As has been customary for a few years now, Mozilla will take part in FISL 2010 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Held July 21 through 24, FISL is an annual gathering of free software groups throughout the world, but especially in South America.
Mozilla’s attendance this year includes talks on Jetpack, Drumbeat, Web Sockets, and Universal Subtitles.
For more information on Mozilla’s participation in FISL, please see the wiki page.
As announced in a few places, the Drumbeat Festival – which is a lot like the Mozilla Summit but for non-product-related Mozilla community members – has been scheduled for November 3-5 in Barcelona, Spain.
Mark Surman – Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) – explains “[t]he theme is ‘learning, freedom and the web’ — connecting people on the radical, disruptive edge of learning with people from the open web world.” That’s a bit different than the one for the Mozilla Summit 2010, which is “Be More Like the Web.” How Drumbeat fits into learning and freedom has yet to be seen. Regardless, the Mozilla Foundation continues to grow the community using Drumbeat and spreading it beyond the mostly product focus of the past few years.
You might have noticed that we’ve been avoiding the Drumbeat Festival, which has been blogged about quite a bit, mostly because even those who work on Drumbeat haven’t yet explained exactly what it is beyond vague words like “platform” and “fundraising.” Mitchell Baker – Chairperson of MoFo and the Chairperson and “Chief Lizard Wranger” of the Mozilla Corporation – calls Drumbeat an “initiative for people who want to use the open infrastructure of the Internet to bring openness, participation and individual empowerment to other aspects of online life,” which is a nice way of saying “it’s lots of things for lots of people.”
Whatever it may end up being, if you’re you’re interested in the Drumbeat Festival, we recommend you check out the wiki page as well as the list of potential invites.
With less than two weeks left until the Mozilla Summit 2010, a proposed schedule for the Mozilla Summit has been published.
While this schedule has yet to include names of sessions, it’s clear that there will be as many as nine (9!) tracks that attendees can follow. With hundreds of attendees, a large number of sessions should allow for better dialogue and less of a keynote-esque feel.
Mozilla’s Drumbeat is holding an event in Paris, just before the Mozilla Summit 2010. The Paris event will happen on the evening of July 1 at 6pm and end with dinner and drinks.
As with all geek events, pizza will be provided.
While most groups have submitted their ideas for sessions, lightning talks, and the science fair to the various private Google spreadsheets, a few groups have been publishing their ideas and proposals on the Mozilla wiki.
The first, the Mobile group, has published a list of sessions they’re proposing for the summit, as well as proposed lightning talks. Attendees of the Summit will likely get a chance to attend sessions on Mozilla’s mobile roadmap, writing and designing add-ons for Fennec, user experience on mobile, and how mobile fits in with Mozilla’s out of process project, Electrolysis.
The mobile group will also have a “keynote” which will feature Stuart Parmenter – Mozilla Corporation’s (MoCo) Director of Mobile Engineering – giving a general overview of all things mobile, including Fennec, Android, Meego, and Firefox Home, the new iPhone application.
The second group to publish their ideas and plans is the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo), which have given a list of sessions and lightning talks they hope to present at the Summit. Among them are sessions on project communication, branch management in Bugzilla, the Mozilla web universe, growing the Mozilla community with Drumbeat, learning from non-Mozilla movements, and a general “participation” session.
The most interesting MoFo session looks to be one on exploring supporter and membership models for Mozilla, which MoFo is especially interested in as a way to raise funds. Membership at Mozilla could mirror that of the Apache Foundation, Gnome Foundation, or other open source non-profits.
The final group that has posted its plans on the Mozilla wiki is the Mozilla Labs Jetpack team. The Jetpack team has posted plans for one session that discusses Jetpack and the future of add-on development, mirroring a talk Myk Melez – Mozilla Labs engineer – is expected to give at the London MAOW the week prior. The group also has plans for three different lightning talks and a Science Fair booth to demo the Jetpack SDK and FlightDeck.
Additionally, the Jetpack team will be holding a Rocket Your Firefox add-on content and will announce winners at the closing dinner on July 9.
The Summit should be a fun and interesting event for those who attend. Hopefully more groups will publish their plans and ideas for the Summit to give outsiders a better look inside the event.
At the Mozilla Summit 2010, attendees will be asked to help with an assortment of tasks throughout the duration of the event. Mozilla has published a Job Board sign-up sheet and asked that all attendees sign up for a task.
The various jobs Mozilla is trying to fill include:
Asking attendees to fill these positions is in stark contrast to the previous summit, where much was organized and handled by an outside firm in conjunction with the Mozilla Corporation HR department. Mozilla hopes this will keep people from passively attending the summit.
For those of you not attending the Summit and still interested in its goings on, the second weekly newsletter – being sent only to Summit attendees – has been mailed off and is available online for your viewing pleasure.
This year, Mozilla will be attending the Renegade Craft Fair, in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It takes place on September 11-12 later this year. The group attending (currently 4-5 people) will be handing out fake tattoos, buttons, shirts, and other various swag. They’ll also be creating limited edition Renegade Craft Fair Chicago t-shirts.
More information is available on the Mozilla wiki.
The sheer number of people attending the Mozilla Summit 2010 is quite impressive. It’ll likely be a great event for all who attend, but a few could get lost in the crowd.
This year, Mozilla is trying to curb that by introducing “Summit Buddies,” a program and a game that pair first time attendees with a “mentor” of sorts, someone who’s attended before.
The game part of the program involves several aspects including quests, points, and prizes. Buddies will participate in quests to earn as many points as possible. The top scorers will receive prizes.
Not everyone has to participate. Those that don’t want to have until June 15 to send an email to opt out.
Of course, before you attend, you may want to hop onto Facebook and RSVP to the event. From there, you’ll be able to see everyone who’s attending (and who has Facebook). Pictures should help ease you into the Summit.
Today is the final day for Summit 2010 travel to be organized and, with just one day shy of four weeks before the Summit, you might wonder about communication surrounding it.
For the vast majority of the Mozilla community that won’t be attending, one of the easiest ways to keep up with the latest gossip and news is to follow Summitr, Mozilla’s aggregator of tweets, photos, and links from the Summit.
Additionally, non-attendees can hang out in #moz10 on irc.mozilla.org to try and read a glimpse of what’s happening or follow the MozillaSummit twitter account to see the Mozilla-approved information.
Attendees will be receiving a newsletter every week leading up to the Summit. The first newsletter has already been published.
As always, watch the Mozilla wiki page on Summit communication to keep up to date with newsletters or new forms of communication Mozilla will be using.
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