mercredi 6 janvier 2010

Two jobs openings at Mozilla!

Par Tristan, mercredi 6 janvier 2010. en

As Mozilla is focusing on technology and products with more frequent releases —Firefox 3.6 and 3.7, Firefox for Maemo and Thunderbird 3.x are coming soon! — but something different and not product-related is going to take place in 2010. It's called Mozilla Drumbeat. I'll shamelessly steal a piece of the drumbeat Wiki to explain what Drumbeat is about[1] :

  • Long Term Vision: make sure the internet is still open, participatory, decentralized and public 100 years from now.
  • Mission: build community of people who create tools that help others understand, participate and take control of their internet lives.
  • Approach: website and local events gather people actively involved in creating a better internet. Annual Drumbeat Festival as major convening point.

The reason why I blog about Drumbeat today is that there are 2 positions open, one in Paris (France) and one in Mountain View (California).

Should you be interested in working full time on Drumbeat, head over to Mozilla Drumbeat - Open Web Project Producer in order to see if you could fit! (If not, there are other open positions listed on the Mozilla career site).

Notes

[1] Mark Surman has a great presentation about Mozilla Drumbeat.

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vendredi 1 janvier 2010

Best Wishes for 2010!

Par Tristan, vendredi 1 janvier 2010. en

There are many differences between Europe and the US, and the habit of wishing a happy new year is one of them. In the US, one should send cards before the end of the year, while in France and some other countries, wishing a happy new year before it starts is frown upon (so we have all January to send season greetings).

But the good news is that time difference will help me here, since I'm able to publish this after midnight (Paris time) while showing up on my colleagues' screens in the US before the end of the year. :-)

In any case, I wish all of you a wonderful year 2010. May it bring you joy, peace, health and satisfaction in what you try to achieve.

La plage de Saint Aubin sur mer, vers l'Ouest

The beach of Saint Aubin sur mer — Calvados — facing West, at night

Je vous souhaite une excellente année 2010. Qu'elle vous apporte joie, paix, santé et satisfaction dans les objectifs que vous vous fixez.

7 commentaires

lundi 21 décembre 2009

Mozilla at FOSDEM 2010

Par Tristan, lundi 21 décembre 2009. en

It's that time of the year again. No, I'm not referring to holidays, but the moment when the Mozilla Europe team starts working on the FOSDEM event. In 2010, FOSDEM will take place on the week-end of the 6th and 7th of February.

Mozilla community members jumping in joy at Fosdem, Brussels

Mozilla community members jumping in joy at Fosdem, Brussels

Mozilla has had a devroom at FOSDEM for the past 9 or 10 years (I only started attending in 2002, by distributing cool Mozilla T-shirts) and we all know how much the Mozilla project has changed over these years. For years — when our resources were extremely limited — FOSDEM has been a great opportunity for the Mozilla community in Europe to get together. But as Mozilla grew bigger, we have started organizing events ourselves, focused only on Mozilla:

The Mozilla Europe board and I have been thinking about the goals of Mozilla participating at FOSDEM, and we have decided to evolve things a bit. Now that we have our own events, it's time to approach FOSDEM differently and focus on making the Mozilla presence an opportunity to interface better with the other Free, Libre and Open Source communities. FOSDEM is wonderful in this regard, since it hosts dozens of other FLOSS projects, with people being able to work freely between devrooms.

In order to achieve this goal and become more approachable, we'll do two things:

  1. The agenda will be significantly different from the previous years:
    1. more 5 minutes lightning talks
    2. joint talks with other projects
  2. Because we have so many Mozilla specific events, we've decided to invite the most active people (and those who have not been invited yet) rather than all the European contributors. This will also leave more seats available in the Devroom, making Mozilla more approachable for other projects. This will also enable us to spend more on Mozilla-specific event that will take place later in the year. Of course, if you want to attend FOSDEM without being sponsored, you're more than welcome to participate!

Now, should you feel that you need sponsorship, go read the selection criteria! With regards to the content of the various talks, Axel Pike Hecht and Brian King should let us know soon how to deal with the program committee he leads, so that you know how to submit a proposal for a talk.

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vendredi 13 novembre 2009

5 years of Firefox party in Paris

Par Tristan, vendredi 13 novembre 2009. en

Earlier this week, Firefox turned 5 years old. The press coverage here in Europe has been amazing. We were lucky enough to have John Lilly with us on this day, so we organized a party with 700 people in Paris.

DSC_0108

5 years of Firefox cake. Other pictures from Richard Ying. Picture used under CC-BY-NC-SA license.

A couple of my colleagues have blogged about this, so I'll just link to them instead of repeating what they've wrote:

A few people have taken pictures. Here they are:

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mercredi 7 octobre 2009

Back from Prague!

Par Tristan, mercredi 7 octobre 2009. en

Team Photo

Most of the Mozilla team in Prague (photo by Ludovic Hirlimann, used under CC-BY-NC license)

There are so many things to say about European Moz Camp 09 – which took place in Prague last week-end – I just can't get started…

I'll try to describe it anyway. It was:

  • Energizing. For example, I had a blast discussing about motivation with Milos, our Serbian localizer, among many other.
  • Super informative, with tons of sessions, keynotes and no less than 4 tracks (QA, Dev, L10n and Advocacy).
  • Full of interactions, the one you can't have on IRC, conference calls or Bugzilla
  • Exciting (having Mike Beltzner explain the Firefox roadmap was great, but having him understand better the community in Europe was even better)
  • Fun (involving laughter, friends, geeky humor and local beer).

Every single minute I have spent there was exciting, and I'd like to thank for this all the people involved in making this event happen (at the risk of forgetting a couple dozen names!).

  1. First and foremost, the lead organizers, William and Irina, all those who helped on this topic. If there were glitches (and nothing can be perfect on an event of this size!), I did not hear of them! [1]
  2. The track organizers who have built a wonderful program with the speakers
  3. All the volunteers who were willing to showed up
  4. Mark Surman, Mike Beltzner and Glyn Moody for taking time out of their busy schedule

There are tons of posts, pictures and tweets that have been published around #eumozcamp09. But if there were only 2 things to see if you haven't been able to attend, they would be the following:

I'm looking forward a similar event next year, with FOSDEM next February in the meantime. See you there!

A couple of blog posts and photo albums from around Europe

Pictures & videos

Notes

[1] Special shout out to Fuzzyfox, Irina and many others…

[2] I'm told that some doctors are already recommending it to people who suffer from depression ;-)

8 commentaires

mardi 18 août 2009

Quote of the day: Jay Sullivan on Fennec

Par Tristan, mardi 18 août 2009. en

Jay Sullivan is the Mozilla VP of Mobile at Mozilla. He works on Fennec, the browser for mobile phones. Jay was recently interviewed by Lifehacker. Here is an interesting excerpt:

What we're seeing happen in mobile is just what we've been seeing on the desktop for the last five years. That's migrating from more client-heavy applications to more web-based applications. Fennec is built on the latest version of our browser engine, and has support for offline storage and things called web workers, which enables threaded applications that can run faster. All these technologies make it possible to build a first-class, HTML5-based application. Plus, we're looking at integrating with the devices' capability. A great example of that is geolocation. With a couple lines of JavaScript code, a webapp developer can take location into account. You see that in Firefox 3.5, with Google Maps supporting it. With Fennec, we're giving you that same ability, but I think it's more important in a mobile device. We're also integrating access to [the] device's camera, and we're working on other APIs to let developers access things like an accelerometer.

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Back from vacations

Par Tristan, mardi 18 août 2009. en

Le matin aussi, c'est bien...

St Aubin sur Mer beach at dawn, aka Nan sector of Juno beach.

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dimanche 26 juillet 2009

Poetry is important

Par Tristan, dimanche 26 juillet 2009. en

Coucher de soleil à Collioure (66)

Sunset in Collioure

Some very good blog posts have been published recently, and I wanted to signal them to my readers. I'll start with a very general statement about the importance of Free, Libre and Open Source Software. It's Atul Varma's Business Card, who quotes an 9 years old and fundamental article by Larry Lessig, Code is law (with the book Code and other laws of Cyberspace).

Mitchell has published not one but two articles related to Mozilla's vision:

  1. I Am Not A Number. "What’s the most interesting thing about the Internet today? To me, it’s not an application, it’s not a technology, it’s not a characteristic like “social.” The most interesting thing about the Internet is me. My experiences. And you. And your experiences."
  2. Eyeballs with Wallets. Excerpt: "There are times, however, when being a wallet attached to eyeballs is not enough. The possibilities available to us online should be broader, just as they are in the physical world. Sometimes we choose to skip the mall and go to the library, or the town square or the park or the museum or the playground or the school. Sometimes we choose activities that are not about consumption, but are about learning and creation and improving the environment around us."

I like the fact that we're not ''just' "eyeballs with wallets". Of course, we're "Website visitors" (aka "Eyeballs"), and we're also customers of e-commerce sites (aka "Wallets"), but we're much more than this.

I'll conclude with a link to a pretty good New York Times article about Mozilla that quotes Mitchell (emphasis mine):

We succeeded because more people got engaged, helped us build a better product and helped us get the product into the hands of people. We succeeded because of the mission.

Exactly. Mitchell sums it up in less than 140 characters on Twitter :

we build Firefox to advance a mission. Now we need to show that Firefox is the first step, not everything.

The product (Firefox) and the mission are intertwined. The mission helps mobilizing forces and energies to build the product. And the product is here to advance the mission. Now our users do see the product (even if sometimes they confuse it with a search engine or an ISP), and sometimes "sense" the mission. We need to keep pushing on the mission part too (aka "poetry"): without it, Firefox is going to be challenged more than with it.

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