I won’t go into detail, instead pointing you to Selim’s report of the event. A few observations though:

• The power of the Firefox OS draw was evident because our table was consistently busy despite our lack of swag.
• Everyone was telling me that while Open Source was prevalent in Turkey, it has not really caught the imagination of people beyond a core community. I see opportunity there.
• Happy to have met Emin Mastizada who is leading a budding new community in Azerbaijan.

With Selim and Emin.

Mozilla Turkey is small, and we are looking for people to join and help out in a number of areas. These include leadership, community building, marketing, programming, social media, and more. Our hope is to grow and become a strong community to help Mozilla with their mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web. Contact Selim or I to find out more.

Hope to see you again soon Istanbul. Here are more pictures from my visit.

Our Contribute page funnel is getting it’s first real stress test as of yesterday when we launched our 15 Years of Mozilla campaign. Via various channels (Twitter, Facebook, Snippets, Email, …) we are pointing people to the Contribute page where we have a lovely new design showing.

Contribute Page in German

Already we spiked yesterday with the number of contribution inquiries coming in. Head over to arewegrowingyet.com for more details. It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out as the campaign continues.

I’m leaving you with something a little fun. Jeff Beatty and I wanted to share our tips on Community mentoring (for Capture Mozilla) and made a video last week at the meetup. Thanks for Curtis Koenig for shooting and editing it, he definitely has a potential career in the movie industry.

[Can't see the video? It's here]

What better way to start 2013 than to reboot your community. Last Saturday we met in Berlin and in attendance were 15 of us. The goal was simple. Find a new direction and structure for the community. We had folks from Switzerland, Austria, and Germany so we have an evolution from Mozilla Germany to German Speaking Mozilla. Something similar has happened to the French Speaking Mozilla Community in the last year. Mozilla Hispano is also a huge inspiration.

[Update: I got a bit carried away here. The community has always been inclusive and German-speaking, not just contributors from Germany. The Swiss contingent at the meetup made up of relatively new contributors threw me off. Apologies.]

We wanted to envision a core community that grows to 100, or 200, or 1000 in the next year. The challenge was to come up with a structure to handle that. Some fun facts:

• We have over 30 million users of the German Firefox version (14 million ADIs)
• The SUMO site gets 1.7 million unique German speaking visitors per month.

After I gave my introductions and vision for Mozilla communities in general in 2013 (in essence to scale up and move into all areas of the project) the team got right down to business.

German Community Meetup Attendees by s_hentzschel on Flickr

Mission

First up, a new mission statement. Here it is:

“Eine starke Gemeinschaft für das offene Internet”

This loosely translates as “A strong community for the open web“.

Structure

After some brainstorming, discussions, and post-it notes fun, the following functional areas were identified:

• Administration
• L10n
• WebMaker
• Dev Evangelism
• Marketing
• Community Building
• Policy / Activism
• Support
• Programming

Areas of Interest (Photo credit: King Molan)

The community will now structure around these areas, with people assigned to work in each area. While we did talk about some specific topics at the meeting, the important thing was that all initiatives and work will flow from this in 2013 and beyond. A commitment was made to integrate more deeply with functional teams at Mozilla, and a structure like this leads easier towards that goal.

Shout Outs

Mozilla events are always a collective effort. Special thanks to:

• Tobias Markus – for kicking off the organisation of the meeting and helping come up with a date
• Kadir Topal – for his continued commitment to community, despite his other responsibilities in the organisation
• Rosana Ardila – for helping with organisation, and convincing me to go ahead with it so soon in the new year
• William Quiviger – for support on the ground in Berlin and mentorship
• Attendees – for giving up your weekend to to participate
• All members of the community – for your dedication and amazing work

Looking forward to the next event to meet even more German speaking community members.

Related articles

• The Genesis Of A Get Involved Page
• 2012 – A Year in Review, The Firefox OS App Days and more…
• Mozilla Reps 2012 Recap

Picture from FOSDEM 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is a post by Benoit Leseul, Rep from Belgium and point man for Mozilla participation at FOSDEM, and wordsmith Claire Corgnou who is a woman of many talents including writing for Bonjour Mozilla.

———-

Like each year since 2003, Mozilla will have a Developer Room at Fosdem. Fosdem (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) is simply one of the greatest events in Europe around free and open source software development: it is THE place to be, to know everything is happening about FLOSS, to meet people… and to have fun! Fosdem is held, during the first weekend of February, in Brussels (Belgium), a very nice city, with the best fries you could ever eat ;-)

So, as usual, Mozilla will have a Developer Room. And, as usual, it’s going to be packed.

If you are interested in giving a talk, leading a workshop or some other session we should hold in the Mozilla DevRoom, please add it to this PAD : https://etherpad.mozilla.org/fosdem2013-talks before 2012-12-20. You can also propose a talk you would like to attend, and we’ll try to find a speaker! Please, do it in the same PAD, in the second section : https://etherpad.mozilla.org/fosdem2013-talks

We want some talks from both Mozilla contributors and employees. All contributors who are selected to be official speakers in the Mozilla DevRoom will be eligible for travel and hotel sponsorship.

Please make sure to list your contact info (Mozillian page, or mail address) in the PAD, so we can reach you easily if your talk is accepted.

Of course, any other Mozilla-related proposal which you think would be  interesting to share with other FLOSS communities is welcome. Please, feel free to propose any kind of talks, even crazy talks, brand new ones, etc. We hope to receive a lot of proposals or suggestions to make this Fosdem be a success with you!

Related articles

• FOSDEM CrossDesktop DevRoom 2013 – Call for Talks
• FOSDEM 2013 Dev Rooms Announced
• FOSDEM 2013 Call 4 Papers

I want to say a huge thanks to Mozilla Bosnia. Thanks to Aleksandar Savic for setting up Mozilla’s presence at the event and inviting me. Thanks to Kerim Kalamujic for the walk up in the hills, the conversation, and the hospitality. And thanks to Adi Zeljkovic and Nedim Zecic for the work and support. This event helped increase the profile of Mozilla Bosnia and Mozilla in general. There is a strong team in Bosnia that is only getting stronger.

With Adi and Aleks

Here is some coverage:

MozCamp Asia 2011 (Photo credit: Benny Chandra)

The latest MozCamp, this time in Warsaw, is approaching fast and it will be the best ever. I want to get the word out about a few things:

1. Will you be in Warsaw on Thursday 6th before MozCamp? If so, come and join us at an event at Reaktor. We’ll be talking about Firefox OS, WebFWD, and all the goodness of the Open Web. Sign up here.
2. I have started my Mozilla Mission. If you are attending, you should too! More details about the Buddy Program.
3. I’ll be contributing to a WebFWD session. Curious? Sign up here (see bottom of the page) if you are interested and pre-submit your questions.
4. The schedule will action packed, with some fantastic talks and speakers. It is going to be completed this week, so continue to check in and find out what sessions you want to attend.

That’s it for now. Make sure to join #mozcamp on IRC, and keep checking the wiki for the latest developments.

UPDATE 1 : The schedule is now (mostly) filled out. Have a look to see what sessions you want to attend.

UPDATE 2 : We need your help! Check out the volunteer opportunities.

Related articles

• Mozilla at CampusParty ’12 and Berlin
• Welcome video, MozCamp LATAM highlights and more…

The Mozilla Reps Council submitted a talk early on when the CFP was announced. The talk, titled ‘How To Multiply Your Community By A Factor Of X‘ seemed like a perfect fit for the Community track. The goal was two-fold, to get the word out about what we are doing in the Reps program, and to learn from other open source communities. Some last-minute shuffling meant that only one member of the Reps Council (myself) could go, but luckily we have a great Rep locally in Portland (Benjamin Kerensa) who jumped in to co-present with me. Our slides are at htmlpad.org/remo-oscon-2012/. I took some pictures, check out the set on Flickr.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams Keynotes

On Community

Everyone has their own ideas about what community is for an open source project, organisation or company. In essence, for me, it is about nurturing a group of individuals with the common aim of forwarding the cause of your project. For any entity with a platform, technology, or mission that they want to succeed, community is crucial. The community as a whole can be made up of sub-communities, for example localisers, developers, and evangelists but it is essential that they all work together. Nurturing means harnessing the passion people have and sustaining that passion over a long period. Mozilla is a community driven organisation and has recognised this for a long time, and the Reps program aims to make life easier for contributors. O’Reilly recognises the importance of community, hence the dedicated track at OSCON. Everyone was talking about community this year, not as an afterthought but as a core component of any project.

Community Leaders at Lunch

Sessions

Coming from a development background, OSCON this year was a departure for me as it was the first time at a conference where I focused on non-technical sessions. See all sessions (click though on a talk for details and slides). Here are some of the highlights of talks I attended.

Harnessing the Good Intentions of Others for your OSS Project

[Listing] This was very much a hands on discussion about how you catch a person during the first period when they express interest in helping and guiding them to achieve what they want to do, e.g. write a patch. If they have a positive first experience, they are likely to return and contribute more. Some general take-aways:

• Pairing: Value lies not in the area of common knowledge but in what each of you knows separately, i.e. what you don’t know. Pairing leads to commitable code, quicker.
• Listening is important, e.g. Twitter
• People who express interest … 2 days window of opportunity before they move on. The opportunity for first engagement is even shorter
• Github lowers barrier to entry to a project
• Average person has 2 hours to give you (initially)
• Other tools: Mikogo works well on low bandwidth. Also: Skype, G Hangouts, Join.me, AWS ec2, remote desktop, VNC
• When asking for help, be specific!

Lleweln and Lynn are doing great work, for just a couple of examples check out teachingkidsprogramming.org and the Geek Road Trip.

Open Source Community Growth as a User Experience Problem

[Listing] Asheesh and Karen from OpenHatch focused on the Web entry point into a project and how this can be make or break for you. A welcoming entry point is a way of turning potential into actual.  The ‘Funnel Analysis’ approach is popular now and the goal should always be to figure out where and why people drop off along the way so it can be refined. They have a few examples: Nano (bad), GNOME (ok), and LibreOffice (good). In general, you want to get people to where they want to go without overwhelming them with too much information. Want to know more about what OpenHatch does? Check out their cookbook.

Mozilla is pro-active in this area. As part of the Grow Mozilla project, David Boswell has been working on a number of initiatives to ensure contributors can more easily become involved via the Mozilla Web pages. One of these  efforts is connecting with people all over the world by filtering potential contributors to their local Mozilla community.

Scaling your community by nurturing leaders

Meghan Gill leads the community marketing efforts at 10gen. 10gen began the open source MongoDB project, and provides commercial support, training, and consulting for Mongo. This is a great example of a commercial company driving an open source project where in effect the success of one is reliant on the other. Some of the things they are doing are similar to the Reps program (e.g. events/swag) and the main take-away here is that for continued health of the community you need to build up a strong set of leaders and give public recognition. The MongoDB Masters program aims to do this.

Open Source – The Next Generation

[Listing] This was an amusing talk focusing on some of the inequalities hampering FOSS communities. The gender issue came up and that has been on the agenda for a number of years. The general consensus is that things are getting better, slowly. The main take-away here is that the FOSS world needs less Kirks, and more Picards. If you are a Trekkie, no further explanation is needed!

Open Source: The Next Generation

Learnings and Next Steps

I had the opportunity to talk to many community folks during the course of the week and they face many of the challenges that we face at Mozilla. There are a common set of issues to deal with – governance, enabling, tools, metrics, events, and so on. And many times, we come up with the same solutions. The levels of success vary. I heard more than one person talking about how the Apache Community is working well, and without know the inner workings it seems that have the right structure and set of documentation in place to make a great experience for contributors. In general I think Mozilla’s efforts are on a greater scale, and more ambitious. There are a few reasons for this, namely being in the right place as the computing industry moves en-masse to the Web, and the fact that Mozilla is walking head on into issues outside their own products such as identity and data privacy.

Open source has been in in crisis in recent years, having to deal with numerous issues such as the move away from desktop, the building of walled gardens on the Web,  and other challenges. Projects are evolving, e.g. Ubuntu’s cloud efforts. We are all working outside our comfort zone. Yet now more than ever we need to rise to the new challenges. To do that we need more passionate people. We need more community. So get involved now with your favourite open source project. Interested in Mozilla? See how you can get involved, and find out more about the Mozilla Reps program.

Related articles

• Steve Holden: Fun and Games at OSCON
• Benjamin Kerensa: I’m talking Community at OSCON 2012

The Mozilla Reps program is getting in on the act. Local Rep Benjamin Kerensa and I are presenting ‘How to Multiply Your Community By A Power Of X‘. We’ll be talking about the Reps Program. In particular, where does it fit in in the general Mozilla community, how the project works, our successes so far, and challenges we have had. We’ll be picking the brains of folks in other open source communities to get ideas on how we can do things better.

Mozilla Reps talk at OSCON

There are other talks by Mozillians, both employees and community members. Go see them!

• Tara Tiger Brown and Chris McAvoy – Legitimizing interest based learning with Mozilla Open Badges
• David Eaves - Open Source 2.0: The Science of Community Management and The Science of Open Source Community Management
• Christie Koehler - Event Planning for Geeks
• Andy McKay – Large Django sites at Mozilla
• Laura Thomson - Everything you ever wanted to know about deployment but were afraid to ask and I Can’t Believe You Still Do It That Way:12 Years of PHP Best Practice Talks revisited

Where would you like to go?

Structure

The format of the weekend has not changed much since and is as William Quiviger wrote about in 2010. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The Aviary.pl Crew in action

In summary:

• Day 1 : Meet in the late afternoon / early evening and catch up, talk, hack together.
• Day 2 : Day of sessions, conversation, status updates, and more.
• Day 3 : Voting in the new board and goal setting for the next 6 months

It was just the right balance between getting work done and collaborating and learning from each other. On Saturday evening after dinner we settled into some game playing (board and video) that showed the great camaraderie that exists in the team.

Governance

Aviary.pl is a structured organisation with a board, a board audit committee, and members.

• 3-member Board (see the new board)
• A board audit committee
• Members

The board and audit committee are rotated every two years. Aviary.pl tried and failed to become a registered non-profit organisation in Poland once before and during the weekend documents were prepared to make a second application. The main reason for this is to accept money more easily. I know that other Mozilla communities are wondering whether to do this in their country. You should examine if you really need to do it, and if you do to expect a certain amount of administrative overhead.

Many Mozilla communities have problems attracting and keeping new members. What I liked about Aviary.pl in this context is that they have a set process for new recruits that includes mentoring for 6 months which in general seems to lead to a better retention rate.

Guests

One thing that worked really well was the presence of invited guests from outside the Mozilla project. Members of the Gnome, Opera and Kaszëbsczi language communities brought a fresh perspective to proceedings. Also present was Lukasz Kluj who works for Lewis PR that does PR work for Mozilla in Poland.

Kashubian (Kaszëbsczi) Language

Yurek Hinz, among other things, works promoting the Kashubian language. He talked to us about his experience on getting the language integrated into Firefox, both the challenges and opportunities for a small language. Some interesting random points:

• In the 2002 census, 53,000 people in Poland declared that they mainly use Kashubian at home.
• Currently 3 active members of the team working on the Firefox localisation
• After many false starts, it reached beta in 2011 and full version in 2012 listed at http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html
• Not getting ADU stats from Mozilla yet, we don’t know the number of users currently
• Supporting languages like this really differentiate Mozilla over other browser and software vendors where they only support languages based on market forces

In Summary

Aviary.pl is working well. It is made up of dedicated individuals. In numbers it is strong, yet as always new contributors are welcome. The community was established in 2004 making it one of the more mature communities. As with all established Mozilla communities, it faces challenges in adapting to new Mozilla projects and priorities while at the same time keeping on top of localisation work. I gave my thoughts on how Aviary.pl can rise to the challenge and they have already been moving in that direction with outreach and development efforts.

[More Pictures]

Related articles

• Learning from the Aviary.pl crew (somethin-else.org)
• Gdansk: 5 free things for visitors to do (cbsnews.com)

Briks Is 6

I meant to call out the 5 year anniversary last year but it slipped by as I was too busy. Six is better, it rhymes! I set up Briks Software this month 6 years ago. Briks is a Web Consultancy that specialises in all things Mozilla and sometimes beyond. We do Add-ons, XULRunner apps, bug fixes, mobile work, and more. We’ve worked on projects large and small, with big companies and startups. Briks is not a 1-person show, I like to call it a Mozilla Development Collective. I’ve had various folks come on board per-project over the 6 years and quite frankly Briks would not have been so successful without them. There are 2 people that I would like to give a special shout-out to. Chris Neale is the glue that keeps everything together, from the web site to design to graphics to listening to me ramble on Skype all day. David McNamara is a coder who can whip something up before you can say ‘digital drifter’. See his recent profile on Bonjour Mozilla!.

The Briks experience so far has been wonderful. Anyone who has ever done consulting will understand what I mean when I say that it has it’s ups and downs. I’ve been fortunate to have more ups. Some projects succeed, some don’t. Some clients come to you with a clear vision, others let you shape it. You meet many different people who become at best friends or at worst good contacts. Almost every day there is a new challenge, and each now project is a puzzle to solve. Hopefully I will get time to write more about this, it deserves a separate post.

However lately I’ve been thinking that I have got to the point where I am looking for a different challenge in my career. The obvious choice would be moving into management in a tech company. Another option would be to do a startup. Or another would be to move to a tropical island and set up a tourist resort. All of these sound great, everything is open. If you have any opportunities you think would suit me, let me know.

Mozilla in Slovenia

Mozilla Slovenija is trying to keep the momentum going for promoting Firefox and Mozilla this year. Our primary tool for doing this has always been localisation, and the team are doing a great job in keeping up with product and web. As far as events go, so far we had a Firefox 10 event and Dan Odporte Kode (Open Source Day), both organised by Reps. And I can’t finish this section without mentioning Matjaž Horvat’s heroic efforts in the ACTA debate here.

ReMo

The Mozilla Reps program is going great and my work on the council has been taking up a lot of my time. It has been a victim of it’s own success in the respect that we are still going through some growing pains and smoothing out many of the processes that will solidify the program going forward. We met in Athens to work through many of the issues and come up with a plan for the project for the next year. Shortly after the new Mozilla Reps website launched. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out, it is a hub with profiles of all reps and will be a wonderful tool for reps and for the those looking for reps.

In general I have learned a ton over the last year while helping out with ReMo in the areas of mentorship and community building. It has been a privilege to help get the program started and to work with community members who feel so passionate about Mozilla.

FOSDEM 2012

For the first time in about 5 years I was not putting together the schedule for and running the Mozilla devroom at FOSDEM. And while I missed the hustle and bustle, let me tell you it was great. I could wander around other rooms, head over to the stands (in a new building this year), and listen to other talks. The show this year was run my local Mozilla Reps and the Belgian community. William Quiviger wrote more about this aspect in his recap. You can catch all the blog posts, slides, and picture on the Mozilla wiki.

WebFWD

I previously wrote about my motivation for getting involved in the WebFWD program. As a scout I’ve been seeing an explosion of startup activity recently in Central and Eastern Europe. While I have not (to my knowledge) directly influenced any projects to apply yet, I have certainly tried to raise awareness of the program. Much of the startup reading I have come across has been shared in the Scout Sightings blog posts compiled by Havi Hoffman. I’ve given an intro talk twice, first at FOSDEM and then at the Firefox event in Kiberpipa. The slides are on Slideshare.

Mozilla Croatia

I was in Zagreb in January for a meeting of the Mozilla Croatia Community. Also present apart from local community members were Ioana Chiorean from Romania, Oskar Ivanic from Serbia, and Matjaž from Slovenia. Up to about 9 months ago, the community was very much dormant with the exception of good work by Edo Huric and also the Firefox localisation team. Then a new force of nature entered in the form of Nikola Matosovic and he has already put together a team of about 40 volunteer members (yes, 40) to help with Mozilla Croatia.

Clockwise from top left: Ivona Haban, Niko Visnjic, Vedran Kovacevic, Satine Anais, Mislav Zorko, Denis Oswald, and Nikola Nikola Matosovic (middle)

The goal of the meeting was to get everyone up to speed with the latest projects and issues in Mozilla, and provide insights into Community building. Having already achieved much in outreach in 2011, the challenge in 2012 is to gain momentum and carry out the ambitious set of goals they have given themselves for 2012.

What Next?

In no particular order here are some things I want to achieve in the short-term:

• Get some crucial releases out the door for Briks clients
• Finish the ReMo add-on, currently a work-in-progress
• Help the Mozilla Ireland community to the next level. We now have hosting for mozillaireland.org and we have to put the site up and plan some events to get new community members up to speed and for Mozilla to get more coverage in Ireland
• Help out more in Mozilla Balkans, and hopefully attend the next meetup which is planned for Zagreb this time around
• Forge deeper links with the startup community and perhaps attend a couple of related events in my region
• Continue to dip my toes in the Dev Engagement project. I’ve been following the mailing list, and curating posts for the MDN Google+ page.
• Put some real thought into my next career steps and act on them

And so it continues.

I have quite a number of reps whom I mentor, and I’d like to talk about all of them at some stage in the context of the work they do in the community. In the meantime, here are my reps who were present in Berlin.

Alex Lakatos

Mozillians Profile

Alex Lakatos at MozCamp (photo by mozillaeu on Flickr)

Not only does Alex do QA maestro work for Mozilla during the day, but in his free time he does web development and is involved in other ways in the project. He is a member of one of the most vibrant communities in Europe, in Romania.

Valentin Gosu

Mozilians Profile

Valentin Gosu at MozCamp (photo by nitot on Flickr)

Also from Romania, Valentin has been helping students for a while especially in his area of interest which is add-ons development. Recently, he ran a successful add-ons competition in Bucharest. Valentin was impressed by the Mobile and B2G projects at MozCamp and is looking into opportunities to help out with those projects.

Laurian Gridinoc

Mozillians Profile

Laurian Gridinoc at the Mozilla Festival (photo by mozillaeu on Flickr)

My next rep, also from Romania (spot a pattern), is based in the UK. I worked with Laurian previously in the Jetpack for Learning contest where he was among the winners. He is a man of many talents, but his current focus in Mozilla is with the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. Recently Laurian was chosen as a Knight Mozilla fellow, and he will soon begin a work placement at the BBC. Good luck!

Aleksandar Savić

Mozillians Profile

Aleksandar Savić at MozCamp (photo by nitot on Flickr)

Aleksandar is one of the most active members of the Mozilla Bosnia community, and a key driver in the wider Mozilla Balkans group. One of Aleksandar’s big initiatives currently is an Internet Security and Firefox event that is upcoming in his home country. If it is successful, the concept can spread and used elsewhere in the community.

Nino Vranešič

Mozillians Profile

Nino Vranešič at the Mozilla Balkans Meetup in Sofia (photo by William Quiviger on Flickr)

It would be easy to call Nino the new kid on the block in the Slovenian community, but he has been working hard for a few years spreading the word first as a student rep and now a Mozilla rep. Recently Nino wrote a paper entitled ‘Business models based on open source software: case of Mozilla‘ (pdf), which he presented at a conference in Slovenia.

Kálmán Szalai

Kami at MozCamp (photo by nitot on Flickr)

Last but not least, no post about Mozilla Reps would be complete without talking about Kami. It seems Kami gets to do the fun stuff like wear the fox hat and attend rock festivasls, all on the name of FOSS. Yet we must not forget the other work that he does in the robust Hungarian community, including translations, web work, blog posts, and more.

• It smells of a gold-rush, a way to make a quick buck. I was brought up with an ethic to go and do your day’s work, work hard, get paid, and play your part.
• This is inter-twined with rush to commercialise the Internet. This is not new, but it is eroding into the idealism of the early days of the Web when it was supposed to be the great equaliser in society, the open information platform.
• To scale, you really need to get investment, which means compromising and handing over rights to your business and ideas.
• I’m a software engineer, and solve problems presented by others. I don’t see myself as an ideas person, or at least don’t have the urge to act on ones I do have.

To make an analogy, startups to me are like young footballers who dream of playing for Manchester United or AC Milan or Real Madrid. Or indeed, even to play professional football at any level. How many make it? I don’t know, but I’d say less than 1%. I suspect the number of startups who are successful comes in at around the same percentage.

But in the last couple of years my thinking has changed. To counter the points above:

• Startups are hard work, well if you are doing it right they should be.
• If we strive to keep the Web open, then making money is fine. We all need to, right?
• If you are smart, you can negotiate a good investment deal. The sheer number of investors out there means choice. Or, bootstrap and scale at your own pace.
• Sometimes engineers come up with the best ideas, because they understand some of the real-world problems that need solving and find opportunity in that.

Image by King Molan via Flickr

I could name other reasons, with their counter arguments, but you get the picture. A couple of weeks ago I attended the Dublin Web Summit, very much a startup event. After not living in Ireland for over 10 years and being completely out of touch with the tech scene, I was greatly encouraged by what I saw. The tech sector is one of the things keeping the Irish economy afloat. But it’s foundation is foreign investment by large companies, usually American. Companies like Microsoft, Dell, and Intel have had a presense there for a number of years. Newer comapnies like Facebook and Twitter have setup their European headquarters there. They do so because of a young, skilled workforce and incentives provided by the Irish government including a low corporate tax rate.

Yet now, there is a realisation that this is not a solid foundation for the future. Large companies can move out at any time, pulling the rug from under you. People are starting to do things for themselves, setting up their own companies more and more. Irish people have always been resourceful but there is nothing less than a culture shift happening. There is a real energy. Even the government, who have shown before to be notoriously short-termist, have many initiatives to help small and medium-sized businesses. Yet more work needs to be done. For example, the bankruptcy laws need a major overhaul to shield entrepeneurs more from risk. I definitely like the direction things appear to be going in however.

In this spirit, I applied to be a WebFWD scout and have been accepted. The application form posed the question “Why do you think you would make an awesome WebFWD Scout?“. Here is what I wrote:

I have been an Open Source enthusiast and supporter all my career. I speak at Open Source conferences. In Slovenia, we have a thriving Web and Startup scene, and I attend events and keep up to date. I have mentored at Seedcamp events. Moving further east, I am a member of a group called New Europe Startups that covers Central and Eastern Europe. There is a real hunger here, something that has been observed less in Western Europe. This is something that can be tapped into for the advantage of the Open Web. I’m a firm believer that our future economic health will be based on entrepreneurial talent that challenges and ultimately usurps incumbents who have a stranglehold on many industries. Last but not least, I have faith in people which drives everything I do, and have a knack for connecting people to do interesting and I hope great things.

So I urge you all, if you have a passion and think you have something that will make people’s lives better, go out and start something, work hard, and keep dreaming.

Related articles

• Eastern Europe’s Startups After the Seedcamp: Zemanta, Brainient, Codility and UberVU Revisited (goaleurope.wordpress.com)
• Y Combinator Challenged By Growing Seedcamp (forbes.com)

I’d like to invite you along to a Mozilla Meetup in Dublin, Ireland on November 2. Mozilla products have been translated into Irish for many years (thanks to the great work of Kevin Scannell and others). Unfortunately as Irish is spoken only be a small minority, this does not provide broad coverage country-wide. The majority would use English versions, and while there is a strong user base, the last time I checked the Firefox market share was much less than countries and regions in mainland Europe.

We want to move things to the next level, getting more active contributors on board in other areas of Mozilla and setting up a permanent community (aka Mozilla Ireland). See how you can get involved[1].

EVENT DETAILS

When: Wednesday, November 2 · 6:00pm – 10:00pm

Where: The Odeon, on Harcourt Street.

Description: Do you want to know more about Mozilla, the organisation behind the groundbreaking Firefox browser? Do you want to become involved in the global Mozilla movement? No coding skills required, though folks with them are of course welcome. Come along and find out more.

Format: It will be an evening of presentations and discussions, with drinks and snacks provided.

Sign up on the Facebook event page[2], or if you are not on Facebook just get in touch with me or drop a comment here. We need to get a feel for numbers attending. Note also the wiki page[3]. We’ll be updating these pages with more information in the coming days.

SPEAKING

The schedule is still open, so if you would like to speak about a Mozilla contribution you made or a project you worked on, let me know. If you are attending the Mozilla Festival in London, this is a great opportunity to hop across the pond beforehand.

DUBLIN WEB SUMMIT

I’ll be at the Dublin Web Summit the week before the meetup. If you want to meet me for more details, get in touch. Tristan Nitot of Mozilla Europe will be making a keynote speech on Thursday 27th.

GOAL

Plant the seeds for a permanent active community in Ireland.

See you there!

[1] http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/

[2] http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=249984621718594

[3] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Meetup_Dublin_2011

Image by jmtosses via Flickr

Last week saw Firefox updated to version 7. I’m not sure if other communities party any more with the rapid release cycle, but we used it as an excuse not only to party but to talk about the latest happenings with Mozilla. Web Hour (Spletne urice in Slovene), our beloved technology meetup that happens every Wednesday, was hijacked for this purpose. We moved location for once to try something different, and were graciously welcomed by our hosts Zemanta in their fancy new offices in the middle of Ljubljana. Big shout out to Rok and Gasper for going the extra mile in organisation.

For the schedule, we wanted to cover the latest important happenings and projects in Mozilla. Even though it was Firefox release day, the general theme was that the Web is evolving fast, and so is Mozilla to meet the challenges. While 5 years ago focus in Mozilla shifted almost wholly to Firefox, the wheel has turned again and Firefox is just one tool of many (though still the most important) to keep the Web open and fight for users.

SCHEDULE

Nino and I split the speaking duties. Nino, the youngest Mozilla Slovenia member showed off why he makes a fine Mozilla Rep.

• Firefox Release Channels
• New Developer Tools
• B2G
• WebFWD
• ReMo

SUMMARY

In short form, it went like this…

• Good turnout, standing room only for the presentations
• The topics we chose were spot on, lots of interest and questions
• Dev tools demos wowed. Thanks Matjaz for helping me get them set up
• Nice conversations after
• We didn’t recruit anyone new for mozilla.si or ReMo, but maybe a seed was planted that will grow later

RANDOM COVERAGE

If I missed anything here, let me know. I’ll update this post once I dig up some pictures. The video of the talks will pop up on Kiberpipa Video soon.

Tweets

• We tried with “first 5 RTs get a T-shirt at the event”
• This tweet alone generated 19 RTs: https://twitter.com/#!/mathjazz/status/118320392275374080
• https://twitter.com/#!/alesrosina/status/119101494711697410
• https://twitter.com/#!/wwwh/status/119103552344961024
• https://twitter.com/#!/skrat/status/119097755984601088
• https://twitter.com/#!/friedcell/status/119097123055747072
• https://twitter.com/#!/wwwh/status/119101800371585026
• https://twitter.com/#!/connectslo/status/118771581983014912
• https://twitter.com/#!/alesrosina/status/119104063274094592
• https://twitter.com/#!/wwwh/status/119110863176212481
• https://twitter.com/#!/brianking/status/119786869159510021
• https://twitter.com/#!/brianking/status/119170118180806656

Blog Posts

• http://mozilla.si/2011/09/21/ze-spet-novi-firefox/
• http://www.zemanta.com/blog/firefox-party/
• http://wwwh.si/spletne-urice-180-firefox-7-release-party-at-zemanta/
• http://www.kiberpipa.org/sl/event/180-firefox-7-release-party-zemanta-1429/

Related articles

• Mozilla Firefox 7 Comes with Memory Handling Improvements (news.dice.com)

Picture by Peter ?uhalev

There are other reasons why I talk at and attend events:

In the spirit of making something a little more permanent from all this, I’ve made an Events and Speaking page to catalog what I hope will not only act as a memory for me, but that others can stumble upon to find something useful. I’ve linked slides, videos, pictures, and other relevant materials.

Mostly I talk about Mozilla, and I am very grateful that Mozilla has sponsored me so many times. You can get involved too. If you want to become a more active Mozillian, or just solidify your role in the community, please consider joining the Mozilla Reps program. There has never been a better or more interesting time than now in the evolution of the Web to get involved, as outlined in recent posts by Tristan Nitot and Gervase Markham. Game on indeed!