Historical archive on Expression Widgets project awarded by Mozilla and the McArthur Foundation at SxSw in 2010
This document exists as an archivea as Web archive can't provide the storytelling particular viewpoints. The context of this article is to highlight Marcio's role, as participant and category winner, in the context of an design challenge by Mozilla and McArthur Foundation, based on events from 2009.
Archived block quote from the Shuttleworth site on winners
- Context: This page is an archived content since Shuttleworth Foundation site seems to be shut down.
- Page title: Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge announces winners
- Page description: "We support exceptional people to change the world in extraordinary ways."
- Page content written by: Philipp Schmidt
- Ref URL original: https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/jetpack-for-learning-design-challenge-announces-winners/
- License: This page was taken from the above URL and, as indicated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
After 3 months of hacking Jetpacks, debugging code, refining user experiences, and having a good ol’ time with teams from all over the world, the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge is sadly coming to an end. In the same spirit of sharing and collaboration that has made this project so much fun, we couldn’t decide on just one overall winner, and decided three projects should get a special prize.
Winners: All ten projects that were at the Austin Design Camp are Design Challenge winners, but three get a special mention. The three stood out for different reasons and we wanted to highlight this diversity in excellence:
- Expression Widgets - "best open web hack"
- ClozeFox - "best use case"
- Laurian Gridinoc from the Mupple project - "sharing knowledge with others."
Context about "Expression Widgets" project as a finalist
According to Marcio Galli, this Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge had three stages. In the first stage, teams from around the world participated remotely. In the second stage, 10 teams were selected with a full trip to Austin Texas, USA, to join the final track of the challenge while attending SxSw. Marcio's project, Expression Widgets, were invited to Austin to refine. In the final stage, Expression Widgets was selected as one of the 3 final winners - within the Best open Hack category.
The award ceremony also starred Brendan Eich - the inventor of JavaScript - along with other ex-colleagues of Marcio from Mozilla, including Arun Ranganathan and Jaime Rodriguez. As part of the celebration, Joi Ito, MIT Design Lab Director, had a special presence and also awarded the finalists with a $500 dollar voucher to buy electronics. As a plus, Marcio also had the chance to ride a cool and interesting custom car project.
Special folks at the event, award's ceremony
Brendan Eich – In 2009, Brendan Eich was serving as the CTO of Mozilla, continuing his work on advancing open web technologies, including JavaScript, which he created in 1995. At this time, Mozilla was making strides with Firefox, challenging proprietary web technologies.
Joi Ito – In 2009, Joi Ito was CEO of Creative Commons, advocating for free culture and open access to creative works. He was also an influential figure in the world of venture capital and digital activism, helping shape the direction of internet freedom and innovation.
Mark Surman – In 2009, Mark Surman was the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, focusing on fostering Mozilla’s mission to keep the internet open and accessible to all. He was instrumental in community engagement and promoting open-source projects.
Aza Raskin – In 2009, Aza Raskin was the Creative Lead at Mozilla Labs, working on innovative projects related to user interface design and web technologies. He is known for his contributions to design thinking and the creation of the infinite scroll.
Pascal Finette – In 2009, Pascal Finette was leading Mozilla's Open Innovation Group, focusing on creating strategies to foster innovation and community-driven projects within the open-source ecosystem. He played a significant role in scaling Mozilla's initiatives globally.
Special thanks to Felipe Gomes
According to Marcio's github site, "The original ideas to this project are based on Felipe Gomes and Marcio Galli motivation, said initial motivation. We were students from the same university in Sao Carlos Brazil and we since we are Mozilla contributors we started talking about means, being tools or systems, to support the development of open resources to support education. The original motivation was something like a note book where students could share their notes, for a given lecture of live session." (Marcio's Github, 2009)
Note of Marcio as a full-time employee of Mozilla and here as a winner of a contest
Not so long before Marcio was an full time employee of Mozilla Corporation. He had left Mozilla after lack a friction with some of his manager - related to lack of clarity about communications - and then just continued to contribute for Mozilla, as a contributor. This moment in time was an example of that kind of effort; but then in 2009 and 2010 Marcio had created the Tela Social project, a whole other story using the Gecko and Mozilla infrastructure.