This week I had the pleasure of welcoming Tristan Nitot to Bucharest, for a 3 day trip including a conference, press interviews and a community dinner.

On the 3rd of December, in Bucharest there was Netcamp, a conference which deals with the Internet and Web technologies. This edition was about the opportunities the Web brings and how people can take advantage of the countless possibilities available on the World Wide Web. Tristan was the opening speaker and in his presentation he pointed out the advantages presented by open source software and the ways people can get involved and make a change in the world. He also talked about Ubiquity, a project which was already known to some of the audience, which I was happy to find out later.

In the afternoon a few journalists from Romanian newspapers got the chance to interview Tristan, which generated a few nice articles in the press.

The community dinner was certainly the most fun part of the day. Mozilla invited community members and open source enthuziasts to a restaurant in the centre of Bucharest, where we talked about Firefox, Mozilla, open source and the usual chit-chat. I enjoyed meeting Toni Hermoso and Alina Mierlus again, who were in Romania doing a series of presentations about Mozilla for university students. I was also glad to invite two people whom I met at the Firefox 3 launch party we had in June and who in the meantime became my friends (making new friends is just another amazing advantage you have when contributing to Mozilla). Completing the 10 person group there were four students from the University of Bucharest, who are passionate about open source and have started a organization meant to promote Open Web standards and open source technologies. They were eager to find out from Tristan about the way Mozilla is organized, comunities and contributors, open source marketing and Mozilla's plans for the future. For more than four hours, we ate pizza, drank Romanian wine and had a great time.

More pictures on my Flickr account

Irina Sandu