, discussing topics like web and graphics design and also sharing what they do as makers.
Other than the informative talks, there were also performances from the amazing singers from SoundCloud Philippines to complete the program.
And last but not the least, no Mozilla event can be complete without giving out raffle prizes!
We also had a grand prize winner for the event who received complete Maker Fest swags with shirts, lanyards, stickers and pins. Participants need not to fret even if they are not called on the raffle because pre-registered participants were given swags and exhibitors are giving our freebies at their booths as well!
In the course of two days, voting for the People’s Choice Award is also ongoing and our winner for this year is PhilRobotics!
The months we dedicated to make this event was truly stressful but at the end of the day, it was all worth it! The MozillaPH team got to meet new volunteers, we got to talk to a lot of people who don’t have much knowledge on what Mozilla does and enlightened them the big picture of what we do for the Web and we got to meet a lot of potential collaborators in the future! The future looks more exciting with the conclusion of our biggest event so far!
Thank you so much for the hardworking volunteers of the MakerFestMNL Organizing Team (most of them are new contributors to MozillaPH!) and our major partners, Glorietta, Ayala Foundation, Inc. and Globe Labs! Thank you to all the exhibitors, speakers and performers who definitely rocked our event that even caused power outage! (lol) Thank you to all the participants who dropped by our event! Thank you to everyone who made it despite the stormy weather in Manila on those days! You guys are awesome!
