Welcome to European Mozilla Community blog

Hey this is the last post of the MECT'09!

We have been joined on the tour by a friend, an XMPP ninja, Jehan doing a world tour by motorcycle. We met at Skopje in Macedonia and he helped us fighting Albanian roads. As we couldn't go through Serbia (passports are mandatory and we only had French ID cards), we had to find another route. We had heard about the bad roads of Albania across the mountains. Results : 300 km in 13 hours but we were alone in the world and the landscapes were breathtaking.

Jehan, the XMPP biker in Albania

Eventually we arrived in Montenegro. We quickly reached the capital (Podgorica) when the car broke down (a bug occured to the firefox mobile). We managed to find a mechanic (it was Easter holidays and everything was closed) who patched the car the day after. We slept and eat at his place and had a great time (Hi Andjela!)

As we enjoyed great company, Kerim, was risking his life in Bosnia, being (according to his own words) the most wanted person and in fear to be tortured for announcing that we wouldn't be able to make it on time for the talk in Sarajevo. Sorry guys. We owe you one.

It is great to see in those countries -often a bit isolated from the main communities- the interest in open source. They're eager to make contact and hear from foreign people about Mozilla and the open web.

After visiting Sarajevo and celebrating my 27th birthday in a cool pub, with Kerim and Muki, we left the day after for Croatia. Zagreb has not been the coolest step. We have been quite unlucky there. We were still late on our schedule after Albania and Montenegro and we didn't manage to join the community there, neither did we manage to find a place to couchsurf. Eventually we left Croatia in the middle of the night for Slovenia. After sleeping on the border of the road in a tent we installed around 6am, we drove to Ljubljana. We stopped just in the center by chance, and it happened to be 200 m from kiberpipa, the geek paradise. Imagine a bar, and in the basement, a little computer museum, some labs rooms... We met some people there and after a drink, we had a burek (balkans specialities) and we visited the city by night.

The following day, after laundry at the camping we visited the city and especially the castle before meeting Brian King.

In the evening we assisted to a presentation and then made a demo. Sonny had the amazing idea of using the streaming video of the presentation to enhance the demo of Paul. It was really impressive, but unfortunately, we had some troubles with the internet connection. Nevertheless, I think the audience got the general idea. The night ended very well with a dinner with Brian King.

The MECT crew, Brian King and the Slovenian localizer

After that, it was a matter of coming back to France. It took us 24 hours, a snow storm, a flat tyre without replacement one. But we finally get to Mozilla Europe office where we enjoyed the last beer of the tour. Before having some others at the ubuntu party we joined the same evening.

Back in Paris

This tour has been a great experience! Thanks a lot to to all the people who made it possible, those we met from the Mozilla Community, the Open Source community and the others.

Greg, Arzhel and Sonny

Hey!

One of the great things of the MECT is that we get to meet people with a lot of interesting ideas and projects.

We are glad to have made a detour in Macedonia to Strumica on our road to Skopje. We met there a bunch of people really interested in Mozilla and Open Source and putting their ideas in action. They have created an open source school where they give development courses. They are only at the beginning of their project and are striving to spread the word about open web and free software. We visited the place and they would have liked us to stay longer to do some presentations but unfortunately we did not have enough time.

There we met Damian and Novica active Macedonian Mozilla contributor who led us to Skopje. It has been awesome to hang around with these guys who made us visit Skopje and introduced us to the local food. They also introduced us to Branko Cobanov who is in charge of cultural affairs for the French embassy. He was very interested and told us that he is ready to organize other event.

The guys had prepared a huge event. It is really cool to see that people are so interested in those topics and that large audience can be gathered to hear about them in Macedonia. For instance Tony (from Strumica) had assured us, when we met him that he could have gathered in a few days hundreds of people to see our presentations.

And after it has been the bar stuff all over again, with the people the most interested in Mozilla.

MozillaDanmark, the Danish Mozilla localization team, has arranged a community meeting in Copenhagen on Saturday 18th of April. It will be an informal meeting about Mozilla, Open Source and other stuff. Read more on https://wiki.mozilla.org/MozDKAprilMeetup (English) or http://forum.mozilladanmark.dk/viewtopic.php?t=5803 (Danish) and add yourself to the list if you will be there.

We would have a lot to share with the community, but we'll try to make it short. After Vienna, we decided we were not far from Slovakia, so we decided to go to Bratislava to have a look at the city. One more step, even if we didn't have time to meet anyone there. But many people noticed our awesome firefox car Kairo inspired us and Arzhel installed an openstreetmap tracker on his mobile phone. So from now we will contribute during all the tour.

It took us some time to get into Budapest because of the traffic jam. Damn big cities! But it's beautiful. We found the place where we were going to couchsurf, but our host wasn't there. Instead we met Matthew a nice Californian guy travelling around Europe like us. We introduced ourselves and proposed him to join us to a concert with Kami, a Mozilla contributor who localize Seamonkey. We discussed about Mozilla and FLOSS in a pub, and then went to the concert to hear to a Hungarian band called Vad Fruttik. We didn't get the lyrics, but the music was great and the vibes amazing.

We eventually get into the couchsurf apartment and met Balint who hosts us and is a very cool guy.

We should enjoy the afternoon by visiting the city. Then we will go to a Prezi event, maybe evangelise a bit about open web while drinking beers.

We're expecting some pretty nice stuffs for the forthcoming days. The meeting in Bucarest, a beer event at Veliko Turnovo a Mozilla Barcamp in Sofia.Then we will make a detour to visit a new community in Strumica (Macedonia) before going to Skopje.

After the event in Skopje we will take an other route that the one we planned because we have no passports to travel across Serbia. We'll try to cross Albania and Montenegro.

Hi everybody,

After 14 hours we finally get to Steyr in Austria at KaiRo's parents place (thanks a lot to him and to his parents). Along the road we enjoyed beautiful landscapes, sun, nice towns and lovely people.
We've just uploaded some pictures and will keep uploading others: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29674615@N02/sets/72157616352149414/

We forgot to introduce ourselves so here we are:

From left to right:

• Grégoire Coustenoble (Greg), He is a student in communications and a Mozilla addict.
• Sonny Piers, He is a former intern at Mozilla Europe and involved in the project since 2004.
• Arzhel Younsi (XioNoX) He is a former Mozilla Europe intern too and soon a Mozilla Corp intern.

The Mozilla Italia Team at "Fa' la cosa giusta", from left to right: Andrea, Giuliano, Michele, Iacopo, Giacomo, Elisabetta, Giovanni, Francesco, Simone and last but not least Stefano (he wasn't present at the booth when we took the group photograph).

(Translated from French)

In another life, I was a Wikipedia contributor. Not full-time contribution, but I would give a hand from time to time, mostly by correcting and translating texts. Actually, my involvement in the FLOSS world started at the event Paris Capital du Libre (Paris Capital of the Libre), more specifically during Richard Stallman's speech, in which he described "the user's Human Rights". I immediately adhered to this ideal of knowledge-sharing under the form of source code. Freedom in using code, freedom to modify, freedom of sharing... A beautiful concept that made me want to start helping Wikipedia, the universal and free online encyclopedia project.

But how have I come from Wikipedia to Mozilla?

The Ubuntu party was the first real contact. I remember going there out of curiosity, with my camera, thinking I could make a good video documentary. That's when I met the Mozilla Europe team, who were all really friendly from the start. Pascal described to me the ideology of the French Mozilla Association, as well as the contributors, the goals, and Mozilla's implication in the world of Free Software.

- "So, what about you? What are you currently working on?"

I mumble about my small experiences, my masters degree in computer science, my modest translation activities -modest because absolutely amateur-like. But everyone has always told me that motivation counts more than anything.

And that was when I told them I was really motivated. Then followed what gamers call an Aggro -or attracting the opponent's attention on one's self.

- “Oh, so you know all about SVN, LDAP, HTML, CSS... ?”

Well, yes, it's part of my studies...

- “And would you be interested in contributing to Mozilla?”

Well, yes, but what could I possibly do?

- “Oh, don't worry about that...!"

And that's how I became a contributor.

That's also how I found myself, two months later, in Brussels for FOSDEM. Housed by another contributor (thanks again Benoît!), I was able to meet many more contributors and exchange many things, without ever having seen them before. And I also got to know other Mozilla communities, and attend great conferences.

"'Join the army!' they said, 'Join the army!'" (- Asterix)

Zbignew Braniecki (Gandalf) – Mozilla Community Sites Project

• contribute.mozilla.org is meant to be the entry point for contributors to Mozilla projects.
• There is a Big Circle – the Mozilla Project as a whole - consisting of many smaller circles – the different projects with their own circle of contributors.
• A community of action is made up of people + catalyst + environment
• While the people are the contributors and the catalyst represents the different reasons contributors choose to take part in the project, the MCS (Mozilla Community Site) will provide people with an environment to create and build the community.
• This project is consistent with Mozilla's goals of promoting participation and creating a community of communities.
• The MCS offers a template for a front page, a news site, a wiki section, forum, blogs. Also, the community widgets will integrate Mozilla data on the community site, combining it with local information.
• The new community logo can be personalized, it is meant to be a unifying element, a layer between communities and the official Mozilla branding. Unlike other brand logos, this one has a liberal licensing and can be personalized according to the community's preference.
• As far as the content management system is concerned, for smaller communities WordPress is recommended, as it is easier to maintain, it's easy to extend and it offers an out-of-the-box solution which needs less time to set up. For bigger communities, Drupal is recommended because it is a powerful and complex system which offers more possibilities for personalization and can support more extensions.
• The MCS uses HTML 5 and easy to modify CSS.
• For forums, the CMS project offers phpBB3 or punBB
• The community sites can also implement a Planet, which is dynamic update system for decentralized projects which aggregates the info on a single page,
• For more information on this, visit wiki.mozilla.org/MCS

John Slater – Community and Design

• The Creative Collective is meant to apply the community building existing already around different Mozilla projects to design.
• Existing initiatives in this area: the Firefox 3.0 T-Shirt design contest, the Ubiquity logo design, the T-Shirt community store, the Mexico logo design contest
• There is a design community around Mozilla, but it is not organized and lacks focus.
• The Creative Collective can help designers gain exposure by posting and sharing their Mozilla-related designs, they can connect with other designers, improve their skills and participate in design challenges which will provide focus and a sense of friendly competition
• It is an open source approach to visual design and it is about connecting people and the community
• The end result is good design which will be a powerful way to spread the word about Mozilla using widely distributed art to convey a message and the power of a community
• Slides of the talk can be found here.