As you probably know, Mozilla Camp Europe 2008 has just been held in Barcelona. Maybe you were even there. It was a great event - fun and exiting. A thing that amazed me is how much you can get out of meeting people face to face compared to emails and irc.

I learned small but important facts, that I would easily have missed in an email conversation, like that London is not part of Europe and that programmers are not people.

But that's not all. The event was very productive for us in the Danish localization team. Here are some highlights of what we achieved at the event from my point of view:

• Søren (who is responsible for Firefox localization) started work on Firefox 3.1 at Mike Connor's keynote, and we had our first green Firefox 3.1 DA build somewhere in the middle of the Thunderbird UX session. (If you were there and heard a "YAY!" from the back of the room, that was us)
• When we localized Firefox 3.0 in the spring, we tried something new. We used a wiki page to track feedback on the localization. Before that, the feedback was scattered around, and much of it was probably forgotten and never taken care of. I think our system for Firefox 3.0 was pretty good and fulfilled our needs. Unfortunately, when the tree froze for RC1, we dropped everything on the floor, and no one took care to copy all the post-release feedback from our other feedback channels to the wiki. In Barcelona we agreed that something should be done about this now, and shortly after I came home, I sifted through our forum to find all the old bug reports. The wiki is now once again up to date, and I hopefully didn't miss too much feedback.
• Another thing, which was done at the event, is something which started back in late 2005 or early 2006. At that time a now frequently asked question first appeared in our Danish support forum. Not the most frequently asked, but certainly the most annoying, since it is our only FAQ question without a good answer. It has been a long process for me, first figuring out wheat was going on, which was very difficult, then filing a bug and convincing developers that it was actually a bug, which was also not so easy, then learning what C++, NSS, CAs, PKCS#11 and all that stuff is to write a patch. The patch was created in Whistler and reviewed in Barcelona, and finally the bug was FIXED at the event.
• It was interesting to hear news about the Mozilla Community Sites project. We have already seen something in Whistler and on Planet, but there were a few updates. In our local community I am mostly responsible for the technical aspects of running our websites. This mostly include applying security updates to phpBB and MediaWiki, making sure our websites work, backing up the databases, and all the other things on your list of things that should be done but never gets done. I hope that the Mozilla Community Sites project becomes a success, so that I can offload some of these tasks to someone else.
• At the event, I also sat down with hansen (Our Thunderbird localizer and dictionary addon maintainer) to figure out the technical issues around including a Danish dictionary in the Danish localization of Firefox 3.1 and Thunderbird 3.0. Hansen has already had some progress at another event, and we both learned things about the dictionary system in Mozilla, and I think we all agreed that the new dictionary from stavekontrolden.dk is of much better quality than our old dictionary from da.speling.org. We are going to add the danish dictionary to hg very soon, and hansen is working on some magic to make sure that the newest version of the dictionary is always used, when both the old addon and the new builtin dictionary is installed. If any technical experts in the Mozilla dictionary code is reading, they are welcome to answer the questions in the bug.
• Late at Sunday Christian Sejersen (from the mobile team) asked if we (the Danish l10n team) at some time could show him how localization is done. They are in the very beginning of Fennec localization right now. Unfortunately that was an hour after Søren had finished localization of mozilla-central. But we agreed to meet within the next weeks or so in Denmark, and I am looking forward to that.

This is just some of the things that happened for me at the Mozilla Camp Europe 2008, and I haven't even mensioned the sessions or the lovely city of Barcelona. I am totally amazed about how much happened and how much got done in one weekend, just because a bunch of nice people got together face to face. I hope to see all of you again soon.