2015-07-19 at 18:19:22
Back in the beginning of June Mozilla has released Firefox 38.0.5, together with a campaign to promote Firefox all over the world. This also included offline events, which we did in Zurich, Bern and Berlin.
On June 3rd we met in Zurich to talk about new Firefox features and why you should use Firefox. Unfortunately my planning wasn't that good and we picked a date where there were 4 other meetups going on in Zurich. This is one thing we definitely need to keep an eye on for the next events. Nevertheless we could talk to a few people and have great discussions about Firefox and the Open Web. We basically hijacked a work session at liip.ch (amazing company which hosts us for our Zurich based meetups) and involved them in the discussion.
For this meetup I baked some cupcakes and tried to decorate them with a Firefox logo. I won't share any pictures of this, since it was not really that good. Nevertheless the attendees liked them. But hey, I knew I had a second chance for the Bern meetup!
5 days later I organized the next event in Bern, my hometown, to talk about how Firefox and Mozilla impacts the Open Web. You can find the slides on my other website. We had about 10 attendees, most of them not familiar with Mozilla and Firefox. I thought that I can take this chance to begin an "Open Web Meetup" group in Bern. This is also how the event was promoted.
There were a lot of interesting questions, which I tried to answer to my knowledge. I'm sure we can have another Open Web Meetup after the summer break to discuss more on Open Web technologies and Mozilla.
For this event I had my second chance to bake cupcakes, this time I had some advice on how to improve from a professional. I took Marzipan, colored it and cut out the Firefox logo out of it. Since it was quite hot, the Marzipan was not easily cutable without breaking, so not all of the logos looked like a fox. Nevertheless it was still recognizable. This took about 4 hours in total, but it was totally worth the effort! But psst, let's not show that to the Brand Engagement team ;)
Also many thanks to netcase.ch (my employer) for hosting us there!
Since I'm not based in Berlin, I delegated this event to Florian Merz, who did a great job on June. Here's his recap:
We held a nice meetup with a talk about "What's new in Firefox". Located in the Berlin Mozilla office we gathered a round of diverse people, regarding both background and motivation to attend this meetup. From addon developer, contributor, to "I just wanted to see what's going on with Firefox, since I switched to another browser a couple of years ago". During the talk we saw some of the newer features of Firefox like "Firefox Hello" or the Pocket integration. Furthermore, we discussed the privacy implications of such features and Mozilla's contribution to the users ability to maintain its privacy in general.
Florian also baked amazing Firefox cupcakes, which I'm sure they tasted fantastic!
After the talk we had some time left for discussion and some cold beer along with home made firefox cupcakes. Thanks for a great evening to all attendees. And also a great "Thanks" to Florian for pulling this off all by himself, great job!
Even though there are reports for #FoxYeah from other countries which were a lot more focused on #FoxYeah graphics, I still think that we had quite some impact in Switzerland and Berlin. If you would like to spread the world even though the #FoxYeah campaign is over, you can do this on friends.mozilla.org! Let's keep rocking the free Web together!