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.

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.

(Don’t see the embedded presentation? Other formats: PDF | PPT)

Robert talks more about the conference here, breaking the news that there will likely be a MozCamp in Vienna in October. My talk and Firefox in general got some coverage in the local press – Read (in German) ‘How does Firefox Become the Number One‘.

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Image via Wikipedia

Tomorrow I will be in Vienna and speaking at Linuxwochen.at, a premier Austrian Open Source event.

The schedule is packed, and up just before me in the evening will be Robert Kaiser talking about the Open Web. If you missed Paul Rouget’s demos this week, I urge to to check them out.  I’ll be focusing more on Add-ons and other areas and the discussion in both talks is sure to get interesting.

I’m looking for ward to hanging out with my neighbours. If you are around, drop in to check out some of the talks and say hi.

if you can say that mouthful 10 times in a row. If you have never been, believe me when I say it a unique experience and highly eventful and enjoyable.

Image via Wikipedia

But my real motivation is to solicit session proposals for the Mozilla room. We’re leaning towards more dev talks and less l10n this year, but that by no means rules out a super hot l10n proposal. We are open to all aspects of the community, technical or otherwise. For example, John Slater has put forward a great proposal on ‘Building Mozilla’s visual design community’. We have still not chosen the speaker/topic list, so you still have time to put forward your proposal. To do so, go over the wiki proposals page and add in your idea, and the main FOSDEM page has more general information. If you have any questions, you can contact me via the comments or from this page.

Enjoy the holidays, over and out.

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• The annoyances of proprietary Firefox extensions

Image via Wikipedia

Video from eLiberatica 2008 published – see interviews with representatives from Google, Mozilla, Sun, European Union, FSF Europe, Gartner and more

eLiberatica on YouTube

The general message I took away from the conference was:

a) the market is not as large as other parts of the world, or even other parts of Europe.

b) the market in Eastern Europe is in its infancy and there is a lot of opportunity.

c) Open Source software and services have become mainstream and will continue to make inroads.

I think these are exciting times in Eastern Europe not just related to business, but in areas of social development, innovation, and culture. If you have a free half an hour or so I encourage you to watch the videos to get a feel for what is happening in the OSS world there.

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• FOSS, Business, and Bucharest

Image by King Molan via Flickr

I didn’t get to the Prism talk after lunch on Saturday, opting for the L10n-Drivers Team Presentation instead. I use Prism and have always wanted to see it rolled into Firefox, and some see a sense of urgency about this now that Chrome and other browsers have a similar feature. From what I heard, the Prism team are moving towards a 1.0 release and it will be integrated into Firefox in some form or other at some point. Correct me if I am wrong.

Matjaž Horvat’s talk in the last slot on Saturday was a good case study of utilisiing the Firefox extension system to provide a window into your Web services. Not only does it give you access to potentially hundreds of millions of users, but has much easier hooks than most of the other plaforms. Read more about it here.

My own ‘State of the Add-ons Universe‘ talk on Sunday before lunch went really well. The audience was a mixed bag but they were engaged and even passionate about some issues. I talked a bit about the history of extensions which was fun and had a few heads nodding and smiling. About 40% of the talk ended up being directly about AMO, but it got the most questions and feedback from people. The main take-away for me was the locale story on AMO needs a little more attention. I am not talking about the site, but rather:
a) Some public add-ons have broken locales. This can seriously break Firefox as well. We need to formalise locale testing more in the review process.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=461805
b) Authors run their add-ons descriptions, instructions, and whatever other text when uploading through translate tools that are not accurate. Some refuse to change the text if it is wrong. I am not sure if this is even widespread and if we can/should even do anything about it.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=461795

Some other highlights from my talk:

- People are excited about Mossop’s upcoming EM changes

- I demoed the Bandwagon extension, a tool for sharing and discovering add-ons via feeds, and the feedback was positive. I’ll talk more about this as release gets closer.

- Extensions of extensions, and the whole dependency story, is hot now and a real issue for Firebug. I talked to Honza of the Firebug team some about this. It is being tracked in bug 462111.

- Meeting Tony Farndon, the author of the Mini Map Sidebar extension. Tony’s achievement is staggering. Coming in with no programming experience, he has created one of the most popular extensions on AMO. He nabbed me after the talk and I hooked him up with Tomcat to set up Leak Gauge (a must for all extension developers). Tony nearly fainted after seeing dozens of leaks after the first run, but then realised he had other extensions installed. Running with a fresh profile revealed no leaks, nice!

Mark Finkle’s back-to-back talks on Fennec Add-ons and XULRunner were top-notch as usual, and the Fennec talk especially got me excited enough to want to do my first Mobile extension. With AMO support now in place, and some live examples in the wild, there is nothing stopping us. The XULRunner talk diverged from the usual format and took the form of a hand-ons tutorial on how to use the Mozilla build system for XULRunner applications. Very useful

It was great to meet some other people from the Add-ons world. Ian Hayward of Glaxstar and I had a chat about a few things and shared experiences on running a business on top of Mozilla technologies. Daniel Glazman and I met for the first time since FOSDEM in 2003. And as an AMO editor, it was great to talk to one of my fellow editors, Archaeopteryx.

I know I have missed some things, but that pretty much sums things up from an Add-ons perspective.

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• Mozilla Camp Europe in Barcelona last weekend

Image via Wikipedia

-Fennec is getting close to prime time and Mark Finkle will be giving us the run-down on Fennec Add-ons.

- Matjaž Horvat will be talking about how and why Zemanta chose Firefox as one of their platforms to launch their startup and how their extension sits on top of their excellent web services.

- I will be talking about the State of the Add-ons Universe. A mix of AMO stats, anecdotes, and I hope a discussion on what is coming up next.

See the full schedule.

I’m excited about hearing what the local Spanish community is doing in the dev space with Add-ons and the broader platform. Talking to French developers in Paris last month makes me think that there is a lot going on all over Europe that perhaps does not get as much attention as it should. If you are attending and want some stage time or have any questions, please leave a comment or get in touch.

If you are wondering about this post title, watch this. Masters at work.

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Mozilla Addons Workshop (MAOW08)

- Good venue, well equipped. The audience was spit into different perspectives but there were screens and televisions scattered around making sure every could see and hear the speakers.

- I enjoyed Wladimir‘s talk. It focused less on popups (or lack of them) and more on the community model and mechanics of maintaining a successful extension. Apparenly 5% of Firefox users approximately use AdBlock Plus, which converts to about 1% of the total Internet user population. Not small numbers on the grand scale of things.

- I did not follow the rest of the talks well, them being in French and all (I wish I studied more in school)! But from what I understood and heard from others, the quality bar was high.

- Met Patrick Finch of Mozilla Europe Marketing for the first time. We chatted over a pint of Guinness (not very Paris I know) on Saturday night and found out we had a lot in common. And David, it was a pleasure as always!

- Met a bunch of other interesting folks. Special mention goes to J.C. Combaz, the Founder and CEO of a French startup called OutWit. He was showing me their smart and powerful Firefox extension called OutWit Hub that scans and mines data from pages. Sometimes the word ‘extension’ does not do justice to software written on the Mozilla Platform. Try it out.

- And last but not least, kudos to William Quiviger, Paul Rouget, and the XULFr.org team for the organisational work. Looks like there will be more similar events upcoming.

The City

- Second visit, first in 2000 for XML Europe 2000.

- Ranks up there as one of my favourite ‘big cities’, if not the favourite. The atmosphere walking alone the Seine on a sunny day is unique.

- Did not talk to one rude Parisian. We need to start moving beyond stereotypes.

- Shops close on Sunday in Paris. This seems different to other major European cities.

- If you like taking photos, you are spoiled for choice. Some of mine are here.

Image via Wikipedia

Last night we met up with some ActiveState folks and it was great catching up with some old colleagues. All my memories of that great year in Vancouver came flooding back to me.

But the coming week at the Summit is all about the future, in particular about where Firefox and the Web is going, and I am looking forward to some great sessions and productive discussions.

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I’ll be at the Mozilla Corp. Offices in Mountain View next Monday (21st). It’s at the front-end of a conference trail that I will write about more.

The last time I visited was January 2007, not too frequent due to the the not small matter of ~10000Km distance gap. So it is about time for another drop-in.

I’ve a few meetings set up, but for any other Mozilla folks, if you want to talk just get in touch.

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!

A lot of context is lost but you will get the general idea. In case you are wondering, the Giant is you … everyone in the FOSS cycle from devs to consumers.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ll be in great company talking this coming week at the eLiberatica conference in Bucharest (see blurb below). … Hope to see you there.

While I am used to giving more technical talks, this time around I will be focusing on something a little different. To fit in with the general theme of the conference, my focus will be on how small and medium size businesses can use FOSS software to get a kick-start on the road to success. The FOSS software pool is getting larger all the time. Whether you run a product model business, or a service orientated one, there is something for everyone. One size fits all is not the case. I’ll be trying to get the message across that there are great opportunities if you take the plunge, with a few tips on how to choose the right tools and technologies to fit your needs.

I’m looking forward to being in Bucharest. It will be my first time in Romania, and I heard the city is fantastic with plenty to see and do. Romanian cuisine looks quite enticing too!

Get some up to date coverage here:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Fosdem:2008:Happenings

I don’t have much more to add, except to say that I agree, it was really great this year. A larger attendance in the Mozilla room, higher than average temperatures in Brussels, and the no small matter of 10 years of Mozilla combined to make it something special.

The Mother Ship (supplementing the work of Mozilla Europe) got more involved in the organisation this year, and a big shout out must go to Anne-Julie Ligneau, Mary Colvig, Jane Finette, Pascal Chevrel, Chris Hofmann, Seth Bindernagel (sethb), and Carsten Book to name just some, for there hard work in the run-up and during the event. And I want to give special mention to the French Mozilla team for their manning (and “womaning”) of the Mozilla stand.

I was very happy with the way the sessions went. All speakers without exception delivered great content and made their topics engaging, enough that the room was full for most talks despite the stifling heat in the rooms.

Gerv has managed to swing one of the big rooms for us again next year, and we are even toying around with the idea of extending the Mozilla gathering by a day or two before the FOSDEM main event starts. However, I don’t think sethb and David Tenser could survive that long together again in Brussels, so we would have to keep the dynamic duo apart for at least half that time!