Open source events

On the 3rd and 4th of October we will hold Mozilla Camp Europe 2009. This year we will be in the beautiful city of Prague. We hold the event to give everyone in the community a chance to interact face-to-face (yes, we're all real people!) and to exchage ideas and information about the community and the Mozilla project.

This year, we will be holding an Advocacy track, covering all aspects of promoting the project and the Mozilla mission. We would especially like to hear your insights or stories about your local community, how it started, and how you recruited members, or what observations you would make about forming your community - all ideas are welcome.

If you want to make a proposal for a talk, or have any questions, please contact Patrick Finch at patrick at mozilla dot com or me, irina at mozilla-europe dot org.

Photo info: Marek (Aviary.pl) presenting the Polish community - by Gandalf

This year again, the French Mozilla community (and a part of Russian one) attended to the 10th Libre Software Meeting ("Rencontres mondiales du logiciel libre" for its French title) which took place in Nantes. This is one of the biggest FOSS events in France which gathers altogether free software communities, enterprises and local or national government employees during five days, to share experiences.

There were lots of people this year, geeks and real life people and we had very interesting conversations. This was also the occasion to meet old acquaintance from the other communities. The last day, like every year, Richard Stallman gave a conference, and the boothes were moved to another place, downtown in Nantes, in the Isle of Beaulieu. This new location allowed more people to come as it was really in the center of the city. As a bonus, we were located just aside the Machines of the Isle of Nantes and we could attend to the walking of the Royal de Luxe Elephant.

Well, this was a busy and exciting week and we are looking forward next year, where the event will take place in Bordeaux.

See the whole set of photos.

On the 22nd and 23rd of May Bucharest was the host of eLiberatica, a conference about open and free software. It gathered over 350 participants: students, entrepreneurs, members of FOSS communities and Mozillians were among them.

The Romanian community (Irina, Alina, Alex) was joined by William and Gandalf, as well as Toni Hermono from Catalonia.

We had many people come at our booth and gave out a lot of swag. We were very happy to realize just how popular Firefox and Thunderbird are among Romanian developers and encouraged people to explore more the posibilities offered by the technology and build their own extensions. One of the main topics of discussion were the new Firefox 3.5 features and what you can do with the new HTML 5 tags. Paul's demos were the stars at this point. We also met the XWiki team headed by Jerome Velociter, who are using Bespin and have integrated it with the Xwiki platform.

We had Gandalf, Alina and William give a presentation.

Gandalf had a great presentation in the first day of the conference about Mozilla: the Mozilla Mission, One Mozilla and Circles of Community. You can see the slides and details here.

Alina talked about the Romanian community and its role of being a bridge between Romanian people interested in Mozilla and the Mozilla Project. She emphasized how important it is to have a community which helps engage the people in contributing to the Project and spreading the Mozilla Mission. Details and slides here.

William talked about the Campus Reps program and how university students can get involved with Mozilla. He also outlined the various benefits students get: besides the fun involved, promoting Mozilla products can get you a lot of extra knowledge and a job/internship opportunity.

The eLiberatica experience was very helpful for us, the Romanian community, in realizing what we need to do in the future in order to get more contributors and reach a wider audience. It was also amazing to meet people who are excited about Firefox and were eager to find out what is Mozilla going to do next. We will definitely work to maintain and add to the excitement and thus attract more contributors to the Project

Photos from the event are available here and William has some insight about women and open source.

Alina Mierlus and Irina Sandu

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.

Sessions in the different DevRooms followed the morning keynotes. In the Mozilla DevRoom, Tristan Nitot started the sessions with an update of Mozilla Europe's activities:

• In 2008, Mozilla has worked a lot on engaging the community and organizing events where people could meet face to face and socialize in real life.
• Community gatherings: Mozilla Summit in Whistler (July 08) - 400 people, MAOW in Paris (October 08) - 120 people, Mozilla Camp Europe in Barcelona (October 08)- 200 people, MAOW in Madrid (December 08 ) - 50 people, FOSDEM in Brussels (February 09).
• Community tours: German community kick-off, Polish community meeting, Romanian community meeting.
• The future looks bright – many events planned for March: Mozcamp in The Netherlands, MAOW in Berlin, Mozilla participation at CeBit in Hannover, Fa La Cosa Giusta (Do the right thing) in Italy, 4 MozCamps in Poland,
• All these events have been done with the help of the community. Further initiatives from the community are encouraged. The contact person is William Quiviger.
• Mozilla is reaching out to cover new grounds regarding community activities: John Slater started the Creative Collective initiative (meant to build a design community around the Mozilla visual identity), innovation and user interface labs, projects regarding education (Mark Surman lead)
• Some numbers: 1.2 million Firefox downloads a day, 230 million active Firefox users, more than 1 billion add-ons; location of Firefox users: 44% in Europe, 33% in North America, 12% in Asia.
• Towards the end of his presentation, Tristan played the latest community-produced video promoting Firefox. It is called “Firefox in Motion” and here it is:

Next spoke Gervase Markham about the Mozilla Foundation:

• The Mozilla Foundation is the part of Mozilla with a special focus on taking the longer and broader view. In the last year, it has been focussed on making grants and working on community health.
• The Mozilla mission is to promote choice and innovation on the Internet. The Manifesto (available in 19 languages) contains the most important points behind the Mozilla mission.
• Gervase pointed out Mozilla's goals for the next two years, which you can find here
• There are 5 areas the foundation has been focussing on:

1. research: tackle tech problems nobody else is willing to, for example Javascript performance, open video codecs ( Mozilla donated money to support research with Ogg Theora), improving transport protocols,
2. comunity health: the Mozilla Foundation looks at the Mozilla Project as a whole and takes care that everybody is able to do their job more efficiently; like Gerv calls it, "Greasing the wheels".
3. education: an important way of increasing the contributor base. Projects in this area: Seneca College in Toronto, Universidad Rey de Juan Carlos in Madrid. Along with organizing courses at universities, the plan is to make available online courses in Mozilla technologies, as well as a central site which will gather all education-related resources.
4. accessibility: making the Internet available for everybody
5. Mozilla movement: explaining to the world why the Mozilla mission is important for everybody and helps improve everybody's lives; The goal is to engage millions of people and help them understand that the Open Web is important and needs protecting. By understanding, people will learn to value it and be willing to take part in the Open Web.

* Now, people have the opportunity to make restricted donations: they can donate money for a single project - projects eligible are Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey and Accesibility.

Stay tuned for part 3 of FOSDEM 2009.

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Last week, me and Toni Hermoso (from Mozilla.cat) went to Romania to organise some Mozilla presentations in academical institutions. Moreover, with mozilla.ro members and other FLOSS associations from Romania Ceata and Rosedu we participated at a dinner with Tristan Nitot, who visited Bucarest and gave a presentation at NetCamp .

We decided to organise this event, because we really belive that Mozilla can improve a lot its technologies by giving students and teachers the chance to collaborate and to know more about Mozilla products and technologies. This was a really interesting experience for me (as a member of mozilla.ro and collaborator of Mozilla Europe) and Toni. First of all I would like to thank Mozilla Europe for making this event possible and least but not last to our collaborators: Ceata and ROSEdu associations, "Nichita Stănescu" High School from Ploiesti, Faculty of Computers and Automatization (University Politehnica of Bucarest), Faculty of Computer Science ("Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University from Iași). The presentations took two hours in which we exposed several things about Mozilla, open web and localisation. My presentation was about Mozilla Ecosystem (products, development model, community, philosophy and a short introduction into Mozilla histrory). Also, I presented the mozilla.ro community and its activity (a few students became interested in collaborating with us for improving Romanian localisation and helping us to promote better Firefox and Thunderbird in our country). After me, Toni made an interesting presentation about FOSS localisation, the situation of Catalan and Romanian languages regarding localisation, also he presented some translation tools, including Narro (a Romanian web based tool developed by Alexandru, which we are presently using for translating Mozilla applications). The last two sessions were more practical, the first was a general discussion about what open web and open standard means and the second one was a practical laboratory in which we made some demonstrations about how to personalize Firefox, how to use and install Ubiquity, Prism, Personas and some other tricks. At the presentation in Ploiesti, on 2nd december, there were more than 100 attendees (high school students) and 4 professors (who are currently teaching there computer science). I observed that they were very interested on knowing more about Mozilla technologies and products demanding us to show them things like how to install addons, how to change themes, more about the functionalities of Firefox.

On 4th december, in Bucarest we had more than 35 participants at Mozilla presentation, mostly students from Politechnica University of Bucarest. At this presentation we had an interesting discussion about translation of software into Romanian. Whereas I had promoted the use of romanian in computer software, a few participants supported that English is cool and Romanian translation is not really necessary and that other countries exaggerate regarding this aspect. After that, I explained that the use of Romanian language in computer software (inclusively translating open source and free software) is very essential for adopting FOSS solutions in public administrations (but yes, according to one participant, Romanians first of all should know they have access to official documents). The feedback for this presentation was very good, and the students preferred to have more information about open source, how to contribute and help a community, which are the benefits, and also that they would like to have in a future more technical presentations. With the help of Ceata (Ceata in Romanian means group of people) association and ROSEdu (Romanian Open Source Education) we had an excellent event, they organized even a coffee break.

In Iasi, we had 20 participants at the presentation, many of them being web developers, and indirect contributors of Mozilla project (1 of them is developing an extension for ubiquity). It was very interesting to discover teachers who are teaching about web technologies and who are using open source technologies for their classes (one of the teachers is also proposing the development of Firefox and Ubiquity extensions as final course projects).

As a final conclusion, the event was very appealing and interesting and we received much feedback from the participants. We think that we learned a lot from this experience and we can share it with other Mozilla's members to make the future academical events better (in all Europe). More photos from the event can be found here. I will come back with the final feedback from the participants when available.

Grüzi,

I'm back from a short visit to Zurich in Switzerland, where I covered for Tristan, who was already attending another event. So I had the chance to represent Mozilla at the OpenExpo 2008 with the keynote "Mozilla – between Chaos and Order". Fortunately enough the slides had already been prepared by Tristan and Jane Finette, so I was left with the easy part: Talking about how we channel the contributions of hundreds of independent developers from all over the world and make something useful with it. It was easy to talk about that, since it's been an every day part of my life for the last 6 years. Still, it was great to see the huge interest in Mozilla.

My talk was scheduled right after Bruce Perence's – the guy who wrote the open source definition! - and while I was fiddling with the equipment, the room started to fill up. When I was ready and looked up I was really surprised to see, that the audience had pretty much doubled and some were even standing in the door. Well, I'm usually pretty much self-absorbed, but even I don't think it was because of me. Apparently Mozilla is just a really, really interesting topic. The browser is probably the number 1 app on most peoples desktop and they want to hear about what they can expect from it in the future and how such a huge project like Mozilla is organized.

All in all it was a very interesting event and I even had the chance to talk to people from other open source projects, like the HELMA guys.

By the way: I bought almost 2 Kg of the best chocolate in the world. Should you ever be in Zurich, go to Sprüngli at Bahnhofstr.

Open Expo

With the lake Zurich in the background

That's what you get for 200 Euro/night in Zurich. A room barely bigger than the bed in it.

At least the view was awesome

Last FOSDEM, Mozilla Hispano's members decided to interview in video some Mozilla members to show Spanish users the face of Mozilla.

Because our community is focused on non-English speakers, we had to subtitle all the interviews in Spanish, a work that was delayed because of the Firefox 3 release and other Mozilla related stuff. Fortunately, the Mozilla Europe interns André and Delphine worked with us correcting our transcription and doing the subtitle synchronization.

Finally we have created and uploaded these video-interviews to our portal. You can see them in English with Spanish subtitles, but they are open to other communities. André and Delphine were doing the French subtitles.

We'll try not to delay this kind of things in the future

Watch the interviews.