Spreading the Word About Open Source

Faye Tandog in her own words | A Network50 Spotlight

Mozilla Learning
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

By Faye Tandog

I was raised in a pretty uptight Asian culture — you can’t just speak up and you won’t have sufficient support to do so whether at home or in school. Until now, it is evident in our culture. We won’t speak up immediately and we’ll beat around the bush, avoiding confrontation especially when we have something negative to say.

As a result of being in such a constrained environment, it is very difficult for people with ideas to thrive as they cannot find the right outlet to do so. Then here comes the Internet. It is like magic to us. I had access to all the information of the world and it felt so liberating. We were provided an outlet to publish our ideas, express our opinion and get the feedback we needed. I have witnessed how people are being taken advantage of because of their lack of access to knowledge, making them unable to reach their full potential and these emerging technologies enabled us to be well-informed, involved citizens and pursue passions we didn’t even imagine we could learn about.

Years after becoming a user I learned about the open source movement, and discovered I have been reaping the benefits of it without me knowing. What stunned me was the fact that I can actually get involved for this movement to thrive.

This made me value freedom of speech and openness and as I have greatly benefited from the movement of people who cared about the Internet, I set a goal to give back to the community by promoting an environment online and offline where everyone can freely share knowledge.

That’s how I started getting involved on spreading the word about open source and openness, especially in tech where typical consumers would think it’s only about them patronizing products and letting companies do the rest. There are three things that I deemed necessary to make this endeavor effective — women empowerment in the field, digital literacy, and youth leadership.

Faye Tandog orients the attendees about Mozilla.

While we are benefiting from the huge advancement in technology, at the same time different entities are trying to monopolize it and restricts the rest of the world to remain on the other end of the business. I find this a threat to advancing openness and innovation, and this motivates me to further push the advocacy I chose to stand up for.

Meet Faye!

Faye Tandog is a software professional and an active member of the Philippines technical community. She has been active in the Mozilla community in a variety of roles over the years. She is a member of our first cohort of “Network50.”

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