European Mozilla Community Blog

Firefox dominating in Macedonia

Gorjan Jovanovski (Macedonia) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:24:00 +0200

Even though the Republic of Macedonia is a young IT country, Firefox already dominates the browser market share way above most European counties. We have gathered info from 4 of the leading Macedonian sites and did a sum up of the statistics. The numbers were great!

The Numbers are the following:

1. Mozilla Firefox - 62.3825%
2. Internet Explorer - 18.7275%
3. Google Chrome - 10.4125%
4. Opera - 5.535%
5. Apple Safari - 2.175%
6. Other Browsers - 0.7675%

Add your own Firefox's 5th birthday place here

Bogomil Shopov — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:54:00 +0300

If you are planning something for Firefox's 5th birthday, please add your spot here by sending me location (city, country) and more details or link to contact(at)bgzilla.org or leave me a comment here.

Mozilla Firefox Catches up with Internet Explorer in Bulgaria

Bogomil Shopov — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:00:00 +0300

According to the Novinite website , In terms of market share, Mozilla Firefox is a lot more popular in Bulgaria than it is globally, and appears to be catching with Internet Explorer.

This becomes clear from data about the market share of the Internet browsers in Bulgaria in September provided by the metric agencies Gemius and Nielsen, as cited by the Pari Daily.

Internet Explorer has a 52,4% market share in Bulgaria, whereas Firefox is used by 39,1%. This contrasts with the global market shares of the two most popular browsers. Globally, Internet Explorer has 65,7%, whereas Mozilla Firefox has 23,75%.

In September 2009, Firefox increased its global market share by 0,77%, whereas Internet Explorer lost 1,26%.

Another major difference between the Bulgarian market of Internet browsers is that the Norwegian browser Opera is the third most popular with a share of 4,43%, whereas Apple’s Safari is out of the top 3.

Here are some more statistics about browsers in Bulgaria.

Some Thoughts on Firefox’s Fifth Birthday

Bogomil Shopov — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:15:00 +0300

Firefox’s fifth anniversary arrived. Looking at my SFX account, it is almost as old as the browser, but I started using this way of thinking much earlier, at the times of Mosaic and Netscape, but that’s another topic.

The presents are the most important thing in a birthday party. But if we are talking about Firefox’s birthday the most important topic would be the web-freedom. Most of the people I know use Firefox. I also know people, who have been using the browser before it was called that way, but so few of them understand the meaning of Open Web, which is really a pity.

It is true, that spirit, beer and cake are very important for a birthday, but it is even more important for this fifth anniversary that we could find many new people, understanding the open web and contributing to its development.

Who creates the Bulgarian web?

Years ago the answer to this question inevitably would have been “The web companies”; the companies, which first launched websites, made them popular and attracted many users; the ones, which developed the Bulgarian web through many new portals, services, discounts, advertisements, and so on and so forth. If you ask them now – “Who makes the Bulgarian web?” they would answer “We do”; if we ask the people on the streets, they would probably answer the same: “They do”.

But that’s not true. You, creating and sharing content every day, commenting, writing, blogging, uploading pictures and video, publishing articles in Wikipedia and anywhere else, YOU create the Bulgarian web, not the companies, remember that! Things are changing at a breakneck speed and while years ago the web companies created the web, now they are just a small part of the whole cloud of everyone, included in the task and taking part in it, willing or not. The web-evolution started a long time ago and YOU are a part of it. YOU CREATE THE BULGARIAN WEB.

I believe that’s the spirit for a Firefox birthday party; it must clarify and teach, not just to gather people, who know what Firefox is to drink beer and talk loudly. That’s why we launched a campaign to make this happen. From October 14th until November 9th the Mozilla Bulgaria Team will present about 6 lectures in different places around the country, telling of the open web, our freedom, the personal space of each of us and the way we can protect it in the Internet. We will be discussing open standards, explaining what Firefox is and why we should celebrate on November 9th not only an anniversary, but something bigger: the realized notion that web – this is you.

Run, Firefox, run!

Jean-Bernard Marcon — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:57:00 +0200

running with FirefoxEvery year in Tours, France by the end of September we have a very popular running race (10 and 20 kms) in the downtown center. It is a kind of festive occasion with music and disguise, and serious athlete competitors are there, looking for performance, along with amateur joggers, just having fun together during a little effort. School boys and girls also take part (with more adapted distances).
All in all, more than 13 000 runners were running under a bright sun on September 27th.

As it is an occasion for every kind of company to sponsor runners with t-shirts, why not promote our favourite Open Source browser?

Thanks to Mozilla, 20 runners were proudly showing their love for Firefox 3.5 on t-shirts.

Here is young Miss Firefox, for her first time on the race, with ehm veterans...

During the race, she runs along with competitors clad in Indians

and animals of every kind

among serious runners

There was also Sylvain Naudin, who plays an active part in several local associations to promote Open Source and Open Culture.
(see his flickr gallery for more)

After 10 kms and a little more than one hour running, here we are at last !

And of course, let's recover during the paëlla party!

Hey, I am sure you have local events where you can promote Firefox for a mainstream audience. Tell us about local actions!

Go, Mozilla, Go!

Meet Milos Dinic, Serbian Contributor

Delphine Lebédel — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:18:00 +0200

Hello Milos. First of all, how old are you and were do you come from?

I was born and raised in the city of Niš, Serbia, and I'm 24 years old.

You are a contributor for the Serbian Mozilla Community. What do you contribute to exactly?

Mozilla Srbija, Serbian Mozilla Community, is involved in many different Mozilla projects. The very first project of our community was the translation of the Mozilla.com website in Serbian.

More specifically, I helped translating some well known Mozilla websites, such as Mozilla.com, Firefox support website (SUMO), Mozilla add-ons website (AMO) and Mozilla Europe. Furthermore, I'm pretty active in SUMO developing area, having successfully completed some quite complex and important activities with the Mozilla WebQA team in the last couple of months. Besides the above mentioned activities, I occasionally write a patch or two for Mozilla add-ons site, trying to help developers.

So in the end, while translating, I came across many other Mozilla projects, and got interested in them. Which is why I'm now actively participating in several projects.

How long have you been contributing to Mozilla?

My first contact with the global Mozilla community was during the winter of 2008. I followed events on the #xul talkings on Mozilla IRC server, as well as tutorials on the MDC site. At the beginning I wasn't too active, but as time passed, I was more and more involved. A few months later I met Pascal Chevrel, who guided me during translations efforts of the Mozilla websites. From that time on, I've been an active member for the Mozilla community.

And what has made you want to contribute to Mozilla? Did you already have any contacts with Mozilla before you started to contribute?

The very first contact with Mozilla was Firefox. After having tried other well known Web browsers, I discovered Firefox and decided to use it for good. As a logical step after Firefox, I started to use using Thunderbird, and later Sunbird.

As I said before, I began by looking for some 'online' help with XUL. After the MDC website, I found the Mozilla IRC server and registered my nickname on it. Several days spent on the #xul channel led me to other channels on the server, where I noticed that many people volunteer in various Mozilla projects. After a few days well spent in getting to know the localization associates, I realized that the work of a contributor is very pricy and respected, and that really got me overjoyed. Furthermore, I saw that I could help, and that what I do will help other community members, so I decided that I would - to the possible extent - help the community, as I really value the time and effort other people have spent helping me.

While working on all these projects, I realized the value of all of this: the communities that work on these projects, as well as directly on the software, are simply invaluable. So I am very happy to have the opportunity to participate a bit in such great things.

While working on all above-mentioned projects, I got to know in more detail how the community works, breaths and creates great software, and I can tell you that I am really proud that I had the opportunity to contribute to its success.

I have heard that you have recently started translating the Mozilla Europe Website in Serbian. What can you tell us about this experience?

Yes. Few weeks ago, I began work on translating the Mozilla Europe website into Serbian language. As there are currently very few active members in our community, so far we have not had the time nor or the courage to initiate this project. However, we are now ready, and I hope that we will soon see the Mozilla Europe Serbian site on the way

Mozilla Europe, as part of the global Mozilla community, is really incredible. Although the goal of all our efforts is to promote and improve Mozilla products and websites, this community is very much responsible for the great success of our projects in Europe. In a world of information technology, much less attention is paid to spread awareness in smaller countries, and that is exactly what Mozilla Europe is trying to correct. All European Communities are equal, and all have the same privileges. What I find wonderful, is that a lot of attention is paid to countries from Southeastern Europe, and thus given a chance to local contributors to promote their country and language. It is very important that on these sites communities get a lot of the integrity to use their language and communities have equal opportunities to present themselves in the best possible way.

Is there anything you would like to add, a message that you would like to pass around?

I'd like to thank all contributors for making our world a place where this great community exists, as well as for honestly accepting new people that come in, and for trying to make things better... I would especially like to thank all Mozilla developers and all others involved in projects, for endless support and community promotion.

At the end, I would like to send a message to all reading this text that they should drop by, at least briefly, to feel the atmosphere among Mozillians, or even contact us. The goal of everything we do is to ease the work, dissemination of knowledge and friendship... and all are welcome!

Mozilla Service Week in the local Catalan Community: Part 1

Alina Mierluș — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:09:00 +0200

Mozilla Service Week, one of the newest projects of Mozilla, is all about helping people to discover the Internet and teaching them to use it for improving their community/project/organization. We started to help Mozilla Service Week a few weeks ago by translating it in our language (Catalan). We have been thinking that the project is a perfect opportunity to help our local community and enable good things to happen in our society, and at the same time, offering others ideas about how they could improve their own community.

The Web has been a serious change in our lives. The Web helped a lot of people in many different ways. But, let's think about it: How the world and our local society could change if more people knew how to use it at its “full capacity”? Do people really know about all the benefits of the Web? How and where could they find the information they need? Do organizations and associations really know how to use the social network in order to have more fans or recruit more members, or promote their activities? Do all people really know about the importance of being up-to-date? Or, how using an open source CMS can simplify their work on developing their personal web page? And how about using all that in their own region?

Some days ago, Mark Surman (executive Director at Mozilla Foundation) commented on his blog about Drumbeat Project , where he stated that “Europe is particularly a good place to start with this kind of local events strategy”. We share his point of view, and we would like to approach this to our closer local reality, which we know the most. So, we decided to join the challenges:

We started on Saturday by volunteering 5 hours to help a cultural association to use some social networks, so they can make a better promotion within their local community. Moreover, we have helped them to set up a blog by using an open source CMS.

Next Saturdayday we are going to participate at Free Software Day (Barcelona, Catalonia) by giving a speech about Mozilla's causes, specially focused in Mozilla Service Week program, and a practical Internet support session as well.

We are also currently preparing with Citilab Cornellà, a telecenter focused on innovation and knowledge, a special event devoted to local communities and local Internet society, on September 22th. We would like to celebrate the global One Web Day and discuss about which local community strategies should we follow in order to promote and create an Open Web movement in Catalonia.

We will explain our achievements with a latter post, and we would like to invite all local communities around Europe to write here about their projects during Mozilla Service Week. This could greatly help other local communities with ideas and inspiration and this will also offer us a better future understanding on how Mozilla Service Week developed around Europe.

Firefox Promotion in the Republic of Macedonia - Part 3

Gorjan Jovanovski (Macedonia) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 22:10:00 +0200

Well everyone, the promotion has finished! The weather and the Macedonia - Scotland soccer match kept people in their houses, but we still got plenty of visitors. 3 hours of fun on the city square in Skopje and Kumanovo was great. People came, they got to know the Firefox browser, the +5000 addons, Mozilla and the Macedonian promotion team.

But words cannot do anything here, so thanks to Damjan Arsovski, we have a bunch of nicely shot pictures of the Skopje promotion.

Dig in to our Flickr gallery, here. For more info about the promotion itself and the group can be found in this blog post.

Firefox Promotion in the Republic of Macedonia - Part 2

Gorjan Jovanovski (Macedonia) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:04:00 +0200

Well guys, only a single day to go until the Firefox promotion here in Skopje and Kumanovo. The whole team is very excited to let you know all the things we have accomplished so far here in Macedonia:

Pre-promotion:

Printing and burning CD's with the Macedonian and Albanian locale of Firefox 3.5.2 was a priority. [preview]

Marketing and spreading the word was also on the top of the to-do's list. Apart from flayers that we will distribute before the promotion, we have gotten support from a local marketing company, which offered us billboards free of charge! They got them up yesterday. preview / design preview

We also did a TV interview with a local TV station about the group and it's activities:

Promotion:

Setting up around 3pm, the promotion is scheduled to start around 4pm, both in Skopje and Kumanovo.

We will have 3 laptops ready for people to experiment with Firefox 3.5.2 and 2 team members on stand-by to help them out. On each laptop, there will be a separate set of Addons, each deigned for a specific person (designer, programmer, social junkie).

On the other side, we will have yet another laptop, but on this one there will be a presentation set up, a set of Firefox questions to be precise. All that will be interested, can stop by and test their knowledge of Firefox's features. The questions will be very easy, and for each participent there will be a prize (badge, FF tattoos, set of stickers, neck-strap...). If a person gets the question wrong, the team member will explain to all the present bystanders what the right answer is and why.

Every hour we will be giving out free Firefox installation CD's with a custom designed menu on Macedonian and Albanian, setup for FF 3.5.2 and a guide for Internet Explorer users.

Post-promotion:

We plan to make the group an official organization. Also, we shall not forget Thunderbird

Well everyone, that's all for now, if you can make it to the promotion, we will be very happy, and as for those that are outside the Republic of Macedonia, you can catch the live stream on our webpage: link

Till next time!

Firefox Promotion in the Republic of Macedonia

Gorjan Jovanovski (Macedonia) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:57:00 +0200

Hi everyone, I am very excited to be the first Macedonian author here on the Mozilla Europe Blog. I am also very happy to announce that the Republic of Macedonia now has it's very own Mozilla Promotion Team named Mozilla Macedonia! Because the so called "Internet Boom" just recently took over the Republic of Macedonia, things in the IT sphere are just starting up. So a few enthusiasts got the idea to create a Mozilla promotion team here. From the black-board, the idea grew into reality, forming Mozilla Macedonia in 2 cities around the Republic of Macedonia: Skopje (capital) & Kumanovo].

Although the Republic of Macedonia is young as an IT country, more than 58% of it's internet users use Firefox! As our first course of action, we will hold a Firefox promotion in our 3 cities on the 5th of September. Handing out Firefox 3.5 CD's (Macedonian & Albanian install, Macedonian & Albanian Menus, Firefox stickers, badges and neck-straps are part of the plan). Media attention will be big, so that's a big plus!

We welcome you all to attend in the city nearest you on the 5th of September, 17:00 o'clock on the city square. See you there and have a Mozilla-rific day!

UPDATE: The Bitola promotion has been postponed for sometime later this year.

Firefox rocked the Vieilles Charrues music festival in France

Irina Sandu (Romania) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:58:00 +0300

The Vieilles Charrues festival is the biggest music festival in France, which takes place in the heart of Brittany and attracts more than 200,000 people every year. This edition brought world-famous rock stars like Bruce Springsteen, Lenny Kravitz, Moby, Placebo and.... Firefox.

The beloved browser had its own place in a tent shared with the Ubuntu team, called the Mozilla Web Cafe. In it there were computers, Wi-Fi and Firefox, where festival-goers could surf the web, get swag and meet the community. Every hour approximately 250 people visited the Mozilla Web Cafe for 3 days of festival.

Besides telling people about how awesome Firefox is, we also wanted to share information about the Mozilla Project and the mission. For this, we printed the Mozilla brochure, which contains all the important information about the project, the organization and the technology. We also gave out a lot of buttons, neckstraps and tattoos, took pictures and made some cool videos, which we will soon share with you.

A big thanks to the festival organizers for inviting us to promote the Open Web and Open Source at the festival. A special hat-tip to Greg Coustenoble, Kevin Hinault, and Sonny Piers for manning the booth during 3 fun-filled and exhausting days You guys ROCK !!!

For pictures, go here.

Tell your story at MozCamp Europe 2009

Irina Sandu (Romania) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:29:00 +0300

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

Firefox 3.5 Launch Parties in Catalonia

Alina Mierluș — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:04:00 +0200

A few weeks ago, Mozilla Catalan team celebrated the launch of the new 3.5 version of Firefox.

The first community party we organised was in The 1916, an Irish Pub in Cerdanyola del Vallès, a town close to Barcelona and just 2 days after the new browser release. Our local community enjoyed a great time whereas we explained the aim of Mozilla project to both habitual clients and supporters who came deliberately to the celebration.

Two weeks later, a second party took place at Espai Mallorca, a cultural site devoted to the Mediterranean Island in the very Barcelona city centre. Over 30 people participated and joined in interesting discussions about what Open Web means and the new improvements of Firefox 3.5.

Eduard Gamonal held a short presentation about the new features and showed a series of demos about how Firefox 3.5 actually upgrades the Web.

Toni Hermoso introduced the new Ubiquity 0.5, localised in Catalan as well, and talked about the new concept of communication with the browser by using the natural language.

Diana Coromines held a short practical presentation about how to translate articles in SUMO and she invited the participants to get involved by explaining the benefits of having support in your own language.

Alina Mierluș closed the session by making a presentation about the importance of collaborating, where she presented the advantage of being a community member and also, a few of the newest Mozilla initiatives, in which people from any kind of background or location can join in, such as Mozilla Service Week or Mozilla Creative Collective.

Afterwards, we enjoyed a Majorcan food snack and all attendees received the new Firefox 3.5, some Mozilla Firefox Goodies and calendars.

We prepared free USB sticks with Fedora 11 with Firefox 3.5 included and Firefox 3.5 portable for Mac OS X.

We would like to thank our collaborators for making Barcelona party happen: Fundació .cat, Consell de Mallorca and Espai Mallorca, Mozilla Europe and, last but not least, Fedora Linux Catalan Community, which prepared for us a customised and fully-localised distribution with the new Firefox 3.5 up-to-date available by default.

Firefox 3.5 launch parties in Romania

Irina Sandu (Romania) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:35:00 +0300

As far as Firefox 3.5 launch parties are concerned, Romania was not a country to be left behind. We had not one, but two events celebrating the launch of the world-acclaimed browser.

The first one, chronologically speaking, was organized in the beautiful city of Cluj, in the heart of Romania. Over 30 people gathered in the pub chosen for the event over beer, cake and Firefox swag. A special, big and yummy Firefox 3.5 cake was made for the ocassion. The first thing on the agenda was the viewing of the Meet Firefox 3.5 video, where Mike Beltzner gives "A quick overview of what makes Mozilla’s latest browser so great". Now that everybody was up-to-date, the feasting on the cake could begin.

In Bucharest, the party had a more academic feel, as it took place on the university campus, and had a similar format: presentations first and drinks and food later. This time there were two talks: the first was about the new features in Firefox 3.5 and the second, more designer-oriented, was focusing on the new HTML technologies Firefox supports. The second part of the celebration consisted of beer, pizza and ice cream at the nearby pub. More photos here.

Now, for the people who helped organize the parties, I want to give thanks to the wonderful enthuziasts who joined Mozilla in celebrating another successful launch and made sure the parties were a success. Among them there are Stas Sushkov, Tibi Turbureanu and Nicu Buculei. Thank you guys!

Photo credits: Stas Sushkov and Nicu Buculei

Mozilla Community Sites (MCS), theme, phpBB, what is going on

Jesper Kristensen (Denmark) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:03:00 +0200

The MCS Project has been almost dead since around February, and currently consists of a theme, a static HTML implementation of the theme and the rough beginnings of implementations for Drupal, MediaWiki, phpBB and WordPress. On the Danish Mozilla community web site, we want to use use MCS, because we want to upgrade our phpBB and MediaWiki, but we don't want to have all the work of upgrading their themes. MCS is a good opportunity for us to share that work with other Mozilla communities. In June in Geneve, we met with the German Firefox community, which also had plans to use MCS on their web site. We therefore agreed, that the Danish and German communities should bring the MCS project back to life and even lead the project if required.

Plans

Both the Danish and German community wants to focus on bringing MCS to a state, where it can be used on our respective web sites. For the Danish community that means a working phpBB and MediaWiki theme as well as a simple PHP theme. For the German community that means a working phpBB theme, and I cannot remember if it was Drupal or WordPress they used. Advanced things such as Single Sign On, OpenID and integrated search is not something we want to do right now.

Status

During the last weeks, I have worked on the HTML theme and the phpBB theme. Current work can be seen in the bug.

In the HTML theme I have converted Builder (a theme customization script) from PHP to JS, to improve performance. The two copies of the HTML theme (one of which included Builder and therefore did not work without PHP) had diverged too much, and I have therefore merged them into one. I have also reworked how Builder looks. (See the Builder button in the row below the site name)

The phpBB version of MCS was basically a 3½ page implemented and more than 70 pages remaining. To be fair, the 3½ pages already done was the biggest ones, but there was still a long way to go. During the last couple of weeks, I have almost finished the phpBB theme.

Help wanted

There is still a long way to go before MCS is useful. Please help out. You could work on a theme for one of the other systems, just like I did for phpBB, no graphical skills required.

If you do have graphical skills, I could very much use your help on the last touches of phpBB, as I have none whatsoever. Here is a buglist (the current Mozilla Europe Blog theme seems to screw up lists, so please imagine the bullets, if you do not read this in a feed reader):

The color and size of the text (while looking very nice) made it unreadable for anyone above 40, and probably a lot of people below 40 also. I have tried to make it more readable, but probably made the layout less pretty while doing so. The font size also needs to be fixed on the main theme.
Some of the headlines in the phpBB theme are squeezed tight against other elements and needs some air. Reply to a topic is a good example. I need help on how to do it and to decide how much space is needed.
Tabs are used in the User Control Panel and Moderator Control Panel (Log in and then use the link in the top blue bar). I got the tab layout from the MCS Style Guide, but I don't have the background texture, and the styling of the tab content I have made up myself (which of course looks ugly). Getting a PNG from the Style Guide and styling the tab content is something I need help on.
The breadcrumbs bar needs to be put somewhere nice.

So what are you waiting for? If you have graphical skills, you don't need to use more than a few minutes to tell me how to make the last touches of phpBB look good.

If you are interested in developing MCS or using MCS, please let me know.

Also: I need to get my changes pushed to the MCS repository. If you can do that, please help. They are on my own hg server.

10th Libre Software Meeting in Nantes

Cédric Corazza (France) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:40:00 +0200

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.

Firefox 3.5 release party in Budapest, Hungary

Kálmán Kéménczy — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0200

One week after the release of Firefox 3.5, the Hungarian Firefox Community organized a party to celebrate the release of the latest and greatest version of Firefox. Nearly thirty friends of Firefox met at Henry J. Bean's Bar & Grill and celebrated the Firefox 3.5.

We discussed various topics related to Firefox from the new version itself to the community related questions and some subjects from developers' point of view. We got lots of fun. I think everyone enjoyed this meeting and we all are happy with Firefox relics.

The biggest surprise comes from three of our community members. They made a wonderful cake filled with nut cream. It was very tasty.

To conclude the meeting was successful, moreover got publicity. The origo, the most popular Hungarian news portal reported from this event on front page, and “MR1 - Kossuth Radio” station of Hungarian Radio also presented a report with us. It is a great honor for us, as Kossuth Radio is the main national broadcaster station in Hungary with the greatest tradition.

Thanks to KAMI to organize this event and happy celebrating!

Ask Tristan a question

Irina Sandu (Romania) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:31:00 +0300

Tristan Nitot of Mozilla Europe will be hosting a live chat on the Web User website (www.webuser.co.uk) on Friday, the 3rd of July at 12:30 BST (that's British Standard Time). He will be answering questions about the recent Firefox 3.5 launch and the floor will be open to anyone who wants to ask Tristan a question about the browser.

All you need to do to take part in the chat is visit www.webuser.co.uk/livechats at 1230BST on Friday 3 July. Questions and comments will be moderated.

Everybody is welcome to participate.

Getting help for localization work

Abdulkadir Topal (Germany) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 02:14:00 +0200

Two weeks ago some of the European localization teams met in Geneva to talk about the different approaches European localization teams have taken to support Mozilla users in their countries. It became obvious that there are as many possible ways as localization teams to do that. In Germany for example we have one community per product, mostly for historical reasons. That means that Thunderbird has its own localizer, website, forums, community etc. and Firefox has its own localizer etc, the same goes for Seamonkey, Calender, etc. In Spain everything Mozilla related is concentrated on one website, in France it's split by area, so support is one community, localization is another, developer docs is another one, etc.

But one thing that is common to all is the problem in finding new people to work on the teams longterm. Francesco put it quite bluntly: "always the same faces" And he is right, almost all of the contributors meeting in Geneva were either founders of the localization teams or had joined years ago, when the project was still in its infancy. This poses a big problem for the local communities, while the number of users is growing as well as the number of websites to localize for the growing number of marketing campaigns (like the world record) and additional Mozilla services (like amo or sumo) the number of localizers stays mostly the same. That means more work for the same number of people, and keep in mind, that every single localization team consists completely of volunteers. Volunteers aren't payed, they have to study or work for a living. Of course, localizers do what they do, because they believe in it, but even then the day has only 24 hours.

So we talked about ways to get people interested in the localization work and it became apparent, that it's not about getting people interested, there is a lot of interest, but mostly short term, people stay just long enough to learn, how the work is done and then they are gone, and you start again to teach the next one. It was quite interesting to listen to how people there in the meeting room became interested in Mozilla. Did you know that SUMO superstar David Tenser was drawn in by the cute Gecko icon? My interest was sparked by Beonex, the absolutely secure but absolutely unusable Mozilla fork. The point is: everyone has a unique story, how he (yes it's mostly he) got involved. I guess there are very few people who were actually asked to participate and then just agreed. Most of the time it's either unintentional or by immanent motivation, not external stimulation.

Knowing that is great, but how do you operationalize that theory? It was only when we were talking about the fact that most of the localizers had been there from the very beginning, that I realized, who was sitting next to me. My team mates Michael and Thomas have joined the German localization team less than 2 years ago, and they have been indispensable ever since. So, apparently it is possible to get new volunteers into an established localization team, even longterm. Of course that rises the question, just how exactly we did it. And the short answer is: by accident. The slightly longer is: there are many factors, so it's hard to nail it down, especially if it happened by accident, but apparently the key is to step down and make place for other people. Yes, it seems to be as easy as that.

When the Sumo project started Henrik and I tried to manage it additionally to all of our traditional duties, but it was quite clear that we had no chance of maintaining it by ourselves. Along came Thomas: he started to have a closer look at our work and got involved more and more. Pretty soon he was the most active person on SUMO and I had to ask David to give him approval rights because I couldn't keep up with approving all of his work. Since then he took over SUMO and is now actively responsible for that work and he is doing an awesome job. The same goes for Michael and his work on the website localization.

This is actually a success story, and I think the key points were, that we (1) needed help within a specific area, a transfer of the help documentation from in-product help to SUMO, and that (2) Henrik and I handed over the responsibility for that area completely to Thomas. It's one thing to contribute little bits and pieces to a projects, but it's a completely different thing to own it.

But of course like I said, everybody has his own unique story, and this is no panacea, but it's probably worth a try. Single out a task you need help with, don't ask for general help, be as specific as possible. Then, if you find someone and you are happy with their contribution, offer them to hand that area over. Yes, this does not work without a leap of faith, you have to let go of something that you might have build up, but in then end you'll be better off.

Interview with Marie Alhomme, European Mozilla Community Blog theme designer

Irina Sandu (Romania) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:18:00 +0300

Marie Alhomme is the one who designed this new cool theme for the European Mozilla Community Blog. She is the winner of the theme design contest organized by Mozilla and Dotclear and I had the pleasure of finding out some more about her and the story behind the design so I can share it with you.

Can you tell me a bit about you: where do you live and what do you do for a living?

I live in Avignon, I'm 29 and I'm a webdesigner/front-end developer, or at least I think that's what I'm called.

Basically, I design identities (logos, etc), webpages, and produce them in xHTML/CSS/JS. I specialize in accessibility and respect of standards.

How did you find out about the Mozilla/Dotclear contest?

I've been using Dotclear pretty much from the beginning and recently decided to upgrade my own site to the latest version. That got me on the new website for Dotclear, where the announce was pretty visible. Plus, I had a reminder in the admin webpage of the new version once installed.

Can you tell us how you came up with the design for the theme and what was your inspiration?

Well, I've always been amazed and awed by Mozilla and what it has accomplished in freeing the web and enabling web workers like me to be even better developers (I'm thinking Firefox and fighting for standards and all that that means), and when I talked about the contest I just could not find one idea to illustate the proposed concepts (open source, collaboration, etc) that would not be "boring", or seen before.

When I talked to people about it, I explained that in that respect I felt like the proverbial worm that fell in love with a star. Well, I had the star mixed up with the moon, but the point of the original story is the same. I thought it would be cool to have that worm, green like my Poupoui, my symbol, gazing up at a "Firefox-hugged" moon, and then discovered I couldn't modify the Firefox logo. So I decided to do it the other way around and tadaaa!

But I was skeptical at first and a lot of people had to push me to participate, I thought my take on it would be too personal to get any attention in the contest. But in the end I'm quite happy, because it IS what I feel like toward Mozilla, Dotclear, and all the open source initiatives.

I also had tremendous help from Sylvain Leconte, a great designer and illustrator, who took my pitiful drawing on a piece of paper and my first illustrator comp and actually drew a worm that looked like one (and the pole and first version of the satellite). I can't not mention him, he's very responsible for my success here.

So you use open source software. Which are the ones you use the most?

Good question, not as much as I'd like... Dotclear and Firefox, obviously, Thunderbird. I also have Ubuntu on my laptop but am not very good with it.

Have you ever contributed to an open source project?

Yes, Dotclear a little (helping in the forums, modifying a plugin, etc), SPIP (modifying a plugin's CSS), and my own (close-to-defunct) open source project, the Pouiblio, which is kind of a very lightweight virtual library to keep your books tracked, but I haven't been able to work on it by lack of knowing how.

PHP is not my strongsuit, even though I love using it in my very basic way. I also try to provide translations for articles or software every time I have the opportunity and the time.

I read on your blog that you are a supporter of Web standards. Why do you think they are important?

They're essential ! I don't know how we could hope having a "real" Internet without standards to support it. If any software vendors tries to do it's own stuff, it's just not going to happen. I mean, it's like trains : if every region in France were to have its own type of rails, nothing would work anymore.

Having supported standards (having standards alone is useless) is more than important : it allows us to provide the users with a more complete and agreable experience, it allows for innovation to thrive, and thus security and confort are even more advanced.

You take part in organizing a series of events called "W3cafe". What is the concept behind the events and what are your goals?

The W3Cafe is organized by the three members (for France) of the International Liaison Group of the W'SP (Web Standards Project). Aurélien Levy and Thierry Regagnon are the other two. The goal of the W3Cafes is to provide accessibility and standards minded people with a place to unite and talk about the web, its technologies and evolution, trade tricks and tips, debate on important questions, and this in the form of conferences or workshops.

But nothing too academic. We try to have an open discussion between the speakers and the audience, so that both get to take something home from the meeting. We try to have them regurlaly and are planning another one before the next Paris Web 09, and we have some interesting topics planned ! So stay tuned

Tristan Nitot recently gave a presentation at one of your meetings. Can you tell me how it went?

Yes that's true ! To be honest, I'm sure it was absolutely fantastic but I was giving a workshop on CSS with Thierry during Tristan's conference... but I caught the end of it. The audience was totally raptured and involved, which is always a good sign And I got a really cool T-shirt that I keep bragging about, so for me the conference went great

Seriously though, Tristan is a great talker, he gets people's attention, and he explains to them in ways that they can understand, and most importantly, relate to. It involves them. And that guy has an amazing experience and culture, so he's always fascinating to listen to.