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)

But I don’t want to talk about that.

I live in Slovenia, which is or is not in the Balkans depending on what definition you use or who you talk to. Over the past couple of years I’ve been fortunate enough to travel around the region (Croatia. Romania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia, Bulgaria) and every time I visit a new place, I’m amazed by the warmth, culture, food, nature, and most of all the people. There is a very real energy that rises above everything else, whether it be pre-conceived or experienced.

The Mozilla community is just that, a community. And we want to harness that energy. Within the Mozilla community are sub-communities, such as Mozilla Asia and Mozilla Europe. Within them there are further sub-communities. Mozilla Balkans is one. And within Mozilla Balkans there are even more communities, such as Mozilla Macedonia or Mozilla Serbia. And in the end we have individuals. Communities bring people together for a greater goal. And that brings us back full circle to Mozilla, it’s mission and goals.

Mozilla Balkans Community Meetup

This week in Ljubjana we’re having a couple of special Mozilla events.

Degustacija Firefox 4 (Tasting Firefox 4)

This is public event tomorrow night (Thursday, 2 December 2010) to show off Firefox 4. We’ll be talking about the Web, Add-ons, Drumbreat, and more. There will be drinks and conversation after. All is happening in the great (all your code is belong to us) Kiberpipa venue.

More details at Mozilla Slovenija and the Facebook event page.

Come one, come all. And bring a friend.

2nd Mozilla Balkans Community Meetup

For the 2nd Mozilla Balkans Community Meetup in Ljubljana, lead contributors from Balkan communities will be invited and sponsored by Mozilla Europe to participate in a 2-day workshop. The aim of the workshop is to enable Mozilla communities in the Balkans to share and learn from each other’s experience working on the Mozilla Project, improve collaboration in the future, and work on specific tasks, based on the 5 goals defined previously and in light of the upcoming Firefox 4 release.

There will be a couple of surprises along the way, and if it is even half as successful (though we aim for double) as the 1st meetup in Skopje, then it will still be declared a success.

Firefox Fathead at Kiberpipa's entrance - by nitot on Flickr

That might require some pretty heavy political lobbying and/or bribery, so in the meantime we’ll start off by having a party. Read all about it over on mozilla.si and RSVP at the Facebook event page. If you can’t speak Slovene (don’t worry, you are not alone) or have an aversion to Facebook, here is the short version:

• Event Title: You’ve Come a Long Way, Foxy (hat tip)
• When: 19:00 on Wednesday, November 11
• Where: Kiberpipa Kersnikova 6, 1000 Ljubljana (map)
• What: 4-5 very short talks, followed by an evening of immense fun

The famous Firefox wine will be served. There will be cake. There will be blood. We are working on the music. Mozillians and party-lovers everywhere, you are invited.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Firefox gains 30 million users in eight weeks (news.cnet.com)
• help build the mozilla developer network (hacks.mozilla.org)
• How to light the world with Firefox (chickswhoclick.wordpress.com)
• New Firefox Plugin Lets Users Dislike Facebook Feed Stories (allfacebook.com)

Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana will be bringing together 20 of the best seed stage web tech startups with experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and developers from all over Europe to participate in a day of intense mentoring, panel discussions and presentations at the superb Tehnoloski park Ljubljana.

We are looking for strong, quality startups that have the talent, drive and capacity to fully embrace the opportunities that participating in a Mini Seedcamp brings. Which is receiving quality advice from top industry leaders and start building those key relationships to help drive your business. Relationships that normally take years to build, you’ll have access to in one day. Mini Seedcamps are not a conference, but an entrepreneurial ecosystem of support to strengthen and catapult your ideas into a viable business.

You still have until 27 April (next Monday) to make your applications, so get to work! I’ll be mentoring, and am excited to be working with some of the best Web talent in the region. Hope to see you there.

Related articles by Zemanta

• We’re on a mission – Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana applications now open! (seedcamp.com)

It was a tweet from Christoper Blizzard that I can’t find right now, or perhaps it was this blog post. So I put out a call. Lo and Behold, Marko Mrdjenovi?  (aka Fry, aka Slovene web dev extraordinaire) was listening. He didn’t know of an existing tool, so he went about the task of making one.

The result: tweecious

Features:

• auto-discovery of  your twitter and delicious accounts
• no login
• runs in the background, unobtrusive
• uses longurl API to find the real links from all those nasty short urls
• use Zemanta‘s suggestion engine to pull in tags

So if you don’t want all those great links you are tweeting to get lost, go get tweecious! Thanks Fry.

Image by King Molan via Flickr

The Slovene locale team made the Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 cutoff, so now test builds are available. Please try them out and report any issues. More details are over at our new blog set up by Matjaž Horvat.

Our work is not done. Next up we are going to finish the rest of the in-product Web pages, and then begin to tackle Thunderbird and Calendar which have not got much attention (esp. TB) in a while.

If anyone wants to help out beyond testing, e.g. with translations, let me know.

Image via Wikipedia

First, the nuclear plant 15km from my home sparked an EU wide alert last week. Note to self – hold breath when I visit KrÅ¡ko for a few weeks and hope the wind blows the other way!

And then earlier this week, a bear attacked and killed a foal 2km away. Yikes. I need to cut the grass so the bears can’t hide there and spring out. Bears are not common here, 2 to 3 lurking around at any one time but they tend to shy away from people and hang out deep in the forest. There are bear regions in other parts of the country.

And lest we forget that quakes are not uncommon in these parts. So I’m just waiting for the sky to fall now, and the party will end with a bang. But before you think I am being morbid, I certainly don’t feel it. All these things add up to a heart thumping, blood flowing existence that makes you grab each day and make the most of it. The world has always been a dangerous place …. live it up.

Image via Wikipedia

- eLiberatica 2008 in Bucharest last week was a blast, not to mention a quality conference. It got the balance between Open Source and business just right, something many conferences fail to do. David Ascher has a blog post talking more about it. Now if only I could dig up that video of him dancing to 80s hits.

- I put some street shots of Bucharest up here, and for conference photos go here.

- If you can understand Romanian, here is an interview I did for eWeek Romania.

- Slovene (sl) locale of Firefox 3 has made beta. You can grab RC2 at the all-rc page.

- There is a major Firefox 3 release party brewing in Ljubljana. Find out more.

Enjoy your weekend!

Taken somewhere between 07:00 – 08:00 on April 26, 2008.

• Nat Torkington over at O’Reilly Radar want Mozilla to reverse its course on XULRunner. I’m confused. He seems to be implying that it should be dropped. shaver has already called him on it in the comments.
• What has happened to MozPad. The initial enthusiasm and burst of action has evaporated. I hold my hands up as guilty of letting the momentum drop … must follow up in the appropriate channels about this.
• If you missed my previous post about FOSDEM 2008, head on over to the Wiki to find out more. I’m wishing Gerv a speedy recovery in time.
• Is it just me, or are the prices at the Mozilla International Store outrageous?! € 68.06 for a messenger bag, which does not include shipping which appears to run and around another € 20 per kg. I’m sure the goods are good, but are they that good?
• Last night at a hair salon art studio(!) opening in Ljubljana, I was catching up with my friend Luka Frelih from Ljudmila. He is blown away by the speed of Firefox 3. So am I. Among the many interesting things he is working on, OpenStreetMap stood out.

I’m not sure if local search engines are default in other distributions, but this issue could certainly set a precedent and thus is important.

So if any of you, especially my Slovene readers, have any insight or opinion on the issue, head on over to the bug and have your say (keep on topic), or comment here in this post if you want to hurl abuse at me for being a blow-in traitor.

…fucks web pages up completely. It destroys the layout, it can change the text, it rotates the images, changes text sizes, it can surf by itself … basically it’s a nightmare of web usability. But at the same time you get very interesting visual structures based on a page’s original design.

Maybe he was trying to imitate IE6 rendering! Anyways, if you around Dubrovnik (stunning spot I hear, have only explored N. Croatia so far myself) between 15-17 June, head on over to the Creative Commons iCommons Summit to meet Jaka and discover plenty of other cool stuff going on.

More Details…

UPDATE : Changed talk to correct time of 19:00

The EU spread it’s arms wider on January 1, with Bulgaria and Romania joining to bring us to a grand total of 27 states. Here in Slovenia, we adopted the Euro, being the first (and only so far) of the 10 who joined in 2004 to do so.

Everyone has their own opinions, personally I feel it is “a good thing”. That goes for EU expansion in general, I was never a euro-skeptic. If the aim is to promote stability and prosperity, so be it. However, it won’t be a cure all for economic problems, and moving to a United States of Europe where Euro is King would not be on my wish list either.

This New York Times article seems to sum up the mood nicely in the country now.

So Eurocrats and people of Europe alike, let us continue to promote cultural diversity, and let eveyone have a fair share of the dividend of a more integrated continent.