The holiday season is upon us, which means that the Mozilla team is hard at work preparing our participation to FOSDEM! For those who live on a different planet (or just a continent other than Europe), FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting. The event is as nice as it's a mouthful, and Mozilla has been participating to it since almost forever. I think my first FOSDEM was in 2002, but other European Mozillians were there the year before, while it was called OSDEM. Mozilla started having a developer room officially in 2003.

FOSDEM sign, hooked with duct tape!

FOSDEM entrance

So Mozilla will be at FOSDEM once again, for its 2011 edition, but in a slightly different format. Both FOSDEM and Mozilla have grown very significantly over the years, and we have increasingly been facing the following issues:

  1. It's becoming harder to accommodate the needs of the Mozillians with the resources of the FOSDEM team. We've been struggling with the size of the room, despite the huge efforts by the FOSDEM organizers to help.
  2. To be more productive, we need several rooms, but we don't want to steal them from other FLOSS projects
  3. Participating Mozillians have been facing a dilemma: either participating to the Mozilla dev room or attending the sessions led by other projects.
  4. Since the schedule is pretty packed, it's hard to make it appealing to contributors from other projects.

In order to solve these issues, we have decided to change the way Mozilla participates to FOSDEM. We'll still have a dev room, but the goal is to use it as an opportunity to engage with participants to the other FLOSS projects, while using the future Mozilla Camps Europe (like Barcelona and Prague?) and other local community events for the Mozilla communities to gather.

To this end, we are going to invest more in upcoming Mozilla contributor events and less in FOSDEM. We will only sponsor Mozillians giving talks at FOSDEM this year, as opposed to sponsoring all Mozillians like in previous years. This will enable us to focus our energy and financial resources on improving future Mozilla contributor events and ensuring that more of our contributors can participate in more events.

Those who want to give a talk in the Dev Room this year should get in touch with Brian King like every year before Friday, 15th January 2011 at: brian at mozdev dot org.

Should you have questions, please connect with William (william at mozilla dot com) - who has just posted on his blog too - or myself!