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.