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Thursday, October 8 2009

Run, Firefox, run!

running with FirefoxEvery year in Tours, France  by the end of September we have a very popular running race (10 and 20 kms) in the downtown center. It is a kind of festive occasion with music and disguise, and serious athlete competitors are there, looking for performance, along with amateur joggers, just having fun together during a little effort. School boys and girls also take part (with more adapted distances).
All in all, more than 13 000 runners were running under a bright sun on September 27th.

As it is an occasion for every kind of company to sponsor runners with t-shirts, why not promote our favourite Open Source browser?

Thanks to Mozilla, 20 runners were proudly showing their love for  Firefox 3.5 on t-shirts.

Here is young Miss Firefox, for her first time on the race, with ehm veterans...

miss fx and vets

During the race, she runs along with competitors clad in Indians

Indian runner

and animals of every kind

rabbit   pig  monkey
among serious runners

runners  sylvain

There was also Sylvain Naudin, who plays an active part in several local associations  to promote Open Source and Open Culture.
(see his flickr gallery for more)

After 10 kms and a little more than one hour running, here we are at last !
arrive

And of course, let's recover during the paëlla party!
paella

Hey, I am sure you have local events where you can promote Firefox for a mainstream audience. Tell us about local actions!

Go, Mozilla, Go!












Tuesday, September 22 2009

Meet Milos Dinic, Serbian Contributor

Milos, Serbian Contributor Hello Milos. First of all, how old are you and were do you come from?

I was born and raised in the city of Niš, Serbia, and I'm 24 years old.

You are a contributor for the Serbian Mozilla Community. What do you contribute to exactly?

Mozilla Srbija, Serbian Mozilla Community, is involved in many different Mozilla projects. The very first project of our community was the translation of the Mozilla.com website in Serbian.

More specifically, I helped translating some well known Mozilla websites, such as Mozilla.com, Firefox support website (SUMO), Mozilla add-ons website (AMO) and Mozilla Europe. Furthermore, I'm pretty active in SUMO developing area, having successfully completed some quite complex and important activities with the Mozilla WebQA team in the last couple of months. Besides the above mentioned activities, I occasionally write a patch or two for Mozilla add-ons site, trying to help developers.

So in the end, while translating, I came across many other Mozilla projects, and got interested in them. Which is why I'm now actively participating in several projects.

How long have you been contributing to Mozilla?

My first contact with the global Mozilla community was during the winter of 2008. I followed events on the #xul talkings on Mozilla IRC server, as well as tutorials on the MDC site. At the beginning I wasn't too active, but as time passed, I was more and more involved. A few months later I met Pascal Chevrel, who guided me during translations efforts of the Mozilla websites. From that time on, I've been an active member for the Mozilla community.

And what has made you want to contribute to Mozilla? Did you already have any contacts with Mozilla before you started to contribute?

The very first contact with Mozilla was Firefox. After having tried other well known Web browsers, I discovered Firefox and decided to use it for good. As a logical step after Firefox, I started to use using Thunderbird, and later Sunbird.

As I said before, I began by looking for some 'online' help with XUL. After the MDC website, I found the Mozilla IRC server and registered my nickname on it. Several days spent on the #xul channel led me to other channels on the server, where I noticed that many people volunteer in various Mozilla projects. After a few days well spent in getting to know the localization associates, I realized that the work of a contributor is very pricy and respected, and that really got me overjoyed. Furthermore, I saw that I could help, and that what I do will help other community members, so I decided that I would - to the possible extent - help the community, as I really value the time and effort other people have spent helping me.

While working on all these projects, I realized the value of all of this: the communities that work on these projects, as well as directly on the software, are simply invaluable. So I am very happy to have the opportunity to participate a bit in such great things.

While working on all above-mentioned projects, I got to know in more detail how the community works, breaths and creates great software, and I can tell you that I am really proud that I had the opportunity to contribute to its success.

I have heard that you have recently started translating the Mozilla Europe Website in Serbian. What can you tell us about this experience?

Yes. Few weeks ago, I began work on translating the Mozilla Europe website into Serbian language. As there are currently very few active members in our community, so far we have not had the time nor or the courage to initiate this project. However, we are now ready, and I hope that we will soon see the Mozilla Europe Serbian site on the way :)

Mozilla Europe, as part of the global Mozilla community, is really incredible. Although the goal of all our efforts is to promote and improve Mozilla products and websites, this community is very much responsible for the great success of our projects in Europe. In a world of information technology, much less attention is paid to spread awareness in smaller countries, and that is exactly what Mozilla Europe is trying to correct. All European Communities are equal, and all have the same privileges. What I find wonderful, is that a lot of attention is paid to countries from Southeastern Europe, and thus given a chance to local contributors to promote their country and language. It is very important that on these sites communities get a lot of the integrity to use their language and communities have equal opportunities to present themselves in the best possible way.

Is there anything you would like to add, a message that you would like to pass around?

I'd like to thank all contributors for making our world a place where this great community exists, as well as for honestly accepting new people that come in, and for trying to make things better... I would especially like to thank all Mozilla developers and all others involved in projects, for endless support and community promotion.

At the end, I would like to send a message to all reading this text that they should drop by, at least briefly, to feel the atmosphere among Mozillians, or even contact us. The goal of everything we do is to ease the work, dissemination of knowledge and friendship... and all are welcome!

Thursday, July 9 2009

Firefox 3.5 release party in Budapest, Hungary

One week after the release of Firefox 3.5, the Hungarian Firefox Community organized a party to celebrate the release of the latest and greatest version of Firefox. Nearly thirty friends of Firefox met at Henry J. Bean's Bar & Grill and celebrated the Firefox 3.5.

ff35_party_4.jpg

We discussed various topics related to Firefox from the new version itself to the community related questions and some subjects from developers' point of view. We got lots of fun. I think everyone enjoyed this meeting and we all are happy with Firefox relics.

ff35_party_2.jpg

The biggest surprise comes from three of our community members. They made a wonderful cake filled with nut cream. It was very tasty.

ff35_party_5.jpg

To conclude the meeting was successful, moreover got publicity. The origo, the most popular Hungarian news portal reported from this event on front page, and “MR1 - Kossuth Radio” station of Hungarian Radio also presented a report with us. It is a great honor for us, as Kossuth Radio is the main national broadcaster station in Hungary with the greatest tradition.

Thanks to KAMI to organize this event and happy celebrating!

Wednesday, April 22 2009

Aviary.pl: 3-day meeting in Kraków

Last weekend, the Aviary.pl team had a semiannual meeting in Kraków. Three days of discussion, planning the future and having fun.

The most important thing was the retrospective. Each person wrote on post-it notes what was going well, what should be changed, new ideas and thanks. Then we prioritised the issues, and decided how to resolve them. Now we have a lot to do ;-)

Post-its on flipchart. Photo: Wadim Dziedzic

After that there was a lonnnnng discussion about our ideas, challenges and how to conquer the world ;-)

On Saturday evening we were celebrating No. 1 position in browser marketshare in Poland:

Yes! We did! Aviary.pl & Mozilla. Photo: Wadim Dziedzic

and on Sunday we went bowling:

Next meeting is planned for September - we are going to celebrate our 5-year anniversary :-)

Thursday, April 9 2009

Live from Budapest

Clown Firefox

We would have a lot to share with the community, but we'll try to make it short. After Vienna, we decided we were not far from Slovakia, so we decided to go to Bratislava to have a look at the city. One more step, even if we didn't have time to meet anyone there. But many people noticed our awesome firefox car :-) Kairo inspired us and Arzhel installed an openstreetmap tracker on his mobile phone. So from now we will contribute during all the tour.

It took us some time to get into Budapest because of the traffic jam. Damn big cities! But it's beautiful. We found the place where we were going to couchsurf, but our host wasn't there. Instead we met Matthew a nice Californian guy travelling around Europe like us. We introduced ourselves and proposed him to join us to a concert with Kami, a Mozilla contributor who localize Seamonkey. We discussed about Mozilla and FLOSS in a pub, and then went to the concert to hear to a Hungarian band called Vad Fruttik. We didn't get the lyrics, but the music was great and the vibes amazing.

Budapest group

We eventually get into the couchsurf apartment and met Balint who hosts us and is a very cool guy.

We should enjoy the afternoon by visiting the city. Then we will go to a Prezi event, maybe evangelise a bit about open web while drinking beers.

We're expecting some pretty nice stuffs for the forthcoming days. The meeting in Bucarest, a beer event at Veliko Turnovo a Mozilla Barcamp in Sofia.Then we will make a detour to visit a new community in Strumica (Macedonia) before going to Skopje.

After the event in Skopje we will take an other route that the one we planned because we have no passports to travel across Serbia. We'll try to cross Albania and Montenegro.

Tuesday, April 7 2009

Vienna: part II


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!

Monday, April 6 2009

First event: Wien in Austria!

Hi everybody,

After 14 hours we finally get to Steyr in Austria at KaiRo's parents place (thanks a lot to him and to his parents). Along the road we enjoyed beautiful landscapes, sun, nice towns and lovely people.
We've just uploaded some pictures and will keep uploading others: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29674615@N02/sets/72157616352149414/

We forgot to introduce ourselves so here we are:

 

From left to right:

  • Grégoire Coustenoble (Greg), He is a student in communications and a Mozilla addict.
  • Sonny Piers, He is a former intern at Mozilla Europe and involved in the project since 2004.
  • Arzhel Younsi (XioNoX) He is a former Mozilla Europe intern too and soon a Mozilla Corp intern.
Let's talk about the event: Quintessenz (a local linux user group) organize a meeting which will take place at 6PM this evening.
You're very welcome!

Place: Raum D / quartier21, QDK / Electric Avenue, MQ Wien
Map:   http://quartier21.mqw.at/uebersichtsplan144 -> Nr. 55

Thanks!

Saturday, April 4 2009

Final preparations

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!

Monday, March 23 2009

Mozilla & Mozilla Italia “Do The Right Thing”!

This year too, Mozilla Italia, for the third time as Mozilla representative, attended the event "Fa' la cosa giusta" ("Do The Right Thing") held in Milan on 13-15 March 2009.

"Fa la cosa giusta" is a heterogeneous fair dedicated to sustainable lifestyles and critical consumption whose claim this year was "Consuming better, consuming less".

Critical consumption means choosing what you buy and what you use by thinking critically. Maybe a browser is not the first thing people think of but we believe it was very clever of Mozilla being there, because a browser too, like many other "goods" (what you eat, how you dress, what you buy in general, where you go on holiday) must absolutely be a matter of choice as expressed so clearly by the Mozilla Motto: "Choice and Innovation".

50.000 people visited the event this year (20% more than the 40.000 of the last year) and the exhibitors were around 500. We calculated that our booth had more or less 7.000 single contacts.

This year, for the first time, an official Mozilla representative was present at Mozilla Italia's booth: William. So we can say that this time we were really "Powered by Mozilla". ;-)

Who of the Mozilla Italia's Team didn't meet William before was really amazed by his vitality, his fellowship and his friendship! He's really super!

Since the very first day the "atmosphere" at the booth was really exciting. All ten Mozilla Italia Team people attending the event were so happy to meet each other and to be there to spread around Firefox, the Mozilla Mission and more in general all the other Mozilla products and projects.

Mozilla Italia Team @ Fa' la cosa giusta 2009

The Mozilla Italia Team at "Fa' la cosa giusta", from left to right: Andrea, Giuliano, Michele, Iacopo, Giacomo, Elisabetta, Giovanni, Francesco, Simone and last but not least Stefano (he wasn't present at the booth when we took the group photograph).

Mozilla & Mozilla Italia “Do The Right Thing”!, Continue reading...

New Hungarian Mozilla Community Site

Back in 2002, when we started to localize Mozilla into Hungarian, we created the mozilla.fsf.hu website. We regularly released news about localization, releases and other related topics. However, this site was static HTML, it was not possible to interact with the site. As time passed by, this setup became outdated. However, as we are a relatively small community, we did not have the resources to build a portal which was "Web 2.0 compliant".

In the Mozilla Camp Barcelona 08 we attended an interesting session held by Gandalf about building community sites. We immediately decided that we would build one instead of our old site at mozilla.fsf.hu. The idea of building a nice portal with a few click made us enthusiastic. Although in reality it took more than a few clicks, we could use the nice "Mozilla Communities" design and we borrowed ideas from the sample code how to do and not to do things in Wordpress.

The new site started in February 2009. All news items and other contents have been migrated from the old site in order to maintain continuity in our web presence. We have around 4000 unique visitors daily. Our plan is to publish 3-4 posts in a week and we would like to be the primary source of Mozilla related news in Hungarian for those who do not follow the international sites and news feeds.

Our Wordpress theme is based on the famous Sandbox framework and anyone can localize easily. We have to fix several minor issues but we would like to release the theme and plugins with a short guide in April. So stay tuned and any feedback could help to improve the template.

You can meet the Hungarian Team here.

Wednesday, March 11 2009

Julia, French contributor

(Translated from French)julia_photo2.jpg

In another life, I was a Wikipedia contributor. Not full-time contribution, but I would give a hand from time to time, mostly by correcting and translating texts. Actually, my involvement in the FLOSS world started at the event Paris Capital du Libre (Paris Capital of the Libre), more specifically during Richard Stallman's speech, in which he described "the user's Human Rights". I immediately adhered to this ideal of knowledge-sharing under the form of source code. Freedom in using code, freedom to modify, freedom of sharing... A beautiful concept that made me want to start helping Wikipedia, the universal and free online encyclopedia project.

But how have I come from Wikipedia to Mozilla?

The Ubuntu party was the first real contact. I remember going there out of curiosity, with my camera, thinking I could make a good video documentary. That's when I met the Mozilla Europe team, who were all really friendly from the start. Pascal described to me the ideology of the French Mozilla Association, as well as the contributors, the goals, and Mozilla's implication in the world of Free Software.

- "So, what about you? What are you currently working on?"

I mumble about my small experiences, my masters degree in computer science, my modest translation activities -modest because absolutely amateur-like. But everyone has always told me that motivation counts more than anything.

And that was when I told them I was really motivated. Then followed what gamers call an Aggro -or attracting the opponent's attention on one's self.

- “Oh, so you know all about SVN, LDAP, HTML, CSS... ?”

Well, yes, it's part of my studies...

- “And would you be interested in contributing to Mozilla?”

Well, yes, but what could I possibly do?

- “Oh, don't worry about that...!"

And that's how I became a contributor.

That's also how I found myself, two months later, in Brussels for FOSDEM. Housed by another contributor (thanks again Benoît!), I was able to meet many more contributors and exchange many things, without ever having seen them before. And I also got to know other Mozilla communities, and attend great conferences.

"'Join the army!' they said, 'Join the army!'" (- Asterix)

Sunday, March 1 2009

Mozilla Net Effects

 
    Hello Mozillians! I'm writing this post because I would like to share with you my experience with the net and how I'm helping the Mozilla Net Effects project. As you can read here , Zak Greant started a few months ago this project, so I decided to help him. In my personal blog I wrote my Internet story, then I made some short movies ( max 12 seconds lenght) about how Internet changed my life. I think that is very interesting to share with others your story about how you discovered Internet and if it changed your life....How!
Here you can find a group on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/mozillanetfx/ , where people says how Internet changed their own lives.
If you would like to help with this project:
- make a video, upload it on flickr and let zak@mozillafoundation.org to know about it;
- post on your local community blog about Mozilla Net Effects (example http://mozilla.ro/mozilla-net-effect-0);
- post on your own blog about Mozilla Net Effects programm (for example http://alinamierlus.com);
I'm sure that all Mozillians all around Europe have many interesting stories about how Internet changed their lives. Help Mozilla to make openness, participation and distributed decision-making common experiences in Internet life
Bellow you have a sample video:

Tuesday, February 24 2009

Mozilla Europe Community Tour '09

We're happy to announce the first Mozilla Europe Community Tour!

It's a new kind of community action.
The idea is to make a road trip (by car) in order to:

  • Help spread the word about Mozilla
  • Bring people together
  • Motivate people to get involved in the project
  • Learn more about communities, and get to know their members' better

For this first 2009 edition, we chose to travel from Paris to Eastern Europe -more precisly to the Balkans area.

The tour will take place in April, and will last 3 weeks. If you want to be part of this trip please contact us, we would be really happy if you could join us.

Stay tuned, more info coming soon !

Monday, January 26 2009

Be part of the Mozilla Community Marketing Team!

marketing firefox Here is your chance to join the effort of improving people’s browsing experience all around the globe. Mozilla’s plan is to gather passionate, creative and dedicated people, who, together with Mozilla employees, will take community marketing to a new level and spread the word far and wide about Firefox and the Mozilla project.

Participation is open to everyone and you don’t even have to know how to code in order to join. If you are a marketing enthusiast, a Firefox user or a community member looking for new ways to contribute, you are welcome to pitch in the action. As with most of Mozilla community projects, fun is sure to be included.

The first open Mozilla marketing meeting of the year will be on Wednesday, January 28th @ 10am PST / 6pm 7 pm UTC. The dial-in number is: +1.650.903.0800, followed by 92# and then 7391#. Or you can use our toll-free number: +1.800.707.2533, followed by 369# and then 7391#. For those that can't make the call or want to participate online, join us in #marketing on IRC. If you're outside the US, you can use Skype to call in with the toll-free number.

We will host bi-weekly meetings to discuss Mozilla community marketing and explore new ways to spread Firefox and promote the open Web.

Please join our mailing list at https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/marketing or keep an eye on http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.marketing/topics for the latest news and updates. We will send out the full agenda for our 2009 kickoff meeting to the mailing list and post to SpreadFirefox.com very soon.

It's time to get fired up! Join the Mozilla community marketing team... this is your chance to make an impact on the Web.