Tag - MECT

Hey!

One of the great things of the MECT is that we get to meet people with a lot of interesting ideas and projects.

We are glad to have made a detour in Macedonia to Strumica on our road to Skopje. We met there a bunch of people really interested in Mozilla and Open Source and putting their ideas in action. They have created an open source school where they give development courses. They are only at the beginning of their project and are striving to spread the word about open web and free software. We visited the place and they would have liked us to stay longer to do some presentations but unfortunately we did not have enough time.

There we met Damian and Novica active Macedonian Mozilla contributor who led us to Skopje. It has been awesome to hang around with these guys who made us visit Skopje and introduced us to the local food. They also introduced us to Branko Cobanov who is in charge of cultural affairs for the French embassy. He was very interested and told us that he is ready to organize other event.

The guys had prepared a huge event. It is really cool to see that people are so interested in those topics and that large audience can be gathered to hear about them in Macedonia. For instance Tony (from Strumica) had assured us, when we met him that he could have gathered in a few days hundreds of people to see our presentations.

And after it has been the bar stuff all over again, with the people the most interested in Mozilla.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of welcoming Arzhel, Greg and Sonny to Bucharest.

After walking for a while around the city to show them a bit of the centre, the City Hall, the University and the second largest building in the world, we headed for the student campus where we had planned a community meeting. There we met Alexandru, who is responsible for localizing Firefox and friends from Ceata, a student organization involved in open source projects.

The community meeting began in a room and continued outside on a hill in the campus on the grass, as the weather was really nice. We talked about everything from the new features in Firefox 3.5, building extensions with XUL, Fennec, Personas, Taskfox, to the Mozilla Education program and future community events.

As every community event should involve food, because it keeps the Mozillians happy, we strolled to a nearby restaurant and continued the discussion over chicken wings with French fries. Beer was involved, also.

The second part of the day was spent by Arzhel helping with the installation of a router for the student organization, while Sonny, Greg and myself where at the nearby bar. We were soon joined by the guys, who needed a beer after successfully installing the router.

The party moved to one of the student dorms, where we ate dinner, talked, laughed and listened to music. The time passed very quickly and only at 1 am did we realize how late it was and that it had almost been 12 hours since the meeting started.

I’m glad that the guys included Bucharest in the MECT and we had so much fun, while also learning many things about Mozilla and open source, that we decided we want to do this again, maybe for MECT number 2. Hope to see you guys soon. The pictures from Romania start with this one.

After a very nice trip with Kairo along the Danube, contributing to OpenStreetMap, giving badges to policemen, we eventually arrived to Vienna. We had an informal meeting in a room of the Contemporary Art Museum.

We met cool people interested in Mozilla technologies. They were, among other stuffs, strongly impressed by the demo of Firefox 3.5 (videos, canvas...), Ubiquity, Weaves, Prism and the Mozilla development platform (XUL, XULRunner...). They were also interested in setting up an Austrian Mozilla community and gave us some other contacts to make it possible.



Then, we hang around in Vienna with some of the people we met and went to a smoky pub. We continued to evangelize there, giving the bar owner the famous victory poster and a Firefox badge to the taxi driver .
After our wifi break we will visit Vienna, interviewing people about Mozilla.

Tomorrow: Hungary! If you're on our road, contact us!

Hello Folks,

As we announced we're throwing the first Mozilla Europe Community Tour (MECT'09 as we call it). We're leaving from Paris on Sunday at 06:00 AM the 5th of April for a three weeks trip in Eastern Europe and Balkans. We have many contacts accross the countries we're going to. And I'm sure it's gonna be a lot of fun. Talking, hacking, drinking... So if you're near any places we're going to, let us know.
To contact us: sonny dot piers at gmail dot com or #europtour on irc.mozilla.org .

Here are our main steps:

The wiki page of our tour is available for the organiser and for anyone who have any idea to propose about this experience. Feel free to edit.

We'll try to put some details of our trip on the map and share here all our experiences with photos and videos.

We just pimped the car for the tour:

PS: We also have a lot of goodies to distribute!

Stay tuned!