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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