Michael's Blog

15 Years as a Mozilla Volunteer

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 19:00:00 +0000

March 10th, 2023 marked my 15th year contributing to Mozilla as a volunteer. In this blog post I will focus on the past 5 years. Before reading this, you might want to check out my previous blog post about my first 10 years.

Statistics

Unfortunately I can't provide the same level of granular statistics as I did in that blog post, as the data aggregation from back then does not exist anymore. However, I created my own tool to track my contributions and you can find all my contributions listed in the Open Source section of this website. I might write about that tool in the future, until then you can set this up for yourself as well. The code can be found on GitHub.

Common Voice

Most of this blog post will focus on Common Voice, as that is the main project I have worked on in the past 5 years. This is the story of how I got to contribute to it and what contributions I've made over the years. Many of these efforts were based on input and collaboration of the community!

Common Voice is Mozilla's effort to create a public domain dataset of voice recordings that can be used to create Machine Learning models to recognize speech. For more information check out the About page on Common Voice.

Getting to know Sentence Collector

As part of my Mozilla Reps work, I helped organize the Mozilla Berlin presence of Mozilla's Global Sprint in May 2018. The Global Sprint was a global event encouraging participants to create fun projects for a healthy internet. For the Berlin instance of this event we decided to focus on Common Voice. One benefit of this was that the Common Voice team was located in Berlin and therefore easily could help us out. At that point I had heard about Common Voice before, but I do not remember contributing to it before this event.

At the event we used a localization tool to submit and review sentences, as that already had a review flow. These sentences then get shown to the voice contributors to record. To get a good dataset many hours of recorded speech is necessary. Many hours of speech also means many sentences that need to be available to be recorded. As you might imagine, this does not scale well. Later that year in July Mike Henretty committed the first version of the Sentence Collector to GitHub. This then allowed as to improve upon and create a flow that specifically fits the purpose and processes of Common Voice.

My first commit to the Sentence Collector repository was in November 2018. Since then I have maintained and improved the Sentence Collector as a volunteer. There were contributions from time to time from other contributors and of course the whole thing would not have been possible without the discussions with the community.

The initial version looked slightly different, but at some point I decided to get it a bit closer to the design of the Common Voice website. This is how it looks now:

Backend work on Sentence Collector

For some time in the beginning Sentence Collector did not have a real backend. The frontend basically directly contacted Kinto, which worked out quite well initially. However with time our requirements became more complex and we had to switch to using a real backend. I fully developed this backend based on a Node. This was quite a project to do in my free time, as there was no existing backend and therefore also no deployment processes. Additionally at that point we decided to introduce the same login mechanism as Common Voice uses and therefore we also had to integrate with Auth0, which made the whole project even bigger. However this was a great learning opportunity for me, as I had never worked with OAuth before that.

Current status of Sentence Collector

Currently there is an ongoing project to fully integrate the Sentence Collector into the Common Voice platform. Until now it was quite hard to find the Sentence Collector and its code was completely independent of the Common Voice platform. This required us to come up with some processes to get the data integrated and keep everything consistent. We had talked about this more than 2 years ago, but it simply never happened. Therefore I'm very happy that this is now happening.

Sentence Extractor

As one-off contributions submitting sentences through Sentence Collector was not enough for all languages, the Common Voice team also created a tool that extracts sentences from Wikipedia (with legal requirements applied). That tool is called Sentence Extractor. Around June 2019 I started contributing to that tool as well and then later on took over maintenance as well. Since then I helped integrate more sources apart from just Wikipedia, as well as creating more rules that can be applied to find the right sentences to extract. All of these rules are documented in the README file.

A bigger project for the Sentence Extractor was the automation of the extraction process. For a long time trusted contributors ran the extraction process locally on their machine and then uploaded the resulting sentences file to the Common Voice repository. This could take hours to run. I created a GitHub Actions workflow which automates the process, while also making sure that none of the sentences changed. This allows anyone to trigger an extract and then the only manual process is to submit a PR with the file to the Common Voice repository. However the content of that file is easily comparable to the output of the GitHub Action and therefore guarantees compliance with the legal requirements easily.

Community Work

After moving to Berlin at the beginning of 2018 I started helping out with organizing community events in the Mozilla office. I joined the already existing bi-weekly Mozilla Nights and helped mentor attendees and then also further on helped organize those events. Unfortuantely we did not switch those bi-weekly Mozilla Nights to be online events and had to pause them during the pandemic.

We have also organized campaign specific events between 2018 and the beginning of 2020, whenever Mozilla had a global campaign that benefited from having physical events happening. You can find previous campaigns as well as upcoming campaigns on the Community Portal. For many of those campaigns we needed a bug reporting form, therefore I develop and keep maintaining the campaign-form which gets adjusted of reach campaign.

I have also continued to be a Peer for the Reps program. However admittedly, in the past 2 years I did not contribute as much to the Reps program. If you'd like to chat with me about the program, I'm super happy to do so though!

And finally, I organized the virtual Mozilla presence in the Mozilla Dev Room at FOSDEM 2022 together with other volunteers.

Firefox

I have also continued to write some patches for Firefox. These usually come in batches of 2 or 3 at the tiem and then I don't contribute to Firefox code for another half year. You can find a list of my fixed bugs on Bugzilla. I'm probably going to keep contributing to Firefox from time to time, however I do not have a big amount of time availabe these days.

10 Years as a Mozilla Volunteer

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 19:29:11 +0000

March 10th, 2018 marked my 10 year anniversary as a Mozilla volunteer. I wanted to write this blog post for quite some time now, but as you might know, writing is not one of my capabilities I’m exercising a lot. With this blog post I’d like to give a quick wrap up of the past 10 years and share the story on how I came to Mozilla. Upfront I’d like to thank everyone who made this journey as amazing as it was, to many more years!

Statistics

If you only care about numbers, here they are. These were measured until early March 2018 and taken from Mozilla’s Community Analytics tool.

205 bugs filed on Bugzilla
3430 Bugzilla comments
178 assigned bugs on Bugzilla (including Reps applications)
259 Patches submitted on Bugzilla
860 reports on the Reps portal
136 events (online & offline) organised since becoming a Rep in 2012
110 submitted PRs on GitHub (not counting Firefox)
994 commits on Git repositories including Firefox and directly to repos such as MozActivate, Firefox 57 Quantum Sprint, Firefox Quantum Release
335 GitHub issues filed in over 20 repositories
50 wiki pages created
369 edits to wiki pages
451 emails to 20 different mailing lists
495 posts / 155 topics created on Discourse since September 14

First contact

I have been using Firefox for at least since the 1.0 release. Unfortunately I don’t have any recollection or evidence for this, but I have a feeling that it could have been one of the releases before as well. In any case, I had been using Firefox for quite some time before I even came into contact with the principle of it being Open Source.

I was in high school when the first contact with a Firefox contributor happened. This must have been some time in 2007, can’t remember when exactly that was. Friends of mine found our Math teacher’s name connected to Firefox. You might ask how that might have happened? Well, I’d say basic stalking. They found his name in the Mozilla Credits, probably by googling his name. Until now I’m not fully sure how it happened, but that seems like the most credible variant of it. The other possibility would be that they saw him in-product. Back then there was a scrolling list of all these names in the “About” window of Firefox. Having seen it there seems less credible though, as they would had needed to stare at this scrolling list for a few names until they found it. I’m pretty sure they were not that bored. You never know though. In the next Math class, they asked him about this and he decided to give a short introduction explaining what he has done for Firefox and showed some code. At that point I was fully hooked and it dawned on me that I can do that as well!

From then on I was hooked and started using the Minefield, nowadays known as “Nightly”, version of Firefox. Since then I’ve been using testing versions of Firefox and (except for a few days) never switched to anything else for daily use. It took a while of using it until I found my first bug. This was on March 10th 2008, more than 10 years ago. After that I started to get more involved in forums such as MozillaZine and started to interact with Mozilla mailing lists. I remember using the daily threads on MozillaZine to see what changed in the latest nightly build I was using. This also put me a little bit closer to what was going on in Bugzilla and I started to follow a few bugs to keep myself up to date.

Even though I was using Minefield and testing it before I filed my first bug, I took my first Bugzilla activity as official start date of my contributions. I think that’s a fair starting point - and honestly the only one I would have a solid date for.

First patch

I didn’t work on my first Firefox patch until about a year later. Funny enough, I went back to the first bug I filed and tried to fix it. Getting the development environment up and running and getting used to the Firefox coding style took me some time, and it’s probably also the patch I needed to revise the most times till now. I remember being on IRC and asking all kinds of questions that are still turning up on IRC nowadays. I remember being very happy once the patch was done and got merged into Firefox itself.

I have to admit, I’ve done probably less coding on Mozilla projects between 2008 and 2013 than I have done in the past 2 months.

First contact with the community

In 2009 I added myself to the Germany/Austria/Switzerland contributors wiki page. This is how my real-life interaction with the community started - I’m not counting my Math teacher in high school here - for reasons. Henrik, my dear mentor eversince, was working in Switzerland in 2011, and he checked out the mentioned Wiki page and found my name. He contacted me and asked if I’d like to have a coffee and talk about Mozilla and meet eachother. Of course I was in! We’ve met in Bern on a summer evening, 22nd of August 2011 to be exact. Yes, that was the Firefox 6 launch party in Bern. I even got my first Firefox stickers!

Mozilla Switzerland

After this initial meeting, we started to meet more regularly in different places in Switzerland. We organised “MozCoffees” in Bern and Zurich, slowly but steadily growing and building the Mozilla Switzerland community.

Our first event in Switzerland apart from regular MozCoffees was the “Weekend of Code 2012” event. Mozillians from Switzerland shared their knowledge about different areas they are contributing to. I’ve held a Firefox Source Code talk, my first talk I’ve ever given about a Mozilla topic.

Over the recent years we got more and more organized, having regular meetups in Zurich and other cities of Switzerland. I don’t want to get into too much details about Mozilla Switzerland here, but you can check out our Wiki page and Twitter account. Also a big “thank you” to everyone involved in the Swiss community, it’s always been a pleasure to organise all these events and make friends.

Henrik also introduced me to MozFest which I attended the first time together with Henrik in 2011. Since then I’ve attended all MozFests and I don’t plan to stop doing that!

(Mozilla Switzerland reunited at MozFest 2014 - photo credits to Henrik)

The Mozilla Switzerland crew also attended the MozCamp in Warsaw in 2012. This was my second interaction point with the international community which helped me a lot to get around! That’s also the first time I’ve met Ioana, our lovely Mozilla Reps module owner.

The Reps era

As Henrik left his job in Switzerland he suggested me joining the Reps program he had been part of for quite some time before. With his mentoring skills he already had prepared me for it the year before that, so it was a quite easy decision for me. I’ve applied to the program on November 8th 2012 and got accepted 5 days later. I’m pretty sure there was some pressure from Ioana as I’ve created my application when sitting right next to her at MozFest. In hindsight a very good thing ;)

I think my contributions through the Reps program would deserve a completely independent blog post, so I’m not gonna go into details here. You can find all 44 pages of reports since then in the Reps archive. Have fun! I was also featured as “Rep of the Month” in March 2014, I was really happy about that!

Trying to build the German speaking community

A big part of my Reps life was devoted to the German-speaking community. This includes Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland. I was invited to the “Community Reboot” event in January 2013 which marked the start of my little project to nurture the German-speaking community and bring it closer together. We did several experiments with the regular online meetings of the community and also introduced regular video meetings.

I’ve organized a followup real-life meeting in February 2014 to bring the community together and talk about everything community related. In 2015 we’ve organized the first Mozilla Tech Weekend which gave a good initial boost to the Berlin community. A big shoutout goes to Florian Merz for talking it into his own hands to build a community in Berlin. Well done! A big "thank you" goes to Axel Hecht as well, as he has been guiding and mentoring me along the way. I think I would have abandoned this project earlier without him.

All my efforts lasted until around early 2016, when I decided that the whole project doesn’t meet my high expectations and I didn’t see any progress within the German-speaking community for quite some time. There were other reasons I’d like not to mention here, that’s why I’m keeping this section of the blog post quite small. All in all, it was a good opportunity for me to build skills and capabilities and I think it’s always good to learn from unsuccessful projects. I definitely did!

The Firefox OS era

When I first heard about Firefox OS I was excited. At one of the Mozilla Switzerland meetups Henrik tried to get it running on a Samsung Galaxy and we had a lot of fun. This was before the Geeksphone devices came out. I remember the day when I ordered my first Firefox OS phone so I can play around with it. Turned out, I very quickly switched to it as my primary phone and until it’s end always used a Firefox OS phone as primary phone. Sometime with experimental builds on it, but that was nothing new as I was using Firefox Nightly as my main browser as well (same people might say I like to live dangerously..). Dogfooding (or as we called it, Foxfooding) was very important to provide a stable and working platform and I didn’t see another way apart from using it daily. Up to now I’m missing the “switch apps by swiping from the very edge of the phone” feature, that was amazing!

As Firefox OS was my new primary focus, I started organising events and talks about it. Together with other amazing contributors around Germany, Austria and Switzerland I’ve organized App hackathons, to name a few (not a full list):

March 2013: Firefox OS hackathon in Vienna
May 2013: Firefox OS App Day in Switzerland
March 2014: Firefox OS in Salzburg
June 2014: Firefox OS App Day in Switzerland
July 2014: Talk at a Swiss meetup
October 2014: Firefox OS Hackathon in Berlin

You can find all my talks I’ve ever given on my website.

Once Firefox OS launched in Germany, I was part of the launch team. We did a promotion event in Cologne which was something new to me. I was used to "selling" Firefox to people, but there was no actual sale involved. With Firefox OS, potential users had to buy a phone to actually use it. I think we had some traction with the Firefox costume, but not really with Firefox OS. Well, I guess that was to be expected in hindsight.

I was involved with Firefox OS until the decision to pivot to Connected Devices. After that I was more focused on Reps specific tasks.

Reps Governance & Participation

Thanks to my involvement in the Reps program on a strategic level and my interest in continuing this, I’ve applied to the Reps Council elections in 2015 in May 2015. This allowed me to shape the conversation and strategy about the Reps program on a more impactful level. This included being invited to several Mozilla All Hands where we spent a week discussing everything about Participation. Some people might not understand why I would take a week off my work to go “work” for Mozilla in my free time, but well, that’s who I am.

As my first term came to an end, I like having these conversations so much that I decided to apply for another term. Crazy, I know. We went through the whole “Reps Next” project and introduced a few improvements to the program which were overdue for a long time. This term lasted until November 2017. You might ask why two terms amount to about one and a half year? We had a little delay on the second elections and therefore were not fully on schedule anymore. Happens :)

After my second term on Council I decided to accept Ioana’s proposal to become a Peer. This was officially announced in December 2017. I hope to bring the same valuable inputs to strategic discussions about the program to the broader group as I have been in Council. Let’s see what comes next :)

What is next

I’ve recently moved to Berlin to my amazing Mozillian girlfriend. As some of you know, I've been together with Konstantina for almost 3 years now and finally was able to make the step to move there as well. This means no longer commuting from Switzerland to Berlin on weekends, which became quite cumbersome over time. I'm very happy I did this and there are no regrets whatsoever. As I'm still employed by NEEO and working remotely, it's definitely an exciting time.

Moving to Berlin means putting the Swiss community into the very capable hands of other contributors but of course I’ll still be in Switzerland from time to time. I’m sure they will do fine without me :)

In Berlin I’ll for sure be involved with the local community, my first event will probably one of the bi-weekly Mozilla Nights here. I’ll slowly gonna get to know how everything works here and then I’ll start to help out to organise events as I did in Switzerland. I’m sure my help is needed and I can provide valuable impact in Berlin as well.

Regarding the Reps program, I’ll continue my work as a Peer and support the strategic discussion around the Reps Program and Participation at Mozilla as best as I can. All this work will of course be reported on the Reps Portal. Additionally to that, I’ve recently started to provide my relatively new Python coding skills to the Reps Portal and I plan to continue doing this. There are definitely a few things to fix and improve there. When time permits, I’m also planning to contribute more to Firefox as I’ve been in the past. There is always something coming up though, you know how it is.

Generally, I don’t think my move to Berlin will impact anything else apart from the local community work. I’m sure you’ll hear from me on how that is working out!

WebVR/A-Frame Hackathon in Lausanne

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 22:49:55 +0000

Last Saturday the Mozilla Switzerland community, together with Liip, has organized a WebVR/A-Frame Hackathon in Lausanne, Switzerland. As always (also in Zurich), we turned to Liip for support regarding a venue, and as always they were happy to host us in Lausanne. At this point, a big "thank you" to them! Without their support we couldn't organize events as easy as we can now.

A-Frame is a framework for WebVR, making it easy to create scenes and components that can be viewed in the browser, with Cardboard, the HTC Vive and other VR devices. A-Frame even includes an Inspector that makes it easy to develop VR applications in the browser without having to test it constantly on a real VR device.

About the event

We gathered at 10 o'clock to have some initial talks and a light breakfast. It also took some time to set up the Vive and making sure we can demo A-Painter and other VR applications. At around 10:30 we started with a quick intro by Geoffroy and me. We explained the agenda and some general information about Mozilla. After that, Ben gave an intro to WebVR and how they are using A-Frame at Archilogic. It's amazing to see how it is being used in the wild for really amazing and helpful projects! Thank you for your time to come to Lausanne and present to us!

Then we did some demos with our gadgets and started hacking. With the help of Ben it was easy to create our own first projects. What struck me most is that my creativity and design skills came to end quite quickly, but nevertheless I could easily create a good Proof of Concept for a future iteration (through skilled people and Pull Requests). :)

Here are some projects that were created/started during this hackathon (click on the images to see it live in your browser):

Another thank you - our preparation hero

A big "thank you" goes to Geoffroy, who has helped us out with the whole coordination with the venue and did an amazing job promoting the event to his network. We are so happy to have people like Geoffroy who are helping us keep the Open Web public and accessible to all!

Honestly, the only thing I did was the administration parts of creating event pages on the Reps portal and Meetup, coordinate for having a speaker and giving a short intro talk about the agenda (with his help). Everything about the venue, food, gadgets was organized by him. He even went as far as traveling to Zurich to get an HTC Vive so we can show case that as well!

Conclusion

We had a lot of fun, and we hope our attendees did too! The verbal feedback was good, however we couldn't get a lot of responses through the feedback form, even though I reminded all participants after the event through email to please fill out the feedback form. Additionally we need to do better in terms of diversity!

All photos are used with permission by Liip or their respective owners if linked to a tweet.

Mozilla Switzerland Community Meetup 2017

Sat, 28 Jan 2017 21:55:40 +0000

On the 28th of January we, the Mozilla Switzerland, community held another community meetup to organize ourselves for the next few months in 2017.

We did a start/stop/continue analysis of our work in 2016.

With that in mind, we came up with a few goals for the first half of the year. Since we all agreed on stopping to do unrealistic goals we focused on the most voted ones from above. Of course this doesn't mean that we will only do those, so everyone is encouraged to also do their own initiatives and we will still have our monthly meetups to bring topics forward.

These are our goals for the first half of 2017. Our motto is: Complete goals and do more instead of running after goal completion and not succeed like we did in the past year.

Experiment: Organize Bootcamp/Barcamp style conference (community proposes talks and votes on them to be done at the beginning) with a broader Web topic. If successful this can be done more frequently and maybe even be adapted to fit into an evening, or be expanded to two days. Our hypothesis is that this brings in more interested people than the talks we regularly organize without clear call-to-action.
- Owner: Marc and Michael
We continue to ask Mozilla to make its decision process more transparent, so community members can feel more involved.
- This was a major concern during our community meetup. This goal is not fully defined and we will work together to phrase our scope accordingly. Also this goal definition is a "working draft", therefore not perfectly phrased.
- Owner: Gion-Andri
All currently used communication channels are clearly listed on mozilla.ch
Our new Twitter tool is in place and functional and the primary Twitter client which enables all of our community to send tweets.
Experiment: Create Telegram channel
- Hypothesis: Discussion happens between more than 2 persons

Non-primary goals, we will keep in mind but are not phrased as official goals:

Continue technical talks
Frequent meetups (informal as well!)
Twitter to be continued as information source
Discourse as documentation of decisions and possible interaction by other Mozillians if they don't agree
Support Rust community

In the next few days we will open corresponding issues in the mozilla.ch participation repository to track this work.

Mozilla Switzerland - Community Meetup June 2016

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 21:05:47 +0000

On June 20th the Swiss Mozillians met in Zurich to discuss the second half of the year. The goal was to come up with objectives for mozilla.ch that are aligned with the current Mozilla strategy and the Participation Team and Mozilla Reps goals.

At first we did a retrospective, here are the key results:

What should we stop doing?

Discussions on the mailing list
posting "meta" discussions on Github
focusing on initiatives we don't have time for
excluding people from discussions (see "meta discussions")
focusing on Zurich
creating single point of failures
missing to provide clear pathways to contribute when we have a talk

What should we start doing?

Create a central hub for all resources MozillaCH-related (in terms of "Get involved")
Focus on a few single strengths we have instead of a lot of single initiatives we can only go so far for
Start non-linear discussions on discourse
Have more event locations to get to people that can't come to Zurich or Lausanne
Be more clear about the strengths of single community members and support them with initiatives that fit into the general direction of Mozilla
Start using communication channels specific to the audience we want to reach

What should we continue doing?

Event organization works well
Github issues for tracking
Team work at meetups
Keeping things simple (not having a lot of bureaucracy hassle) With that in mind, we came up with two objectives. Both are aligned with overall Mozilla strategy pieces. The first one is Core Strength, the second one is Prototyping the Future. None of these Key Results are easy to achieve, but we think that with these we can achieve a good base for the upcoming years.

Objective 1: Grow our core contributor strengths and be amazing at being visible in Switzerland**

Key Result 1: We have at least 5 core contributors that are active on Discourse
Key Result 2: 30% of threads on Discourse are created by non Community Focus Group members
Key Result 3: At least 25 GitHub issues are created from a discussion on Discourse with clear steps on how to implement
Key Result 4: Have started an at least monthly meetup group around Developer Tools to have "hacking evenings"
Key Result 5: At least 3 persons are involved in organizing events
Key Result 6: At least 4 persons are involved in creating content for Twitter tweets and answering mentions
Key Result 7: The mozilla.ch website clearly reflects on where we want people to get involved in MozillaCH covering all functional areas provided on the Wiki page
Key Result 8: At least 80% of functional areas are covered by at least 2 contact persons

Objective 2: We are a driver in prototyping Firefox for the future**

Key Result 1: We have started a monthly meetup group around Developer Tools to have hacking evenings, providing guidance to new people to get involved in hacking DevTools
Key Result 2: We have at least 2 hackathons for 2 different components
Key Result 3: We have at least 20 confirmed Nightly users who know how to submit bugs
Key Result 4: We are engaging at least 10 people in QA'ing Servo for specific websites
Key Result 5: We engage at least 2 persons to work on positron, spidernode or browser.html

What do you find intriguing? What would you like to know more about? Jump into a discussion on Discourse or participate in our GitHub Participation issue repository.

Alpha Review - Using Janitor to contribute to Firefox

Thu, 05 May 2016 15:02:12 +0000

At the Firefox Hackathon in Zurich we used The Janitor to contribute to Firefox. It's important to note that it's still in alpha and invite-only.

The Janitor was started by Jan Keromnes, a Mozilla employee. While still in an alpha state, Jan gave us access to it so we could test run it at our hackathon. Many thanks to him for spending his Saturday on IRC and helping us out with everything!

Once you're signed up, you can click on "Open in Cloud9" and directly get to the Cloud9 editor who kindly sponsor the premium accounts for this project. Cloud9 is a pure-web IDE based on real Linux environments, with an insanely fast editor.

At the hackathon we ran into a Cloud9 "create workspace" limitation, but according to Jan this should be fixed now.

Setting up

After an initial "git pull origin master" in the Cloud9 editor terminal, you can start to build Firefox in there. Simply running "./mach build" is enough. For me this took about 12 minutes for the first time, while my laptop still needs more than 50 minutes to compile Firefox. This is definitely an improvement. Further you won't need anything else than a browser!

I had my environment ready in about 15 minutes if you count the time to compile Firefox. Comparing this to my previous setups, this solves a lot of dependency-hell problems and is also way faster.

Running the newly compiled Firefox

The Janitor includes a VNC viewer which opens a new tab and you can run your compiled Firefox in there. You can start a shell and run "./mach run" in the Firefox directory and you can start testing your changes.

Running ESLint

For some of the bugs we tackled at the hackathon, we needed to run ESLint (well, would be good to run this anyway, no matter what part of the code base you're changing). The command looks like this:

    user@e49de5f6914e:~/firefox$ ./mach eslint --no-ignore devtools/client/webconsole/test/browser_webconsole_live_filtering_of_message_types.js
    0:00.40 Running /usr/local/bin/eslint
    0:00.40 /usr/local/bin/eslint --plugin html --ext [.js,.jsm,.jsx,.xml,.html] --no-ignore devtools/client/webconsole/test/browser_webconsole_live_filtering_of_message_types.js

    /home/user/firefox/devtools/client/webconsole/test/browser_webconsole_live_filtering_of_message_types.js
    8:1   warning  Could not load globals from file browser/base/content/browser-eme.js: Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/user/firefox/browser/base/content/browser-eme.js'  mozilla/import-browserjs-globals
    8:1   warning  Definition for rule 'mozilla/import-globals' was not found                                                                                                                     mozilla/import-globals
    8:1   error    Definition for rule 'keyword-spacing' was not found                                                                                                                            keyword-spacing
    18:17  error    content is a possible Cross Process Object Wrapper (CPOW)                                                                                                                      mozilla/no-cpows-in-tests

    ✖ 4 problems (2 errors, 2 warnings)

    0:02.85 Finished eslint. Errors encountered.

As you might see from the input, running this in the Janitor environment results in not finding the Mozilla-specific rules. The reason here is that the eslint npm package is installed globally. Globally installed eslint can't find the locally installed mozilla-eslint-plugin. In my opinion the easiest fix would be to not install it globally, just within the firefox directory (running "./mach eslint --setup") while spinning up the instance should be enough here.

We could circumvent this problem by changing the global npm prefix and then running it with "/new/path/eslint ..." so it doesn't call the other one. In hindsight, we could just have installed it to the directory and then call it through node_modules.

Update, May 5, 15:09: Jan has has fixed this plugin issue :)

Creating a patch

Creating a patch is really easy, following the tutorial on MDN is enough. We were very happy to see that the moz-git-tools are already installed by default, so you can just create your own branch, checkin your changes and run "git format-patch -p -k master" to get a Git patch file. Since we need a Mercurial patch, you then run "git-patch-to-hg-patch" and you can upload the resulting file to Bugzilla and you're set!

Those two commands could maybe be aliased by default so running "create-patch" or similar would directly do this for you to further decrease the work you need to do manually.

Seeing it in action

You can watch it in action on YouTube.

Conclusion

After some initial account problems, we didn't really find any other bugs apart from the ESLint situation. Again, thanks a lot to Jan for providing us the environment and letting us test it. This will change the live of a lot of contributors! For now The Janitor supports contributions to Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, Servo and KDE. There is also a GitHub repository for it.

Firefox Hackathon Zurich April 2016

Thu, 05 May 2016 14:31:47 +0000

Last Saturday we've held a Firefox Hackathon in Zurich, Switzerland. We've had 12 people joining us.

Introduction

At first I gave an introduction to Firefox and introduced the agenda of the hackathon.

Dev Tools Talk

After my talk we heard an amazing talk from Daniele who came from Italy to attend this hackathon. He talked about the Dev Tools and gave a nice introduction to new features!

Hackathon

Before the hackathon we created a list of "good first bugs" that we could work on. This was a great thing to do, since we could give the list to the attendees and they could pick a bug to work on. Setting up the environment to hack was pretty easy. We've used "The Janitor" to hack on Firefox, I'll write a second blog post introducing you to this amazing tool! We ran into a few problems with it, but at the end we all could hack on Firefox!

We worked on about 13 different bugs, and we finished 10 patches! This is a great achievement, we probably couldn't have done that if we needed more time to set up a traditional Firefox environment. Here's the full list:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1031956 (Colin, Patch done, but not yet uploaded)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1256822 (Fabien, patch just needs a small addition to the commit message)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1256895 (Ale and Richard, patch just needs a small addition to the commit message)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1256912 (Augustin, patch was checked in)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1256810 (Fabien, patch just needs a small addition to the commit message)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1256936 (Fabien, patch just needs a small addition to the commit message)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1256795 (Ale and Richard, patch just needs a small addition to the commit message)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1235062 (Ale and Richard, patchs needs some more work)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1256863 (Michael, patch was checked in)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1256854 (Michael, patch was checked in)

Thanks to everybody who contributed, great work! Also a big thanks to Julian Descolette, a Dev Tools employee from Switzerland who supported us as a really good mentor. Without him we probably couldn't have fixed some of the bugs in that time!

Feedback

At the end of the hackathon we did a round of feedback. In general the feedback was rated pretty well, though we might have some things to improve for the next time.

40% of the attendees had their first interaction with our community at this hackathon! And guess what, 100% of the attendees who filled out the survey would be joining another hackathon in 6 months:

For the next hackathon, we might want to have a talk about the Firefox Architecture in general to give some context to the different modules. Also for the next hackathon we probably will have a fully working Janitor (meaning not alpha status anymore) which will help even more as well.

Lessions learned

Janitor will be great for hackathons (though still Alpha, so keep an eye on it)
The mix of talk + then directly start hacking works out
The participants are happy if they can create a patch in a few minutes to learn the process (Creating Patch, Bugzilla, Review, etc) and I think they are more motivated for future patches

All in all I think this was a great success. Janitor will make every contributor's life way easier, keep it going! You can find the full album on Flickr (thanks to Daniele for the great pictures!).

Reps Council Working Days Berlin 2016

Sun, 24 Apr 2016 14:10:43 +0000

From April 15th through April 17th the Mozilla Reps Council met in Berlin together with the Participation Team to discuss the Working groups and overall strategy topics. Unfortunately I couldn't attend on Friday (working day 1) since I had to take my exams. Therefore I could only attend Saturday and Sunday. Nevertheless I think I could help out a lot and definitely learned a lot doing this :) This blog posts reflects my personal opinions, the others will write a blog post as well to give you a more concise view of this weekend.

Alignment Working Group

The first session on Saturday was about the Alignment WG. Before the weekend we (more or less) finished the proposal. This allowed us to discuss the last few open questions, which are now all integrated in the proposal. This will only need review by Konstantina to make sure I haven't forgotten to add anything from the session and then we can start implementing it. We are sure that this will formalize the interaction between Mozilla goals and Reps goals, stay tuned for more information, we're currently working on a communication strategy for all the RepsNext changes to make it easier and more fun for you to get informed about the changes.

Meta Working Group

For the Meta Working Group we had more open questions and therefore decided to do brainstorming in three teams. The questions were:

Who can join Council?
Which recognition mechanisms should be implement now?
How does accountability look in Reps?

We're currently documenting the findings in the Meta working group working proposal, but we probably will need some more time to figure out everything perfectly. Keep an eye out on the Discourse topic in case we'll need more feedback from you all!

Identity Working Group

A new working group? As you see, I didn't believe it at first and Rara was visibly shocked!

Fun aside, yes, we'll start a new Working group around the topics of outwards communication and the Rep program's image. During our discussions on Saturday, we came up with a few questions that we will need to answer. This Friday we had our first call, follow us in the Discourse topic and it's not too late to help out here! Please get involved as soon as possible to shape the future of Reps!

Communication Session

On Sunday we ran a joint session with the rest of the Participation team around the topic "How we work together". We came up with the questions above and let those be answered / brainstormed in groups. I started to document the findings yesterday, but this is not yet in a state where it will be useful for anybody. Stay tuned for more communication around this (communication about communication, isn't it fun? :)). The last question around "How might we improve the communication between the Participation-Team and the Council?" is already documented in the Alignment Working group proposal. Further the Identity working group will tackle and elaborate further the question around visibility.

Reps Roadmap for 2016

Wait, there is a roadmap?

Yes!

At the end of our sessions we put up a timeline for Reps for all our different initiatives on a wall. Within the next days we'll work on this to have it digitally per months. For now, we have started to create GitHub issues in the Reps repo. Stay tuned for more information about this, the current information might confuse you since we haven't updated all issues yet! It basically includes everything from RepsNext proposal implementations to London Work Week preparations to Council elections.

Conclusion

This weekend showed that we currently have an amazing, hard-working Council. It also showed that we're on track with all the RepsNext work and that we can do a lot once we all work together and have Working Groups to involve all Reps as well.

Looking forward to the next months! If you haven't yet, have a look at the Reps Discourse category, to keep yourself updated on Reps related topics and the working groups!

The other Council members will write their blog post in the next few days as well, keep an eye out for link on our Reps issues. Once again, there are a lot of changes to be implemented and discussed, we are working on a strategy for that. We believe that just pointing to all proposals is not easy enough and will come up with fun ways to chime into these and fully understand them. Nevertheless, if you have questions about anything I wrote here, feel free to reach out to me!

Credit: all pictures were taken by our amazing photographer Christos!

Mozilla Switzerland IoT Hackathon in Lausanne

Sun, 24 Apr 2016 13:04:27 +0000

On April 2nd 2016 we held a small IoT Hackathon in Lausanne to brainstorm about the Web and IoT. This was aligned with the new direction that Mozilla is taking on.

Preparation

We started to organize the Hackathon on Github, so everyone can participate. Geoffroy was really helpful to organize the space for it at Liip.ch. Thanks a lot to them, without them organizing our events would be way harder!

The Hackathon

We expected more people to come, but as mentioned above, this is our first self-organized event in the French speaking part of Switzerland. Nevertheless we were four persons with an interest in hacking something together.

Geoffroy and Paul started to have a look at Vaani.iot, one of the projects that Mozilla is currently pushing on. They started to build it on their laptops, unfortunately the Vaani documentation is not good enough yet to see the full picture and what you could do with it. We're planning to send some feedback regarding that to the Vaani team.

In the meantime Martin and I set up my Raspberry Pi and started to write a small script together that reads out the temperature from one of the sensors. Once we've done that, I created a small API to have the temperature returned in JSON format.

At this point, we decided we wanted to connect those two pieces and create a Web app to read out the temperature and announce it through voice. Since we couldn't get Vaani working, we decided to use the WebSpeech API for this. The voice output part is available in Firefox and Chrome right now, therefore we could achieve this goal without using any non-standard APIs. After that Geoffroy played around with the voice input feature of this API. This is currently only working in Chrome, but there is a bug to implement it in Firefox as well. In the spirit of the open web, we decided to ignore the fact that we need to use Chrome for now, and create a feature that is built on Web standards that are on track to standardization.

After all, we could achieve something together and definitely had some good learnings during that.

Lessions learned

Organizing a hackathon for the first time in a new city is not easy
We probably need to establish an "evening-only" meetup series first, so we can attract participants that identify with us
We could use this opportunity to document the Liip space in Lausanne for future events on our Events page on the wiki
Not all projects are well documented, we need to work on this!

After the Hackathon

Since I needed to do a project for my studies that involves hardware as well, I could take the opportunity and take the sensors for my project.

You can find the Source Code on the MozillaCH github organization. It currently regularly reads out the two temperature sensors and checks if there is any movement registered by the movement sensor. If the temperature difference is too high it sends an alarm to the NodeJS backend. The same goes for the situation where it detects movement. I see this as a first step into my own take on a smart home, it would need a lot of work and more sensors to be completely useful though.

Mozilla Switzerland Goals H1 2016

Sun, 07 Feb 2016 15:43:26 +0000

Back in November we had a Community Meetup. The goal was to get a current status on the Community and define plans and goals for 2016. To do that, we started with a SWOT-Analysis. You can find it here.

With these remarks in mind, we started to define goals for 2016. Since there are a lot of changes within one year, the goals will currently only focus on the first part of the year. Then we can evaluate them, shift metrics if needed, and define new goals. This allows us to be more flexible.

The goals are highly influenced by the OKR (Objective - Key Results) Framework. To document open issues that support this goal, I have created a repository in our MozillaCH GitHub organization. The goal is to assign the "overall goal" label to each issue. You can find a good documentation on GitHub issues in their documentation. There is a template you can use for new issues.

Objective 1: The community is vibrant and active due to structured contribution areas
Objective 2: MozillaCH is a valuable partner for privacy in Switzerland
Objective 3: There is a vibrant community in the "Romandie" which is part of the overall community
Objective 4: The MozillaCH website is the place to link to for community topics
Objective 5: With talks and events we increase our reach and provide a valuable information source regarding the Open Web
Objective 6: Social Media is a crucial part of our activities providing valuable information about Mozilla and the Open Web

We know that not all of those goals are easily achievable, but this gives us a good way to be ambitious. To a successful first half of 2016, let's bring our community further and keep rocking the Open Web!

Mozillas strategische Leitlinien für 2016 und danach

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 17:27:24 +0000

Dieser Beitrag wurde zuerst im Blog auf https://blog.mozilla.org/community veröffentlicht. Herzlichen Dank an Aryx und Coce für die Übersetzung!

Auf der ganzen Welt arbeiten leidenschaftliche Mozillianer am Fortschritt für Mozillas Mission. Aber fragt man fünf verschiedene Mozillianer, was die Mission ist, erhält man womöglich sieben verschiedene Antworten.

Am Ende des letzten Jahres legte Mozillas CEO Chris Beard klare Vorstellungen über Mozillas Mission, Vision und Rolle dar und zeigte auf, wie unsere Produkte uns diesem Ziel in den nächsten fünf Jahren näher bringen. Das Ziel dieser strategischen Leitlinien besteht darin, für Mozilla insgesamt ein prägnantes, gemeinsames Verständnis unserer Ziele zu entwickeln, die uns als Individuen das Treffen von Entscheidungen und Erkennen von Möglichkeiten erleichtert, mit denen wir Mozilla voranbringen.

Mozillas Mission können wir nicht alleine erreichen. Die Tausenden von Mozillianern auf der ganzen Welt müssen dahinter stehen, damit wir zügig und mit lauterer Stimme als je zuvor Unglaubliches erreichen können.

Deswegen ist eine der sechs strategischen Initiativen des Participation Teams für die erste Jahreshälfte, möglichst viele Mozillianer über diese Leitlinien aufzuklären, damit wir 2016 den bisher wesentlichsten Einfluss erzielen können. Wir werden einen weiteren Beitrag veröffentlichen, der sich näher mit der Strategie des Participation Teams für das Jahr 2016 befassen wird.

Das Verstehen dieser Strategie wird unabdingbar sein für jeden, der bei Mozilla in diesem Jahr etwas bewirken möchte, denn sie wird bestimmen, wofür wir eintreten, wo wir unsere Ressourcen einsetzen und auf welche Projekte wir uns 2016 konzentrieren werden.

Zu Jahresbeginn werden wir näher auf diese Strategie eingehen und weitere Details dazu bekanntgeben, wie die diversen Teams und Projekte bei Mozilla auf diese Ziele hinarbeiten.

Der aktuelle Aufruf zum Handeln besteht darin, im Kontext Ihrer Arbeit über diese Ziele nachzudenken und darüber, wie Sie im kommenden Jahr bei Mozilla mitwirken möchten. Dies hilft, Ihre Innovationen, Ambitionen und Ihren Einfluss im Jahr 2016 zu gestalten.

Wir hoffen, dass Sie mitdiskutieren und Ihre Fragen, Kommentare und Pläne für das Vorantreiben der strategischen Leitlinien im Jahr 2016 hier auf Discourse teilen und Ihre Gedanken auf Twitter mit dem Hashtag #Mozilla2016Strategy mitteilen.

Mission, Vision & Strategie

Unsere Mission

Dafür zu sorgen, dass das Internet eine weltweite öffentliche Ressource ist, die allen zugänglich ist.

Unsere Vision

Ein Internet, für das Menschen tatsächlich an erster Stelle stehen. Ein Internet, in dem Menschen ihr eigenes Erlebnis gestalten können. Ein Internet, in dem die Menschen selbst entscheiden können sowie sicher und unabhängig sind.

Unsere Rolle

Mozilla setzt sich im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes in Ihrem Online-Leben für Sie ein. Wir setzen uns für Sie ein, sowohl in Ihrem Online-Erlebnis als auch für Ihre Interessen beim Zustand des Internets.

Unsere Arbeit

Unsere Säulen

Produkte: Wir entwickeln Produkte mit Menschen im Mittelpunkt sowie Bildungsprogramme, mit deren Hilfe Menschen online ihr gesamtes Potential ausschöpfen können.
Technologie: Wir entwickeln robuste technische Lösungen, die das Internet über verschiedene Plattformen hinweg zum Leben erwecken.
Menschen: Wir entwickeln Führungspersonen und Mitwirkende in der Gemeinschaft, die das Internet erfinden, gestalten und verteidigen. Wir wir positive Veränderungen in Zukunft anpacken wollen

Die Arbeitsweise ist ebensowichtig wie das Ziel. Unsere Gesundheit und bleibender Einfluss hängen davon ab, wie sehr unsere Produkte und Aktivitäten:

Interoperabilität, Open Source und offene Standards fördern,
Gemeinschaften aufbauen und fördern,
Für politische Veränderungen und rechtlichen Schutz eintreten sowie
Netzbürger bilden und einbeziehen.

German-speaking Community mid-term planning

Thu, 24 Dec 2015 18:44:26 +0000

Mozilla's Participation Team has started to do "mid-term plannings" with a few focus communities back in September. The goal was to identify potential and goals for a six month plan which would then be implemented with the help of all the community. Since Germany is one of the focus markets for Firefox, it's clear that the German-speaking community was part of that as well.

Everything started out at the end of September, when we formed a focus group. Everybody was invited to join the focus group to brainstorm about possible plans we can set in stone to drive Mozilla's mission forward. I'd like to thank everybody who chimed in with their ideas and thoughts on the German-speaking community and its future in our own Discourse category:

After the community meetup at the beginning of the year we had a lot of momentum which enabled us to get quite a lot done. Unfortunately this momentum has decreased over time, with a low since September (my opinion). Therefore our main areas we picked for our mid-term plans focused on internal improvements we can make, so we can focus on Mozilla top-organizational goals once we have implemented our improvements. This doesn't mean that the German-speaking community won't focus on product or mission, but it's just not where we can commit as a whole community right now.

We have identified four areas we'd like to focus, which I will explain in detail below. Those are documented (in German) on a Wiki page as well to be as transparent as possible. We also asked for feedback through the community list and didn't get any responses that would say anything against this plan.

Community Structure

In 6 months it's clear for new and existing contributors who is working in which functional area and who to contact if there are any questions. New contributors know which areas need help and know about good first contributions to do.

Goals:

Understandable documentation of every contribution area the German-speaking community is active in. At least 60% of the areas are documented initially.
There are contact persons listed per contribution area with clear means of contact. At least 80% of the initially defined areas have at least one contact person for new contributors. For the three biggest areas there are at least two contact persons.
Handling of new contributors is defined clearly for all contribution areas, including responsibilities for individuals and groups. The onboarding process is clearly specified and we get at least two new long-term contributors per area. These new contributors can be onboarded within a few weeks with the help of the contact persons as mentors. Further mentors can be defined without them needed to be "contact persons".

Website

In 6 months the mozilla.de website is the base for all information about Mozilla, its local community and contribution possibilities. Users of the website get valuable information about the community and find contribution possibilities which can be started without a lot of time investment to get used to the product. The website is the portal to the community.

Goals:

The website clearly states the possibilities to contribute to the German-speaking community (even if this is only a link to a well defined /contribute page)
The website lists all current Mozilla product and projects
The content defined in February 2015 is re-evaluated and incorporated as needed
The website is the main entry point to the community and promoted as such
Through the new website we get at least 10% of new contributors which found us trough it

Meetings / Updates

In 6 months discussions among the community members are well distributed. New topics are started by a broad basis and topics are being discussed by a wide range of contributors.

Goals:

There are at least 6 active participants per meeting
The meeting is structured for efficiency and brings in a reasonable ratio between discussion and update topics. There are enough enough discussion points so that updates can be treated as "read only" in 60% of the time.
The satisfaction of the participants who would like to join is increased by 30%
There are at least 10 unique participants in discussions on the mailing list

Social Media

In 6 months the German-speaking community is active on the most important social media channels and represents Mozilla's mission and the community achievements to the public. Followers learn more about the community and learn about the newest updates and initiatives the community is supporting. Additionally these channels are used to promote urgent call-to-actions.

Goals:

The different channels are clearly separated and the user knows what content needs to be expected.
We have at least 1200 followers with @mozilla_deutsch, @MozillaDe and @FirefoxDe (not unique followers)
We have at least 750 "likes" on our Facebook page
We keep users engaged and updated with at least 8 tweets per month per channel
There are at least 3 maintainers for the different accounts

To track the progress we created a GitHub repository in our organization, where everybody can create issues to track a certain task. There are four labels which make it possible to filter for a specific improvement area. Of course, feel free to create your own issues in this GitHub repo as well, even if it might not be 100% tied to the goals, but every contribution counts!

I have put together a share-able summary slides for easy consumption in case you don't want to forward the link to this blog post.

Even though I'm going to focus my time on the Mozilla Switzerland community, I will still help with and track the progress we're doing with the mid-term plan implementations.

Feel free to get in touch with any of the focus group members linked above or the community-german mailing list in general for any questions you might have.

MozCoffee Framework - Wie organisiere ich ein Meetup?

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 23:49:05 +0000

Einführung

Dieses Dokument soll als kurzes Tutorial dienen, um ein erfolgreiches Meetup zu organisieren. In diesem Dokument werden die wichtisten Punkte erläutert und einige Tipps gegeben, wie das ganze organisiert werden kann. Es besteht kein Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit. Zudem ist allen Mozillians selbst überlassen, wie die Organisation stattfindet.

Was ist das Ziel des Meetups?

Als erstes sollte man sich überlegen, was das Ziel für das Meetup ist. Mögliche Fragen dazu sind:

Ist es ein Meetup, um neue Mitwirkende in die Community zu integrieren?
Ist es ein Meetup, um sich innerhalb der bestehenden Community besser kennenzulernen und ein regelmässiger Ideenaustausch zu gestalten?
Soll dies “generell Mozilla” oder ist es eine Serie von möglichen, verschiedenen Themen?
Wem will ich was bieten? Dies kann Mitarbeiter im Büro, Kollegen/Freunde oder auch Fremde sein. Anhand dieser Fragen, kann die Agenda mit möglichen Themen zusammengestellt werden.

Mögliche Themen / Formate

Für das Meetup gibt es grundlegend zwei mögliche Formate. Entweder kann es sich um eine “Diskussionsrunde” handeln, bei der allgemeine Themen besprochen werden. In den meisten Fällen kann dies als “Zusammenkunft gleicher Interessen” bezeichnet werden. So kann einfach auf Fragen von Teilnehmenden eingegangen werden. Dies ist die einfachere Version, welche weniger Organisationsaufwand benötigt und eignet sich gut für ein erstes Meetup. Hierfür benötigt man auch keine Agenda, höchstens ein paar Themen, die man ansprechen kann.

Das andere Format ist ein Vortrag-basiertes Meetup. Hier spielt es grundsätzlich keine Rolle, welche Themen besprochen werden. Wichtig ist, dass es sich um ein Thema handelt, bei welchem du dich wohl fühlst und gerne Auskunft gibst.

Mögliche Themen für Vorträge (kann von 10 bis 60 Minuten reichen):

Mozilla generell (Mission, Struktur, Gemeinschaft)
Was sind die möglichen funktionalen Gebiete, bei denen sich man engagieren kann?
Produkt-spezifisch, z.B. Firefox, Firefox OS, Webmaker, ..
Gebiet-spezifisch, z.B. UX, Design, Coding, Lokalisierung, ..
Web Developer spezifische Talks, wie z.B. “Demo Firefox Developer Tools”
Netzneutralität, Privatsphäre Für beide Formate gilt: es macht nichts, wenn du auf eine Frage nicht antworten kannst. Auch “ich weiss, wen ich da fragen kann und ich werde mich bei dir melden” ist eine gute Antwort.

Mögliche Agenda mit Vorträgen

18:30 Eintreffen
18:40 kurze Intro zu “Was ist Mozilla?”
18:45 Vortrag
xx:xx Fragerunde
danach gemütliches Beisammensein und Diskussionsrunde Dies ist natürlich nur ein Vorschlag. Wenn es sich herausstellt, dass ein Treffen über den Mittag besser geeignet wäre, kann dies natürlich auch gemacht werden.

Was ist das gewünschte Resultat des Meetups?

Eine wichtige Frage ist, was das Resultat des Meetups sein soll.

Generelle Information über Mozilla, Produkte, etc, damit die Leute informiert sind?
Gewinnen von neuen Contributorn?
Mischung aus beidem? Um die weitere Planung zu vereinfachen, sollte hier 2-3 Ziele definiert werden. Mögliche Beispiele sind:
Am Ende des Meetups wissen 5 weitere Personen für was Mozilla einsteht und wie man helfen könnte
Am Ende des Meetups sind 2 Personen interessiert bei Mozilla mitzumachen und wissen, wo sie beginnen können
10 neue Personen werden Firefox zuhause runterladen und ausprobieren
2 Personen erzählen ihren Freunden vom Meetup und laden diese zum nächsten Treffen ein

Grösse

Anhand des Themas kann die Grösse des Meetups ungefähr abgeschätzt werden. Am Anfang werden die Meetups etwas kleiner ausfallen, da diese noch nicht so bekannt sind. Dies ist aber absolut kein Problem! Auch kleinere Meetups können Spass machen und andere Personen wichtige Informationen über Mozilla vermitteln.

Die Grösse gegen oben ist offen, benötigt aber mehr Organisationsaufwand, je grösser das Meetup wird.

Geeignete Location finden

Anhand der Grösse und Thema kann nun ein geeigneter Ort für das Meetup gesucht werden. Dies sollte zur Sicherheit mind. 2 Wochen vor dem Meetup erledigt werden. So kann sichergestellt werden, dass alle Teilnehmer wissen, wo das Meetup stattfinden wird.

Level 1 (bis zu 8-10 Personen): Kleinere Meetups können ohne Probleme in Restaurants durchgeführt werden. Hierbei ist jedoch zu beachten, dass es sich nicht um ein zu überfülltes Restaurant handeln sollte, damit Gespräche möglich sind. Einander anzuschreien bringt nichts ;) Achtung: Reservierung nicht vergessen, damit auch genügend Platz vorhanden ist. Orte wie Starbucks funktionieren auch wunderbar.

Level 2 (für Vorträge oder ab 10 Personen): Für Vorträge oder bei grösseren Meetups wird zwingend ein eigener Raum benötigt. In den meisten Fällen haben Universitäten abends freie Räume, die man (wenn man lieb fragt), gerne für ein Meetup benützen darf. Als Alternative kann auch der Arbeitgeber gefragt werden, ob ein Sitzungszimmer dafür verwendet werden darf. Falls beides nicht möglich ist, können auch andere Firmen angefragt werden. Webentwickler-nahe Firmen hosten in vielen Fällen gerne Meetups.

Level 3 (längerfristig): wenn absehbar ist, dass es in Zukunft weitere, regelässige Meetups geben wird, ist es sinnvoll, sich nach einer längerfristigen Lösung umzusehen. Falls in “Level 2” eine Möglichkeit gefunden wurde, kann man den Anbieter des Raums fragen, ob man mit einer Frist von n Wochen da jederzeit (sofern verfügbar) den Raum haben dürfte.

Meetup durchführen

Hier gibt es nur etwas zu sagen: habt Spass! Die Durchführung soll kein Zwang sein, sondern euch und den Teilnehmer Spass machen.

Nachfolgende Arbeiten

Um Teilnehmer über neue Meetups zu informieren, ist es nötig, eine Kontaktmöglichkeit zu haben. Dies kann ein Newsletter sein, eine meetup.com Gruppe oder auch einfach eine eMail-Liste.

Damit potentielle Mitwirkende optimal unterstützt werden können, ist es am Anfang nötig, eine nahe Beziehung mit ihnen zu führen und so gut wie möglich zu unterstützen.

Periodizität

Solange die Meetups regelmässig stattfinden, spielt es keine Rolle, wie oft dies der Fall ist. Dies kann einmal im Quartal sein, oder einmal im Monat. Dies ist abhängig von der Zeit, die man für die Organisation aufwenden kann.

Werkzeuge / Promotion

Gibt es andere Stammtische, Meetups, etc in dieser Stadt?

Gibt es in deiner Stadt andere Stammtische oder Meetups? Das findest du u.a. über meetup.com raus. Falls es welche gibt, wäre es sinnvoll, einen davon zu besuchen, um zu sehen, wie das da gehandhabt wird. Ist bereits ein Datum für ein Mozilla Meetup bekannt, kann an diesen anderen Meetups auch Werbung dafür gemacht werden.

Gegebenenfalls gibt es auch die Möglichkeit, Vorträge bei anderen Meetups zu halten, um zu sehen, ob in dieser Stadt überhaupt Interesse besteht.

Meetup.com

Für regelmässige Meetups kann auf meetup.com eine Meetup-Gruppe erstellt werden. Weitere Informationen dazu gibt es direkt auf meetup.com.

Beispiele:

Twitter / Soziale Medien

Die Promotion kann, sofern für diese Stadt überhaupt sinnvoll, über Twitter und andere soziale Medien gemacht werden. Dabei ist es wichtig, dass man irgendwo eine Seite hat, die man in den Beiträgen verlinken kann. Diese Seite sollte mind. eine Beschreibung, Datum und Ort erwähnen.

Budget

Normalerweise sollte es nicht nötig sein, für ein Meetup Budget zu erhalten. Sollte dies aber trotzdem nötig sein, meldest du dich bei Michael Kohler, da dies über Reps läuft.

Swag

Sticker sind ein gutes Mittel, um Leuten eine Freude zu bereiten. Wenn diese auf einem Laptop landen und Firefox promoten, umso besser. Falls ihr für ein Meetup Swag benötigt, meldet euch bei Michael Kohler, da dies über Reps läuft.

Mozilla Tech Weekend in Berlin - November 28th & 29th

Sat, 14 Nov 2015 16:02:14 +0000

The Berlin Mozilla Community would like to invite all of you to the Mozilla Tech Weekend on November 28th 2015. There will be tech talks on Saturday and workshops on Sunday.

Location

Kulturkantine Saarbrücker Str. 24, Haus C, Berlin http://www.kuka-berlin.de/lageskizze/

Sign up for free at http://www.meetup.com/Berlin-Mozilla-Meetup/events/226461969/

Schedule for Saturday 28th November

Servo: Mozilla's Parallel & Safe Next-Generation Browser Engine
Data reporting at Mozilla
Firefox OS: Why we exist
What's new in Firefox

After the talks there will be some food and time to get in touch with developers and each other.

On Sunday there will be workshops on similar topics to follow up or get you all set up if you would like to start contributing to Mozilla projects. Sign-up for the workshops will be on-site on Saturday.

Cheers, The Berlin Mozilla Community https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/community-berlin

Mozilla Weekend Berlin - Day 2 / Feedback

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 20:38:51 +0000

At the Community Meetup of the German-speaking community back in February we decided to organize a Mozilla Day or Mozilla Weekend in 2015 to get more visible in Berlin, tell people about Mozilla’s mission and projects, and recruit new Mozillians. We did this on July 11th and 12th. This is the post about Day 2. You can read about Day 1 in a previous blog post.

Introducing participants to Bugzilla, quick session by @axelhecht #mozweekend pic.twitter.com/KeZyZgLnbz

— Michael Kohler (@KohlerSolutions) July 12, 2015

Day 2

On Sunday we had several workshops going on in parallel in the Mozilla Office in Berlin. Around 30 attendees joined us and hacked on Firefox, Firefox OS and brainstormed about involved in the Community Creative Team. Since we had coders and designers there, we had a good balance of workshops to participate in.

Heads down hacking at #mozweekend Berlin day 2 pic.twitter.com/tYJw7io7mQ

— Brian King (@brianking) July 12, 2015

Work done (or started) in the workshops:

Bug 547401 - worked on by Stefania and David Bryant
Bug 1180314 - fixed by David Bryant, his first patch on Mozilla code (as it is for all other volunteers)
Bug 1170460 - worked on by Nils, but was blocked due to unclear specifications
Bug 965211 - fixed by Nils, I love this, already tested that one on my Flame with Nightly
Bug 796319 - Asma has started to do this after our introduction into Gaia
Bug 1055357 - worked on by Oleksandr who had great ideas on how to improve code not in the scope of this bug
Bug 1044275 - worked on by Claas who is an experienced Android developer Florian will send out an invitation for a follow up in Berlin later this week. See below for more information.

Further Elio started the Community Design Creative in Germany. They will have their first meetup (physically with Vidyo participation) at the end of the month. This was a group of about 7 persons interested in design. Since we currently only have 2 designers in our German-speaking community I think this is a great addition and has great potential. Let's keep focus on this and keep them engaged!

Deep thinking with @axelhecht and @david_bryant, thanks! :) #mozweekend #Berlin #gratitude pic.twitter.com/5GvMfVxPRb

— Stefania Delprete (@physte3) July 12, 2015

Followup with potential new contributors

Florian, Markus and Mario will follow up with the code contributors in Berlin and organize regular meetups. We still have to figure out a few location questions, but we're on the right track. We had 14 people from the workshops interesting in meeting up again and talk about Mozilla and writing some code. Like that we could also have a group that meets regularly to help out with contribution problems and talk about new things they've been working on. I think that at least 6 people will stick around long-term. This would basically be a 300% increase of volunteers in Berlin!

As already written, Elio will follow up with the designers to create amazing creative assets and improve UX.

Further I think it might be beneficial to organize another Mozilla Weekend style event next year. Let's see how that turns out.

Feedback from participants

At the end of Day 1 we asked people to give feedback. Here's the result (out of 14 responses):

What people liked:

"Ask us anything" session (mentioned as best session by more than 50% of feedback givers)
Speech Recognition talk by Kelly
Firefox OS talk by André What people would improve:
More technical talks (for example Servo)
Introduction session to get to know all the participants
Have a session on Webmaker
Reach more people (Michael: not sure what exactly is meant by that, maybe attendence?)
More live demos

How the understanding of Mozilla and its mission changed:

A lot: 7
Somewhat: 6
Barely: 1
Not at all: 0

Other input:

"Please less audience involvent next time :-)"
"Much more interactive. Much much more interactive." (mentioned by 2), also less slides
"Don't let speakers use the hand microphone"
"Don't give the mic to audience to avoid them giving monologues."
"Does any meetup really need a talk about women in X? Really? Please give us more tech, less replacement topics."
"i expected a more technical insight into mozilla projects. i am just a web developer / mozilla user"

For day 2 I think that all participants were involved enough and could do whatever they wanted to contribute to. We did not do a specific survey for the workshops though. Judged from the interest to follow up I think this was amazing!

Lessions learned

Organizing a 2-day event takes quite a lot of time
Finding a free venue for talks for a whole day in Berlin, contrary to our initial believes, seems impossible
People are interested and we need to keep doing follow up and do more local events in Berlin. Berlin is a big city with a lot of IT people who are interested in learning about Mozilla and contributing. Until now we haven't done enough there.
For the next event we should have a budget which is laid out for a 50% no-show rate.
It is easy to get people starting on contributing, but we need to do good follow ups to keep them.
We can achieve our goal to have more women in our community when we continue like that. But we need to make sure that we stay inclusive.
There is a demand for recordings for these kind of talks, fortunately we have air.mozilla.org :)
People want to know information directly from the leadership team, since not many know what's going on behind the curtains.
Have more demos for topics we talk about
We should keep going and have fun with it!

Thanks again for everyone who made this possible! We achieved a lot, let's keep the momentum going!

Mozilla Weekend Berlin 2015 - Preparation & Day 1

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 19:24:18 +0000

Preparation

First we had a "Call for Speakers" which did not turn out as hoped, since we didn't have a lot of proposal for talks. Further we were missing quite a few people to facilitate the workshops. Fortunately there was a Mozilla Leadership Meetup on July 10 in Berlin, so we contacted the Leadership team and asked, if they wanted to participate and have a few talks about Mozilla and its projects. This worked out really well and it was great to have part of the Leadership Team at the event as well. I think this helped to get contributors as well.

It was the first time we created a website for an event in the German-speaking community. We decided on mozweekend.de which we will be able to use also for future Mozilla Weekends in Germany. I think we need to do that as well for future, big events since we had quite a lot of visitors and registrations. Until one day before the event we had about 120 registrations.

Day 1 - July 11

For the first day, we had planned talks to introduce Mozilla, and dive deeper into the different projects. Since we had about 120 registrations we applied our standard 33% no-show rate and expected about 80 participants. In the end, we had around 55 participants, but nevertheless the attendees were very interested. This is a sign that quantity is not always the goal, quality is way more important.

Begin	Topic	Presenter
10:00	Welcome & Introduction to Mozilla	Elio Qoshi & Michael Kohler
10:15	What's new in Firefox?	Michael Kohler
10:30	Speech Recognition at Mozilla	Kelly Davis
11:15	Ask us anything	Mitchell Baker, David Bryant, Axel Hecht
12:00	Lightning Talks	Elio Qoshi & André Fiedler & Axel Hecht & Mario Behling & Per Guth/td>
13:30	Firefox OS - Current status and the future	André Fiedler
14:00	Why I am at Mozilla	David Bryant
14:30	Shape of the Web	Mary Ellen Muckerman
15:00	WoMoz - Women at Mozilla	Kristi Progri
15:45	Leaving behind the designer ego in open source communities	Elio Qoshi
16:00	Opportunities to Contribute at Mozilla	George Roter & Michael Kohler/td>
16:45	Closing Session	Michael Kohler

All these talks will be available on air.mozilla.org once their uploaded as well! I think we had quite a good mix of projects, even though Firefox was not represented as good as it could have been.

Awesome talk about @firefox OS by @sonnenkiste at #mozweekend @mozilla pic.twitter.com/fcd39pdK6R — Mario Behling (@mariobehling) July 11, 2015

What an eye-opening talk about Women in the Tech industry by @KristiProgri #mozweekend pic.twitter.com/LaCGMJ2dIY — TheOne (@wagnerand) July 11, 2015

The "Ask us Anything" session was very important and it was great to have Mitchell Baker, Chairwomen of the Mozilla Foundation, and David Bryant (VP of Platform Engineering), and Axel Hecht (contributed since the beginning of Mozilla). We had a lot of interesting questions from the audience.

QA with @MitchellBaker @david_bryant and @axelhecht at #mozweekend pic.twitter.com/uzLgfNKUd8 — Brian King (@brianking) July 11, 2015

You can find all the pictures and tweets with the hashtag #mozweekend.

Excited to see @geroter and @KohlerSolutions talking about Contributing at Mozilla, incl. fun exercises! #mozweekend pic.twitter.com/dicfLSJGhE — TheOne (@wagnerand) July 11, 2015

#mozweekend #berlin 2015 pic.twitter.com/laK02rAP6Q — ANIL KUMAR (@anilbms75) July 16, 2015

Go ahead and read about Day 2 as well!

A big thanks goes out to the organization team and the 10 speakers, you all did great work! And thanks to everyone who showed up even though it didn't rain!

#FoxYeah in the German-speaking community

Sun, 19 Jul 2015 18:19:22 +0000

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.

Zurich

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!

Bern

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!

Berlin

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!

MobileCamp 2015 - Firefox OS room

Sun, 17 May 2015 09:01:16 +0000

On April 25 and 26 the 7th edition of the MobileCamp was organized in Dresden, Germany. Mobilecamp is a barcamp with "Mobile" as topic. It's probably the most important barcamp regarding mobile in the German-speaking countries. Therefore the German-speaking Mozilla community decided to host a Firefox OS day on Saturday. The organizers of the barcamp were kind enough to lend us a room specific for that.

Since the MobileCamp was mostly dominated by Android, iOS and Windows Phone in the past, we decided to do a Firefox OS day to educate people about the power of the Web. On Saturday I held a talk (slides 1, slides 2) about Firefox OS and showed how to create open web apps. Since this was a barcamp I left enough room for discussion and there were some quite interesting questions.

For the rest of the day we were available for helping out with creating apps and doing demos. The schedule of the Mobilecamp was quite dense and very interesting, so people didn't stay long in our room. Nevertheless a lot of people came by quickly to check out Firefox OS. We did a lot of demos showing off the newest features and having discussions with interested attendees. We did not only show Firefox OS on phones, but also a build of the emulator showing the GUI for TVs. That looked quite well on the big TV we had in our room, a real Panasonic TV with Firefox OS would actually have been better for this to show all the features. But it was great nevertheless :)

One person came back from time to time to figure out WebNFC and building Firefox OS by himself together with Michael Schloh von Bennewitz who gladly assisted me at this event. Thanks a lot to Michael for the great help!

For the whole weekend we also talked to Android users to make them download Firefox for Android. Many didn't know that Firefox is also available for Android and therefore were using Chrome on mobile. I think we will have at least 30 new Firefox for Android users now. One person showed up in our room and told me that it would be great if Firefox would also have tabs-on-top on mobile. At first I was quite confused, since I've been using that for quite some time but wasn't sure if it was Nightly/Beta only. It turned out that he just had an old Firefox installation and everything was good after an update through the Play Store.

For pictures it's probably best to check out the Twitter timeline.

Since Mobilecamp is important for the mobile market in Germany I'm glad we could attend Mobilecamp and show off Firefox OS and educate people about the Web since we believe that the Web is the platform. Also a big "Thank you" to all the organizers, it was great! Thanks for everything!

German-speaking Community - Status of goals

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 00:04:38 +0000

At the German-speaking community meetup in February we set some goals to reach in 2015. In our last bi-weekly meeting we discussed the current status of those goals. Here's a quick summary:

Completed

Write to all "Localizers in Training" that have added themselves to the wiki and were never contacted -> done, but no feedback yet
Finish l10n documentation for beginners -> live on the wiki
Overall year goal SUMO: 90% of all articles (top 100) should always be updated and translated -> we're currently at 100%
Overall year goal SUMO: for Firefox releases the top 100 articles should always be finished -> we're currently at 100% for all releases since then
Better format for the meeting -> completely done and more efficient with the new Vidyo bi-weekly format (Meeting notes) Working on it:
Community Tile -> mockup and first implementation (though not completely finished) got nice feedback, will finish the design by end of week so we can finish the wording
Organize Mozilla Weekend -> planning has started
Continue Rust meetups -> last one was on April 1 and there will be further meetups
Recruit 5 new Mozilla developers -> working on it
at least 10 FSA until end of year -> Brainstorming meeting with TJ on May 7
2 new Reps to cover more regions and distribute work load -> Jan showed interest
Visual identity -> voting for a nice motive is done, we have two "winners" (mountains and "language borders"). We'll come up with a few mockups and vote on them
Events in 5 cities where we never had an event before -> we have 2 invitations to events in Worms and Karlsruhe
Transfer websites/forums to Community IT -> blocked from Community IT side, bug

TODO

Organize Add-ons SDK talk
Start meetups in Berlin to grow the local community there -> we have postponed that to after the Mozilla Weekend due to time contstraints
WoMoz -> we didn't define this measurable, but we'll try to start something at Mozilla Weekend if possible
Update mozilla.de content

Not defined as goal, but still happening

Robert, Philipp and Arpad will start a Vienna (AT) meetup group \o/
Monthly meetups in Zurich (CH) and (about bi-monthly, informal) Bern (CH) by Mozilla Switzerland

In case you're interested in helping out and contribute to Mozilla, you can find our Trello board with open tasks at: https://trello.com/b/jycYCGlR/mozilla-deutschsprachige-gemeinschaft

Thanks to everyone who worked hard on any of this, this will be a great year!

German speaking Mozilla Community - Meeting Feedback

Sun, 22 Mar 2015 22:21:15 +0000

On the 21st and 22nd of February 2015 we held the annual Meetup of the German speaking community. With this blog post I'd like to share the opinions of the participants, so others can benefit form our experience.

For the following graphs, 5 is "perfect" and 1 is "bad".

Overall

Overall we got quite good feedback for the whole event. Most of the attendees were happy with the meetup. This is also reflected in the work all contributors have done since the meetup. There are certainly a few things we can improve, but it's good to know that it wasn't a failure.

Discussions / Breakout sessions

For the general discussions the overall feeling is reflected again.

The breakout sessions were quite short. This might be one point attendees didn't like about it. I think we'll get further input for the breakout sessions next time to make sure that all participants can benefit from them. But since we're over "3" on average, there is no need to complete question our format of the breakout sessions.

Organization

Thanks to the great organizational help from Hagen Halbach, we could achieve our goal to give participants as much information about the event as possible before they traveled to Berlin. 78.6% saying that it was "perfect" says a lot. Thanks again to everyone who was involved with the organization!

Even though we shifted almost everything right before the event (on Saturday morning), the participants were happy with the time management. Great to see spontaneous people! ;)

Location / Food

Since almost 93% answered that the Mozilla office in Berlin was suited for the event, we will probably do it there the next time too. This might change if we get a lot of new contributors and grow a lot. The biggest meeting room was full during our general discussions, so it might be worth to have a look at any other bigger venue for more people.

The same goes for the food format we used. We had deliveries twice and went for dinner in a restaurant on Saturday. With more people delivery might get more confusing and might not work as well. Sorry again for my confusing instructions regarding lunch on Sunday, this can certainly be improved so everyone actually gets food. We also got a feedback that next time we should consider to have one order per person instead of doing a "buffet" style lunch as we did on Saturday to meet everyone's taste.

Other input

There are also a few text inputs I'd like to mention here:

We should have talked more about Social Media
Localizer group was small, important people couldn't come to the meetup
Community Building topics might be quite hard for technical people
We could do daily logistics emails to all participants
"It would have been great if everyone couldve [sic!] given their input on topics. A few contributors were not participating in discussions which lowers the quantity of valuable input."
The presence of the few Mozilla employees were valued, even though a few people would have liked more input from the volunteers

And of course, completely selfish: "Michael+Hagen! Awesome guys!"

This is it. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this. The data is anonymous, so we won't be able to name anyone. And now, keep on rocking the open web!

FOSS Asia 2015 Singapore

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 23:15:59 +0000

About FOSS Asia

FOSS Asia is a yearly FOSS community meetup in Asia. This year it was held from 13^th to 15^th of March in Singapore. Previous events were i.e. in Cambodia and Vietnam. You can find the schedule of the conference on their website.

Disclaimer: Mozilla was a sponsor of this event.

Disclaimer 2: I wasn’t sponsored by Mozilla, nevertheless helped out at the booth and on the track.

Singapore

I arrived in Singapore on Wednesday (directly from Mexico, where I left on Monday) and did some sightseeing to get to know the neighborhood. In the evening I went to the hackerspace.sg where they had a meetup and talks. It was very interesting and I had the chance to get to know the local cuisine after the meetup.

Friday

On Friday we were at the venue at about 8:30am to prepare our booth. But since our swag hadn’t arrived, we didn’t have much to put there. Therefore we decided to show Firefox OS to people. I showed it to Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore's Minister for the Environment and Water Resources. He had a lot of great knowledge so I didn't need to explain a lot.

(Photo: Darwin Gosal)

So we listened to the talks and engaged with other attendees during the breaks. With a booth with some stickers, we could have had a bigger impact since all the people would have been in the same room.

Gen Kenai talked about Firefox OS on the main track. I think it was great to have a talk about Firefox OS there since it was the only day we had everyone in the same room. Later Jan held a talk about JanOS on the main track as well. He's doing a great job with it. You should definitely check that out!

Saturday

On Saturday we had our own Mozilla track.

9:00 am	Collaborative Webmaking using TogetherJS	Santosh
9:30 am	Offline Communications in Firefox OS	Jaipradeesh
10:00 am	Firefox Hello - The easiest way to connect for free over video with anyone, anywhere	Priyanka Nag
10:30 am	Building an Open Source Community	Bob Reyes
11:00 am	Firefox OS as a Thin Platform	Soumya Deb
11:30 am	Combining Firefox OS with Webmaker	Michael Kohler
12:00 pm
1:00 pm	INFA-Internet for All	Dyvik Chenna
1:30 pm	Appmaking is Now Diversified	Santosh
2:00 pm	Students Involvement in Mozilla's project	Raj
2:30 pm	Localization of Firefox Marketplace Apps	Biraj
3:00 pm	Performance Efficient JavaScript	Soumya Deb
3:30 pm	Write once, Run anywhere - Develop Hybrid apps with Cordova	Jaipradeesh
4:00 pm	Mobile Web Compatibility	Abdul Rauf

Our room was on Level 5 and wasn’t very easily discoverable, the registration desk had an overview of all locations though. Since no other tracks were located there, there were no “pass-by-and-maybe-stay-there”, but people actually needed to actively come to one of our sessions. We didn’t know that beforehand.

Nevertheless a few people showed up to our talks. Some talks were full, for some we had almost nobody attending.

(Photo: Nhie)

In the evening all of the Mozillians went for a Chinese dinner together. After dinner we joined the pub crawl at Brewerkz at Clark Quay.

Sunday

On Sunday we continued with our track with workshops.

9:00 am	Creating Your First Firefox OS App for Non-Coders	Bob Reyes
9:30 am
10:00 am	Webmaking with Mobile	Raj and Biraj
10:30 am
11:00 am	Security Testing for Developers Using OWASP ZAP	Sumanth Damarla
11:30 am
12:00 pm
1:00 pm	Webmaking in Public Space	Fauzan+Rara+Yofie
1:30 pm
2:00 pm	Workshop on getting started with MDN	Priyanka
2:30 pm
3:00 pm	Hacking on Gaia (1,5 Hour)	Michael+Deb+Jai
3:30 pm
4:00 pm

We learned from Saturday and this time actively went up to people and asked them if they’re interested in our workshops and if they’d like to come. This resulted in a better attendance, but we couldn’t fill all the workshops.

(Photo: Yofie)

Additionally we set up a second booth in the “main” room to attract more people. This certainly helped a lot.

(Photo: Yofie)

Yofie did a great job with designing and printing out flyers with the schedule. After about 1 hour we had hung them all around the building (even in the elevators) to make people to come to our track.

(Photo: Yofie)

Further we promoted the Bug Sprint over Twitter and with flyers on the walls. At least one person came to the Mozilla track and asked for more information. We later got the feedback from him, that he looked at the bugs, but they seemed to be “too big” to do then in a couple of hours.

Lessons learned (these are just my points, we need to have a more broad discussion with all the people involved)

Next time we should have a general overview of the location before the event (is there a main booth room? Where are the tracks located exactly?)
Swag should arrive in time. I did not check what exactly the problem was, but at conferences it’s critical to have at least some stickers. Also you need to have something to mark the booth with (table cloth would be perfect).
Further, in my opinion, it wouldn’t hurt to have a roll-banner to use for the booth. It’s hard to tell what booth it is when people stand in front of the swag.
Having a “Web” and “Mozilla” track is difficult. Non-Mozillians will often choose the web track since it’s more general. Maybe we could “inject” a few talks into the other tracks? Maybe we could move all technical presentations to the different tracks and have only “evangelism” talks at our track? (this is not solely my idea, Deb and all others helped a lot last night)
Aggressively advertising workshops helps.
People are interested in Mozilla, maybe we could do even more outreach during the breaks.

We have started a discussion about the “lessons learned” on Discourse. Join in if you have attended #fossasia (or otherwise if you have good input).

You can find all Mozilla-related tweets from FOSSAsia with the hashtag #MozAsia.

I’d like to thank all the organizers for their great work. Well done! It was a pleasure to be there. I certainly had a lot of fun in South East Asia and I could imagine coming back!

(Photo: Yofie)

Treffen der deutschsprachigen Mozilla Gemeinschaft - Tag 2 (DE / EN)

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 04:33:44 +0000

(English version below every paragraph)

Das ist der dritte Eintrag zum Treffen der deutschsprachigen Mozilla Gemeinschaft. Insgesamt werden drei Teile veröffentlicht. Die vorherigen Teile findest du hier: Tag 0, Tag 1, Tag 2 .

This is the third post regarding the German-speaking Mozilla community meetup. There will be three parts in total. You can find all previous parts here: day 0, day 1, day 2 .

Das Treffen fand vom 20. bis am 22. Februar 2015 statt. Um die Koordination unter den Freiwilligen im deutschsprachigen Raum (Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz) zu gewährleisten, treffen wir uns jährlich um unsere Pläne und Ziele für das jeweilige Jahr zu definieren. Zusätzlich ist es natürlich auch wichtig, sich von Zeit zu Zeit zu treffen, da einige Diskussionen einfacher und schneller in einem Gespräch vor Ort geführt werden können. Insgesamt haben 27 Personen teilgenommen.

The meetup was held on February 20 to February 22 2015. To facilitate the coordination between all volonteers and staff living/working in the German speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) we meet once a year to discuss any topics, plans and goals for the year. Further it's important to meet regularly to have certain discussions in person since these are faster and more efficient. In total 27 persons attended this meetup.

(Foto/Photo: Hagen Halbach)

Tag 2 / day 2

Am Sonntag starteten wir auch um 10:00 Uhr im Berliner Büro.

On Sunday we once again started at 10am at the Berlin Office.

eginn	Ende	Thema	Dauer
10:00	13:00	Planung 2015 / Events / Ziele / Rollenverteilung [etherpad](https://demeeting.etherpad.mozilla.org/community-meetup-2015-ideas)	45'	Alle
13:00	13:45	Inhalt mozilla.de	45'	Alle
13:45	14:15	IRC Meeting + Zusammenfassung Treffen	30'	Alle
14:00	...	Abreise oder weitere Diskussionen	...	Alle

Zuerst trafen wir uns wieder in den Gruppen, um die Ziele zu besprechen. Danach versammelten wir uns wieder, um diese gemeinsam zu besprechen und zu notieren.

At first we had the same breakout groups again, this time to evaluate goals for 2015. After that we discussed those together with the whole group and decided on goals.

Lokalisierung / Localization

Die Lokalisierung-Gruppe hat einige Punkte ausgearbeitet. Zum einen wurden diverse Wiki-Seiten überarbeitet und aktualisiert, zum andern wurden diverse Themen besprochen. Die gesamte Übersicht gibt's hier.

The l10n group has worked out a few points. First they updated multiple wiki pages. Second they discussed several other topics. You can find the overview of topics here.

Ziele / Goals:

Dokumentation auf dem Wiki fertigstellen / finish the documentation on the wiki
"Localizers in Training" anschreiben und nachfragen / get in touch with the "Localizers in Training" SUMO

SUMO hat eine Einführung in die neuen Tools durchgeführt. Zusätzlich wurden einige Ziele formuliert.

SUMO has done an introduction into the new tools. Further they decided on a few goals.

Ziele / Goals:

90% der Artikel sollen immer übersetzt sein / have 90% of all articles on SUMO translated all the time
Zu den Firefox Releases sollen immer die wichtigsten 100 Artikel übersetzt sein / for Firefox releases all of the top 100 articles should be translated Programmierung / Programming

Die "Programmierung" Gruppe hat auch einige interessante Sachen ausgebearbeitet. Alles hier aufzulisten wäre zu viel. Daher sei euch ein Blick auf ihr Etherpad gegönnt.

Ziele / Goals:

"Mozilla Day" veranstalten (nicht nur für Entwickler) / Organize a "Mozilla Day" (this does not only cover developers)
Vortrag zu Jetpack abhalten / give a talk on Jetpack
Rust Meetups weiterführen / continue the Rust meetups
Developer Meetups in Berlin / developer meetups in Berlin
5 neue Mozilla Entwickler rekrutieren / recruit 5 new dev contributors Community Builing

In der "Community Building" Gruppe haben wir diverse Themen besprochen. Unter anderem haben wir angeschaut, was momentan funktioniert und was nicht. Wir haben auch über Firefox Student Ambassadors und Recognition gesprochen. Hier gibt's den Gesamtüberblick.

In the community building group we talked about different topics. For example we looked at what's working now and what's not. Further we talked about Firefox Student Ambassadors and recognition. You can find the overview here.

Ziele / Goals:

mind. 10 FSA bis Jahresende / have at least 10 FSA until the end of the year
2 neue Reps im Norden von Deutschland / have 2 new Reps in the north of Germany
WoMoz / get WoMoz started (this is a difficult task, let's see)
Visuelle Identität (Logo) fertigstellen bis Ende 2. Quartal / finish the visual identity (logo) until end of Q2
mind. 5 Events in Städten, die vorher noch kein Event hatten / have at least 5 events in cities, where we never did events before
Mozilla Day / Weekend
"Onboarding" Prozess definieren / define onboarding process
Besseres Format für das wöchentliche Meeting / better format for the weekly meeting Webseiten / Websites

Alle deutschen Mozilla Seiten laufen momentan auf dem Server von Kadir. Da Kadir nicht mehr so viel Zeit hat, wäre es gut, wenn alles zu "Community IT" umgezogen wird. Dies wurde am Meetup besprochen und für "OK" befunden. Der Bug dazu befindet sich hier.

All German Mozilla sites are currently hosted by Kadir. Since Kadir doesn't have enough time to support them, the goal is to move them to Community IT. This was agreen upon at the community meetup. You can find the relevant bug here.

Ziel / Goal:

Alle Seiten umziehen / transfer all sites
Inhalt von mozilla.de überarbeiten / refresh the mozilla.de content Alle diese Ideen, Pläne und Ziele sind in einem Trello-Board zusammengefasst. Jeder der deutschsprachigen Gemeinschaft kann sich da einem Eintrag zuordnen und daran arbeiten. Mit diesem wollen wir die verschiedenen Pläne und Ziele übers Jahr hindurch verfolgen und abarbeiten.

All these plans and goals are summarized in our Trello board. All German speaking community members can self-assign a task and work on it. With this board we want to track and work on all our plans.

_ (Foto/Photo: Hagen Halbach)_

Danach haben wir uns über den Inhalt von mozilla.de unterhalten. Grundsätzlich wird der Inhalt komplett überarbeitet. Hier die Liste an Funktionen, die die neue Seite haben soll.

After that we discussed what features should be on the mozilla.de website. In general, all the content will be updated.

Produkt- und Projektübersicht / product and project overview
Landeseite (Community Tile) / landing page for the community tile
Liste von Veranstaltungen / list of events
Download-Button
Link auf "Contribute" / link to "contribute"
Link auf Mailingliste (kein Support!) / link to the mailing list (no support!)
Link auf den Newsletter / link to the newsletter
Planet
Social Media
Prominenter Link auf SUMO / prominent link to SUMO for help
Link Wörterbücher / link to the dictionaries

(Foto/Photo: Hagen Halbach)

Am Ende haben wir uns über das wöchentliche Meeting unterhalten und einen Vorschlag ausgearbeitet, um dieses effizienter zu machen. Folgende Anpassungen werden durchgeführt, sobald die Einzelheiten geklärt sind (wird über die Mailingliste diskutiert). Bis dahin bleibt alles beim Alten.

At the end we talked about our weekly meeting and drafted a proposal how to make it more efficient. The following changes will be done once everything is clear (we're discussing this on the mailing list). Until then everything stays the same.

Verschiebung von wöchentlich auf zweiwöchentlich / biweekly instead of weekly
nicht mehr nur IRC, sondern Vidyo (Videochat-Programm) / Vidyo instead of IRC
Alles wird wie gewohnt in einem Etherpad dokumentiert, so dass auch andere mitdiskutieren können / document everything on the Etherpad so everybody can join without Vidyo
- Workflow: Etherpad -> Meeting -> Etherpad
Die finalen Einträge aus dem Etherpad werden ins Wiki abgelegt, da diese dort durchsuchbar sind / the final meeting notes will be copied to the Wiki from the Etherpad

Feedback / Lessions learned (nur Englisch, da nur für Mozilla Reps relevant)

planning long-term before events makes sense
the office is a good location for these kind of meetups, but not for bigger ones
there is never enough time to discuss everything together, so individual breakouts are necessary

Ich möchte mich bei allen Teilnehmer für die informativen und konstruktiven Diskussionen bedanken. Ich glaube, dass wir einiges zu tun haben im 2015, wenn wir jedoch die Motivation vom Treffen mitnehmen können und unsere Pläne und Ziele umsetzen können, wird dies ein sehr erfolgreiches Jahr. Alle Fotos vom Treffen findet ihr auf flickr.

I'd like to thank all attendees who participated in very informative and constructive discussions during the weekend. I think that we have a lot to do in 2015. If we can save the motivation from this meetup and work on our defined plans and goals, we'll have a very successful year. You can find all pictures of the meetup on flickr.

Treffen der deutschsprachigen Mozilla Gemeinschaft - Tag 1 (DE / EN)

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 04:33:11 +0000

(English version below every paragraph)

Das ist der zweite Eintrag zum Treffen der deutschsprachigen Mozilla Gemeinschaft. Insgesamt werden drei Teile veröffentlicht. Die weiteren findest du hier: Tag 0, Tag 1, Tag 2 .

This is the second post regarding the German-speaking Mozilla community meetup. There will be three parts in total. You can find all other parts here: day 0, day 1, day 2 .

_ (Foto/Photo: Brian King)_

Tag 1 / day 1

Am Samstag um 10:00 Uhr ging's los mit dem ersten offiziellen Tag.

On Saturday we started the first official day at 10am.

Beginn	Ende	Thema	Dauer	Wer
10:00	10:30	Kennenlernen, Mozilla allgemein	30'	Alle
10:30	12:00	Einführende Diskussionen + Mozilla Goals	1h 30'	Alle
12:00	13:00	Diskussionen / Planung in Gruppen	1h	Gruppen
13:00	14:00	Mittagessen im Office	1h	Alle
14:00	15:30	Rückmeldung der Gruppenarbeiten + Diskussionen	1h 30'	Alle
16:30	17:30	Participation 2015 (Englisch)	1h	Alle
17:30	19:00	Community Tiles	1h 30'	Alle
20:00	22:00	Abendessen	2h 30'	Alle

Wir eröffneten das Treffen mit einer kurzen Vorstellungsrunde, da sich noch nicht alle gekannt haben. Es war schön zu sehen, dass aus allen Ecken des Mozilla Projektes Leute angereist sind, um die Zukunft zu planen.

We began the meetup with a short introduction round since not all of the attendees knew each other. It was nice to see that from all around the Mozilla projects people came to Berlin to discuss and plan the future.

Danach führte uns Brian in die Ziele und Pläne von Mozilla für das Jahr 2015 ein. Dabei standen vorallem Firefox (wieder mehr Fokus auf Desktop), Firefox OS (Benutzer-getriebene Strategie), Content Services (Differenziertheit von Einkommen) und Webmaker im Vordergrund. Damit wir unsere Ziele definieren können, müssen wir auch die Ziele von Mozilla kennen.

After that Brian introduced us to Mozilla's goals and plans for 2015. Firefox (more focus on Desktop this year), Firefox OS (user driven strategy), Content Services (differentiate income) and Webmaker were the focus. To reach our goals for the community we also need to know about Mozilla's overall goals so we can align them.

Nach dieser Einführung haben wir den momentanen Status der Gemeinschaft bestimmt. Dies wurde anhand einer SWOT-Analyse gemacht (Stärken, Schwächen, Möglichkeiten, Gefahren).

To know where we currently stand with our community, we did a "SWOT" analysis (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).

Stärken / Strengths:

L10N: umgesetzte Menge und Qualität / L10N: amount of work that was done and the quality of it
Viele Projekte in der Gemeinschaft vertreten_ / a lot of different projects are worked on by the community_
Wir hatten mehr Events als in 2013 / we had more (and more impactful) events in 2013
Spontanität / spontanous
...

Schwächen / Weaknesses:

Viel Arbeit / a lot of work
"Bus Faktor" / "bus factor"
Kommunikation / communication
Wenige Social Media Aktivitäten / not a lot of social media activities
Wöchentliche Meetings sind nicht effizient genug / weekly meetings aren't very efficient
....

Möglichkeiten / Opportunities:

Web Standards
Rust
Datenschutz_ / privacy_
Firefox Student Ambassadors
...

Gefahren / Threats:

Fragmentierung / fragmentation
Chrome + Google Services
...

(Foto/Photo: Hagen Halbach)

Danach haben wir uns in diverse Gruppen aufgeteilt, um gruppenspezifische Arbeiten zu erledigen und zu diskutieren. Dazu gehören "Lokalisierung", "Programming", "Community Building" und "Webseiten".

We splitted up in different groups to discuss group-specific topics and report back to everybody. We had "Localization", "Developer Engagement / Programming", "Community Building" and "Websites".

Nach dieser Gruppenarbeit kamen wir zusammen und haben bereits erste Ergebnisse diskutiert. Weitere Informationen zu den Arbeitsergebnissen dieser Gruppe folgen im Beitrag zum Tag 2.

We discussed the first outcomes of the groups together. Please refer to day 2 to see the results.

Am Samstag kam Markus vorbei. Markus möchte regelmässige Veranstaltungen in Berlin durchführen, um die Präsenz von Mozilla in Berlin zu vergrössern und eine lokale Gemeinschaft zu gründen. Wir begrüssen diese Idee natürlich und werden in 2015 Markus mit dabei unterstützen!

Markus, a local developer from Berlin, came by on Saturday. He'd like to organize regular events in Berlin to increase the presence of Mozilla in the city and to build a local community. We like this idea and will support him in 2015!

(Foto/Photo: Mario Behling)

Nach der Gruppendiskussion hatte Brian eine weitere Information: Participation. Hier verweise ich gerne auf den Blogeintrag von Mark Surman, um das genauer zu erklären.

After the group discussions Brian had further information: Participation. Please refer to Mark Surman's blogpost to get more information about that.

Als Abschluss des offiziellen Teil des Tages führten wir eine Diskussion über das sogenannte "Community Tile". Bei Firefox wird bei neuen Profilen beim Öffnen von neuen Tabs eine Übersicht an diversen Kacheln angezeigt. Eine dieser Kacheln ist für die Gemeinschaft reserviert und kann dafür verwendet werden. Wir diskutierten und sind zum Schluss gekommen, dass es sich bei diesem Link um eine Seite handeln sollte, welche die deutschsprachige Gemeinschaft erklärt und den Benutzern mitteilt, wer Mozilla ist und dass auch Leute aus dem deutschsprachigen Teil der Welt daran mitarbeiten.

At the end of the official part of the day we had a discussion about the "Community Tile". When you open a new tab in a new Firefox profile you'll see an overview of different sites you can visit. One of these links is reserved for the community. We discussed our proposal and came to the conclusion that we should focus to tell everyone what the German speaking community does and especially that there are local people working on Mozilla projects.

(Foto/Photo: Hagen Halbach)

Ihr fragt euch, wer alles mit dabei war? Seht selbst!

Want to see who was there? See for yourself!

(Foto/Photo: Brian King)

Nun geht es weiter mit dem Tag 2.

Now continue reading day 2.

Treffen der deutschsprachigen Mozilla Gemeinschaft - Tag 0 (DE / EN)

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 04:32:52 +0000

(English version below every paragraph)

Das ist der erste Eintrag zum Treffen der deutschsprachigen Mozilla Gemeinschaft. Insgesamt werden drei Teile veröffentlicht. Die weiteren findest du hier: Tag 0, Tag 1, Tag 2 .

This is the first post regarding the German-speaking Mozilla community meetup. There will be three parts in total. You can find all other parts here: day 0, day 1, day 2 .

(Foto/Photo: Hagen Halbach)

Vorbereitung / Preparation

Da es sich dieses Jahr um ein zweitägiges Treffen gehandelt hat, war dementsprechend auch die Vorbereitung aufwändiger. Durch die Hilfe von Hagen Halbach konnten wir das aber ohne grössere Probleme bewältigen. Wichtig war hierbei auch, dass wir mit der Planung bereits im Oktober begonnen haben und so Zeit hatten, alles zu buchen und zu planen.

Because this was a two day - event the preparation took more time than the years before. Due to Hagen Halbach's help we could manage this without any blocker. We already started to plan this event in October, this probably saved us a few sleepless nights and we had time to plan out everything and book on time.

Da Berlin (fast) von überall gut erreichbar ist und Mozilla da ein Büro hat, haben wir uns sehr schnell entschieden, das Treffen da abzuhalten. So mussten wir auch nicht ein Büro finden, was ggf. gekostet hätte.

Since traveling to Berlin is easy from (almost) anywhere and Mozilla has an office there, we quickly decided to organize the meetup there. To save costs this is a great way since we would have needed to find another place otherwise.

Hiermit ein grosses Dankeschön an Hagen (Mithilfe bei der Gesamtorganisation), Martyna (Hilfe beim Organisieren des Büros und Essens), Robert (Verantwortlicher von Mozilla während dieses Wochenendes) und Brian (Community Manager bei Mozilla) und an alle anderen, welche massgeblich bei der Planung involviert waren.

A big "Thank you" to Hagen (help with the organization), Martyna (all office and food catering inquiries), Robert (responsible for the office during the time) and Brian (Community Manager at Mozilla). Further also a "Thank you" to everyone else who was involved in the planning.

Ziele des Treffens / Goals

Stand der Gemeinschaft besprechen / discuss the current state of the community
Pläne und Ziele für 2015 definieren / define plans and goals for 2015
Zusammenhalt stärken und persönliche Gespräche führen / increase the atmosphere and have time for personal discussions

Ich denke, dass wir diese Ziele wunderbar erfüllt haben.

I think we've succeeded very well with these goals for the meetup.

_ (Foto/Photo: Hagen Halbach)_

Tag 0 / Day 0

Da einige bereits am Freitag angereist sind, haben wir einen (inoffiziellen) "Tag 0" abgehalten. Im Vorfeld haben wir einige kleine Präsentationen geplant. Diese wurden aber auf den späteren Nachmittag geschoben, da sich sofort interessante Gespräche entwickelt haben.

Since a few people already arrived in Berlin on Friday we organized an inofficial "day 0". We planned some presentation which we moved to early evening after we saw that there are already a lot of interesting discussions going on.

Kurz vor dem Abendessen habe ich über Mozilla Schweiz gesprochen. Ich habe den Beginn, unsere Events und Erfahrungen erklärt. Ich denke, dass diese auch für die deutschsprachige Gemeinschaft verwendet werden können. Ein grosser Unterschied ist natürlich, dass wir in der Schweiz ohne Probleme ein Treffen in Zürich machen können, ohne viele Teile des Landes auszuschliessen. In Deutschland zum Beispiel sieht das anders aus, da man da nicht ohne grössere Kosten/Zeitaufwand vom Süden in den Norden fahren kann. Für lokale Treffen funktioniert dies aber wunderbar.

Right before the dinner I've talked about Mozilla Switzerland. I explained the beginning, our events and experiences. I think this could also inspire the German speaking community. Obviously Switzerland is small since you don't cut out a lot of partcipants when you organize an event in Zurich. In Germany it's quite impossible to travel from the south to the north regarding costs/time for a monthly meetup. But for local meetups this concept works great.

Nach dem Abendessen führten wir die Diskussionen weiter, einige haben sogar noch Bugs geflickt und anderen gezeigt, wie das funktioniert.

After dinner we continued our discussions. Some of the attendees even hacked on different projects and showed other how to contribute to these projects.

Ich möchte mich bei allen Teilnehmer für die informativen und konstruktiven Diskussionen bedanken. Ich glaube, dass wir einiges zu tun haben im Jahr 2015, wenn wir jedoch die Motivation vom Treffen mitnehmen können und unsere Pläne und Ziele umsetzen können, wird dies ein sehr erfolgreiches Jahr. Alle Fotos vom Treffen findet ihr auf flickr.

I'd like to thank all attendees who participated in very informative and constructive discussions during the weekend. I think that we have a lot to do in 2015. If we can save the motivation from this meetup and work on our defined plans and goals, we'll have a very successfull year. You can find all pictures of the meetup on flickr.

Nun geht es weiter mit dem Tag 1.

Now continue reading day 1.

Firefox OS Awareness Day 2014

Sun, 08 Feb 2015 16:05:31 +0000

On the 13.12.2014 we've met in Cologne, Germany to have a "Firefox OS Awareness Day". The goal of this event was to promote Firefox OS in Germany, a very difficult task as it turns out.

Some words about the mobile phone market in Germany

Most of the people under 50 years old in Germany own a smartphone. This is either an Android, iOS, Windows Phone or BlackBerry, but not a lot of Firefox OS devices around. Firefox OS devices are sold at Congstar (online) and O2 (they have shops, but haven't seen any Firefox OS devices in the shops yet). There are probably three different segments where Firefox OS devices could be considered:

Teens who buy their first smartphone (contra: many apps that teens use are not available on Firefox OS yet)
Privacy concerned people
People over 50 who still use feature phones (but this is a hard segment since most of the time they don't actually want to spend money on a smartphone since they don't need the advantages of a smartphone) Arriving in Cologne

This time we decided to use AirBnB since the hotel costs before Christmas in Cologne are almost insane. We've found a nice appartment with enough space to host 4 persons (6 wouldn't have been a problem either) for a good price. The host was very nice and the checkin was painless. For events with about 4 to 6 Mozillians attending we can look into AirBnB again!

The event on Saturday

Thanks to the great help from the local O2 flagship store (thanks Robert et al!) everything was ready when we arrived at the store a few minutes before opening. Martyna from the Berlin office sent the Firefox costume directly to Cologne. Sören, Philipp, his wife and I we're ready to show Firefox OS to people within the store and people passing by the store. Sebastian from the German Firefox OS launch team unfortunately couldn't attend, so we were quite happy to see Philipp's wife helping us out.

The O2 flagship store is in the middle of the city of Cologne. This also means a lot of people on the street. Since Cologne is quite strict with their rules in public space, we had to make sure that we're not blocking the street too much. So most of the time we stood in the door of the store without blocking the second entrance. We quickly figured out that this is the best option since for some reason there we're never a lot of people inside the store. For the people inside the store we had a table with flyers and some Firefox OS swag and several demo phones we could present. There were quite a lot of interested people, but most of them wouldn't want to exchange their smartphone for a Firefox OS device.

With the Firefox costume we got a lot of attention and a lot of people wanted to shoot pictures with the fox - the same as in Berlin in November. If we didn't have enough impact for Firefox OS yet, we certainly made a lot of people smile because of us :)

You can find the other pictures we took on Flickr!

Lessons learned

The German phone market is almost saturated with Android/iOS
Astonishingly a lot of people that do not have a smartphone are happy with it and wouldn't change for an easy "beginner-friendly" smartphone. This is mostly the population above 60 years.
Even though most people were not interested in buying a new smartphone, it was good to get the word out about a mobile phone OS that runs on the Web platform.
We've met one person who already played with Firefox OS and had a nice chat with him about apps etc. Community building at it's best since he had never been in contact with the local community.
There are a lot of French tourists in Cologne, for the next time we would also print French flyers when doing something near the French border.

Firefox OS App Day Frankfurt - 22.11.2014

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 22:58:29 +0000

On the 22nd of November we met in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) to have a Firefox OS App Day. This is an event where we have talks in the morning to explain Firefox OS and Web APIs and then we hack for the rest of the day creating amazing apps for Firefox OS (and the open web).

Preparation

I asked Jan Bambach if he wanted to help out to organize a Firefox OS App Day. He gladly accepted even though he had some stress in school since he has to write exams. After figuring out a date, we started to plan the event. We started with the agenda.

09:00 - 09:15 Welcome / Introduction to Mozilla
09:15 - 09:45 "What is Firefox OS?"
09:45 - 10:15 "How do I develop for Firefox OS?"
10:15 - 10:30 Break
10:30 - 12:30 Hacking your own Firefox OS app
12:30 - 13:30 Lunch Break
13:30 - 17:15 Hacking your own Firefox OS app
17:15 - 17:30 "Firefox Marketplace - How to submit an app"
17:30 - 18:15 App presentations

We did a lot of advertisement for the event, but unfortunately that didn't turn out as we expected. We only heard about another event taking place the same day a few days before the event. This was too late to reschedule. Next time we'll check better and avoid having an event at the same day as a big Barcamp going on. I'm sure that we'd have more participants if it was on another day. Additionally we found out that asking Universities to advertise it to their students doesn't scale as well as it should. We didn't get any feedback from them.

App Day

On Saturday we were 9 persons. We expected to have 25 persons, but I'm going to explain to you why this is actually not as bad as it sounds.

After a talk about the Mozilla community and Firefox OS from me, Colin talked about Web APIs and showed some examples. This was very interesting to all the participants since most of them were native App developers and not web developers. There were some "I can do X on Android, is that possible with Firefox OS too?".

Since we could support every developer without having a "question queue", the overall turnout of the apps was a lot more advanced than at other App days with more people where we sometimes had multiple people waiting for an answer to a question. This was also the first time where we had two Marketplace submissions with a fully functional app. /images/images Apps created:

Wasserwaage- an app to measure if something is even
Clownfish - a game where you need to swim around fishes and need to avoid them (still awaiting review in the Marketplace, make sure to check it out once it's reviewed!)
A game where you need to clear your side of the table of all balls so that the other person has all the balls (not yet pushed to the Marketplace, but already a very exciting game even though there are no points yet)
A quiz app where you need to find out the capital or country by identifying the flag of the country (this was already developed before, but he did a lot of fixes and adapted it to Firefox OS)
An app to upload Creative Commons pictures to the Wikimedia Commons page. Unfortunately we had a problem with the Wikimedia API and couldn't finish the app. He promised to finish it once it's possible. The Wikimedia Commons API doesn't send a CORS header, so systemXHR doesn't work if cookies are sent.

At the end we showed how to upload an App to the Marketplace. Let's hope that everybody else uploads their app too once it has a better state and is not a prototype :)

Thanks to everybody who attended, great event!

Lessons learned

Check better for "competing" events during the event days
Re-check location (fortunately this wasn't a problem even though the reservation wasn't confirmed)
Smaller groups are better since you can support the developers way better than in a large group
We should advertise the Flame better, there is a lot of interest!

EuroPython 2014

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 21:39:39 +0000

Disclaimer: this is an event report from Marco Perez.

Even though we were very happy to see that Mozilla was a sponsor of "EuroPython 2014" and even got its own booth, it felt somehow strange to see it all empty. We hoped that maybe it would be equipped and manned in the afternoon or maybe on tuesday.

But wednesday arrived and the booth remained empty. So I contacted Michael, our rep of the swiss Mozilla community. After he asked me to get some swag from the local Mozilla office in Berlin, Marcel and I formed a plan.

After the last talks we went to the office at Voltastr. Fortunately not everybody had gone home yet. Georg showed us around and provided us with an ample supply of stickers and pins. We even got an original Mozilla lanyard each.

So armed with all those goodies as well as some stuff I had brought to Berlin (a t-shirt, a hoodie and the grand-daddy of all B2G phones (a Samsung Galaxy S2, modified to dual-boot a heavily patched nightly build of Firefox OS)) we prepared a surprise in the attic of the bcc.

Thursday saw a slightly different Mozilla booth with a variety of stickers, pins, a Firefox OS mobile phone, posters with some hints (mozilla.org, getfirefox.com, mozillians.org) and QR codes. Unfortunately we couldn't attend the booth all the time, since there were so many interesting talks we didn't want to miss.

But the stickers and the pins disappeared almost as fast as I could resupply the booth. I began to suspect that maybe just a few afficionados helped themselves very generously. So in order to spread the remaining pins and a few hundred stickers as effectively as possiblr i had to switch tactics: Welcome to guerilla style! :-)

During the breaks i wandered around on all three floors and discretely placed some stickers on the tables where folks were working, reading, coding, eating, drinking, discussing or having fun. Some didn't want them while others asked for a few more to give away.

On friday afternoon I gave the last remaing stickers to the volunteers that had helped keep everything going smoothly and we went to clean up the booth.

Lessons learned

We must always assume that Mozilla is a sponsor of such events and that there may be no official Mozilla staff available to prepare a booth, especially if there's some "competing" event (e.g. OSCON).
There may be no access to the resources (swag, large color printers, demo equipment, competent people) needed to make the booth look "professional", especially if there's no time for serious preparation.
So next time I'm going to attend such an event, I should either coordinate my efforts with my local rep or their local office or have my Bugzilla permissions upgraded so I can check whether there's some open bug for the event I'm going to visit.

Million Mask March Zurich - 08.11.2014

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 21:35:03 +0000

On the 8th of November (yes, 2 days before #fx10), we met in Zurich to provide a tea booth for protesters. There is a new law coming up in Switzerland which would negatively influence everybody's privacy, which was the reason for the protest. A few days before the event I asked Martin and Gion-Andri from the Swiss community if they'd like to help out with the tea since two other members couldn't make it that day. Fortunately they said yes and did a great job!

Reminder for everyone who wants to serve tea some time: cooking 28 liters of water for the tea is easy. It took us only about an hour to finish the tea. But since nobody of us is allowed to drive a car (we don't need to have a car in Switzerland), we had to think about transportation. Since we also had to transport a table we needed a car and couldn't use public transport. We didn't find anybody with a car, so we took a taxi. The taxi driver did a great job driving steady to not spill anything. Making any other driver believe that it's a weird taxi driver driving so slowly? We did it!

There we're about 80 to 100 people attending. Since Switzerland is quite cold these days, our tea was greatly appreciated. We had a great evening and we're surprised how many people don't know the values of Mozilla. We need to have more events like this and show that Mozilla stands for Privacy.

Mozilla Hacking Day 2 - 11.10.2014

Thu, 20 Nov 2014 21:32:40 +0000

On the 11th of October we organized a "Mozilla Hacking Day 2" in Berlin. This was the follow up of the first Hacking Day in Berlin in April.

On Friday we met and went to dinner and talked about the next day. Since we had to wake up early on Saturday we didn't stay up long (cough). On Saturday we had a quick delay since we couldn't have our room at TU Berlin yet at 9am. Fortunately we could have it at 9:30am and had interesting talks before that while waiting. This was organized together with MeshCon, so we could talk to a lot of people that generally don't get in touch with Mozilla.

We devided the tables into "Firefox", "Firefox OS", "Firefox Addons" and "Other". All hacking tables had attendees present. Many of them didn't know what to hack on, so we helped them out. Someone asked me about Popcorn.js and I could show him how to fix a bug (he found it himself!) in Popcorn Maker. On the other tables people were busy hacking on other stuff. I think most people enjoyed this day.

At lunch we had great quiches from Florian, who suggested to cook them for us. These were amazing, thanks again to you, Florian!

From the around 35 attendees, 2 said that they will continue contributing to Mozilla (Add-ons) and one even registered to be an add-on reviewer.

According to the feedback we have decided the following:

More specific hackathons (for example "Firefox Hacking")
Since we didn't do any localization there will be a localization sprint next year
It's hard to get feedback (only 4 people have filled out the form) - how can we improve that?
The next time, prepare a "Good First Bug" list beforehand instead of using the bugzilla search

All in all, it was a great day and we'll certainly provide this opportunity to learn in 2015.

MobileCamp Dresden May 2014

Mon, 26 May 2014 22:58:32 +0000

On the 10th May I went to the MobileCamp in Dresden, Germany to give a keynote about Firefox OS. One of our community members was asked if Mozilla wants to do the keynote and we thought that this is a great opportunity to tell people in Germany about our mission and our goals we have with Firefox OS.

Keynote

I held the keynote right after the introduction and session planning on Monday morning. I talked about our Mission, why we're doing Firefox OS and the current state of it. At the end I gave a quick overview of new features to come. After the keynote a few people instantly came to me and asked if they could play with my Firefox OS devices.

You can find the slides here: http://bit.ly/mobilecamp-firefoxos

Saturday evening

On Saturday evening we went to the City Beach in Dresden and we talked about the mobile world and what the future will hold. Once again I could show Firefox OS to the people there and the general feedback was quite good.

Later I met Laura Hilliger and Henrik Skupin to get some drinks and catch up. It was great to talk to local Mozillians.

Rest of the barcamp

Unfortunately I wasn't very well, so I didn't do a second session. Appmaker would be a great thing to have a session on, but there will be another MobileCamp next year or other barcamps in the German speaking countries. I'll definitely keep that in mind.

There were a lot of other, very interesting sessions as well. In some I could provide my view from the "Firefox OS" view point, which led to great discussions.

One guy was very impressed when he experienced the keyboard and noticed that the vibration feedback is instant. I then explained that this is done using the Vibration API.

In conclusion this was a great event and I could have nice discussions about Firefox OS and its eco system.

Mozilla Hacking Day April 2014

Mon, 26 May 2014 22:57:03 +0000

On the 26th of April we met in Berlin to have a "Mozilla Hacking Day". After several month of planning, we had a good session plan which sounded interesting. On meetup.com, 55 people rsvp'd and about 17 Mozillians registered to help us out at the event itself.

Mozillians Dinner on Friday

On Friday we met at the hotel and went out for Tapas to plan the last few things for Saturday and have some Mozilla discussions.

Hacking Day on Saturday

On Saturday around 40 people showed up to get to know Mozilla and hack on its projects.

Our schedule:

9:00 - 9:45	BREAKFAST
9:50 - 10:15	Welcome / Introduction to Mozilla		Michael Kohler / Julian Viereck
10:20 - 10:35	Next things for Firefox	<wip>	Tim Taubert
10:40 - 10:55	Firefox OS Development	FirefoxOS (Overview/Gaia)	Colin Frei
11:00 - 11:15	Mozilla Research	Overview	Till Schneidereit
11:20 - 11:40	COFFE BREAK
11:40 - 11:55	WebRTC		Avinash Kundaliya
12:00 - 12:15	ScanJS - scanning JS for security issues	Security (Web, Firefox, Firefox OS, ...)	Frederik Braun
12:20 - 12:35	Webmaker	Mozilla Webmaker (www.webmaker.org)	Michael Kohler
12:20 - 12:35	MDN		Florian Scholz
12:40 - 13:40	LUNCH BREAK
13:40 - 13:50	Hacking part introduction	Introducing contacts, "how to find bugs and get started"	Georg Fritzsche

afternoon		Mozilla Research (Shumway) and/or JS Engine and/or ES6 goodness	Till Schneidereit
afternoon	e10s work in Firefox	Where we are right now with E10S. What needs to be done. Show & tell	Tom Schuster
afternoon	Firefox OS Malware Defense and the Firefox OS Crypto Concept	Thing have moved and are moving in FxOS app sec space, and I'll update you on where we are and where we (hopefully) are going. I'll also give an introduction to the current FxOS crypto concept proposal.	Christiane Ruetten
afternoon	Calendar Data for Apps and the Web with ICAL.js	There are quite a few simple parsers for the iCalendar format (rfc5545) on the net, but I have seen none that are full featured parsers. As part of my work for the Mozilla Calendar Project, I have created a full featured replacement to the C++ libical used in our product, Lightning. This isn't the only place scheduling is important. In this session I will show you how easily you can use ical.js to schedule on the web in a standards compatible way. Please bring your ideas on how calendaring can be used in your domain. If you want to take a look beforehand, check out https://github.com/mozilla-comm/ical.js	Philipp Kewisch
afternoon	Mozmill & release testing of Firefox	You will see how Mozilla QA makes use of the Mozmill framework in combination with Jenkins to qualify Firefox releases	Henrik Skupin

Since we had some overlapping sessions (e.g. talks during other sessions), the attendees needed to choose what they wanted to do after lunch. Some decided to hear the rest of the talks, others went upstairs to hack on the projects. Unfortunately most of the people downstairs didn't come upstairs to hack on something after the talks.

Those hacking upstairs splitted up to the different session tables with Firefox OS being the most popular. Some other tables, unfortunately, were empty. This is one point we need to address for future events (see "Lessions learned" below).

In conclusion we can happily say that this was a great event and we'll follow up on that in autumn. We had a lot of discussions with interested people, mostly about Firefox OS. This was one of the first events where a lot of Mozilla emplyees were present, this is a big advantage and also helps to further improve the coorporation between employees and volunteers.

Lessions learned

We knew we'll have a few "no show", but we didn't expect it to be almost 40%. We need to find a way to improve that.
Better calculate the food: we had some Pizzas and bread left. At the end we gave it away to people needing it more than we do, but nevertheless this could be improved. But this also has to do with the first lession.
Better plan the sessions and ask people about their interests earlier to not have empty session tables.

A big "Thanks!" goes out to everyone who helped organize it and supported us at the event itself. Also, I'd like to thank co.up which sponsered the venue.

I'm currently planning to do a second Mozilla Hacking Day. This time with more people and all the lessions learned applied. Stay tuned!

German-speaking Community DocSprint April 2014

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 18:11:18 +0000

Am 5. und 6. April traffen wir uns in Berlin für einen Mozilla DocSprint der deutschspachigen Community. Es konnten leider nicht alle Core-Contributors dabei sein, aber wir hatten trotzdem ein schönes und produktives Wochenende.

Am Freitag traffen wir uns im Mozilla Office in Berlin, um an einer Mozilla-Town-Hall teilzunehmen. Danach haben wir über diverse Themen diskutiert und uns auf die beiden bevorstehenden Tage vorbereitet.

Samstag

Am Samstag war unsere Aufmerksamkeit vollständig auf SUMO gerichtet. Thomas hat uns eine Einführung gegeben, so dass wir danach selbständig Artikel übersetzen konnten. Mit der super Hilfe von Thomas und anderen Lokalisierern konnten wir viele Artikel zum Thema "Firefox 29" übersetzen. Andy und andere haben jeweils die neuen Australis-Screenshots auf Deutsch dazu beigetragen.

Nach ungefähr 11 Stunden Arbeit konnten wir guten Gewisses chinesisch essen gehen.

Sonntag

Am Sonntag führte uns Florian in MDN ein, da sich die beiden Systeme unterscheiden. Wir fokussierten uns auf die "Developer Tools" Artikel von MDN.

Am Nachmittag erhielten wir eine kurze Einführung in "Produkt-Lokalisierung" von Kadir. Mit dieser Einführung sollten nun alle in der Lage sein, die verschiedenen Produkte zu lokalisieren und die deutschsprachige Übersetzung auf dem aktuellen Stand zu halten. Da Sebastian bereits viele Bugs im Vorfeld korrigiert hatte, blieben uns nur noch 2 Bugs, die wir bearbeiten konnten. An dieser Stelle auch einen herzlichen Dank an Sebastian und Andy, welche zwar nicht dabei sein konnten, aber trotzdem massgeblich am Erfolg dieses Wochenendes beigetragen haben.

Die erledigten Arbeiten könnt ihr nachfolgend einsehen.

Erledigte Arbeiten (über alle 2 Tage verteilt)

SUMO

26 Artikel aktualisiert
100 wichtigste Artikel: 34% -> 48% Etherpad mit den entsprechenden Artikel und Links: https://demeeting.etherpad.mozilla.org/german-speaking-sprint-berlin-april-2014-sumo

MDN

Vorher:

Artikel übersetzt: 9 (18%)
Artikel aktuell: 1 (12%) Nachher:
Artikel übersetzt: 15 (29%)
Artikel aktuell: 11 (74%)

Etherpad, mit den entsprechenden Artikel und Links: https://demeeting.etherpad.mozilla.org/german-speaking-sprint-berlin-april-2014-mdn

Product-Sprint

Die Liste mit den Bugs, findet ihr hier.

Sonstiges

Webmaker.org wurde vollständig aktualisiert und übersetzt -> 100%
Appmaker Übersetzung aktualisiert --> von 40% -> 83%
whatcanidoformozilla.org aktualisiert und weiter übersetzt -> 100%

Mein Ziel wäre gewesen, auch noch ca. 30% der Webmaker-SUMO Artikel zu übersetzen, aber dafür hat es leider zeitlich nicht gereicht. Da ich nun aber weiss, wie diese übersetzt werden können, kann ich das auch so machen und muss nicht vor Ort in Berlin sein.

Nächste Schritte

Wir benötigen bei SUMO weitere Reviewer, dies ist bestimmt eines der wichtigeren Themen in den nächsten Monaten. Ausserdem benötigt MDN immer wieder neue Contributors, auch da können wir bei anderen Events immer wieder MDN erwähnen.

Grundsätzlich gilt, dass wir ein sehr produktives Wochenende hatten. Aus meiner Sicht kann man dies gerne gegen Ende Jahr wiederholen. Herzlichen Dank, dass ihr alle teilgenommen habt.

Alle Bilder zu dieser Veranstaltung findet ihr auf Flickr. Die Teilnehmer sind in dieser Mozillians-Gruppe vereint.

Barcamp Salzburg March 2014

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 17:29:55 +0000

On the 15th of March I organized a Firefox OS workshop at the Barcamp Salzburg. But let's start from the beginning.

Friday evening

On Friday evening I demoed my Firefox OS devices and had some really nice talks with the students from the FH Salzburg.

I could even try Googles Glasses in exchange with my Firefox OS device :)

Saturday

After some very interesting talks we could start with our workshop in the afternoon. We had a time slot of about 2 hours. Even though about 15 persons registered for the event, only 8 showed up. Nevertheless we had a great workshop!

At the beginning I hold a short talk about Firefox OS explaining its way and our goals. No, I don't have slides to share, since I took the very popular slides from Christian Heilmann and deleted some of the slides to fit it to our time slot.

After that Ankit took over and explained how to use the Firefox OS Simulator.

Since Ankit showed how to debug the standard applications already installed on the simulator, a lot of participants instantly opened the editor and played with the Developer Tools.

Since the time didn't allow us to do a lot of application programming the participants just played with the simulator and we answered some questions. One guy took his already existing web app and ported it to Firefox OS.

After all, the participants had a great time playing with Firefox OS. Additionally they all now have amazing Firefox OS swag. The orange Firefox OS glasses are a great give-away and at the end we could have given away even more than we had!

German-speaking Mozilla Community Meetup February 2014

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 23:34:25 +0000

TL;DR: Great meetup, let's work on our defined goals for 2014!

On the 8th of February 2014 we had our second "German-speaking Mozilla Community" Meetup after rebooting the community. In this blog post I'd like to review the event and tell you about our 2014 goals.

Not 100% achieved 2013 goals

Not a lot of new faces on this year's meetup
Even though there was a lot going on, the coordination within the groups was not great. Also overall communication can be improved.
"Contribute" form is hard to process -> almost no visible new contributors
It's hard to find new contributors for Marketing and Localization We splitted up in different groups: L10N/Support, Hacking and a "miscellaneous" group.

Let's review our goals for 2014

L10N/Support

Goal: Find more contributors
Goal: Improve the German articles on SUMO, MDN
Goal: Improve the German translation of Firefox, Firefox OS
Solution: organize different Sprints during the year. The next sprint will be on the 5th and 6th of April in Berlin Hacking:
Goal: Find more contributors
Solution: organize multiple "Mozilla Hacking Days". The next event will be on the 26th of April in Berlin (to be definitely confirmed)
Solution: use the momentum of the first Hacking Day to organize a second Hacking Day. At the second event we fully go "non-Mozillians", i.e. as many interested, possible contributors as possible Miscellaneous:

Firefox OS

Goal: find new app developers and create localized apps
Goal: promote Firefox OS in Germany
Solution: organize multiple Firefox OS App Days in Germany/Austria/Switzerland
Firefox OS App Day Zurich (planning ongoing)
Firefox OS App Day Vienna (planning ongoing)
Firefox OS App Day Munich (planning pending)
Other Firefox OS App Days to be specified Marketing:
Goal: find new contributors for posts on Twitter, Facebook, ...
Solution: probably use already existing contributors in other areas Webmaker:
Goal: organize multiple Webmaker events in Germany, Austria and Switzerland
Goal: organize a OpenBadges event in Switzerland
Goal: organize a "All Things Web" bi-weekly course in Switzerland (probably in cooperation with the Open Tech School)
Solution: Meeting with Michelle Thorne on the 4th of April to discuss the ideas

The different groups will inform about the progress in the #deMeeting on the 5th of March.

Community Building Brainstorming

At the end of the day we had a "Community Building" session. Here's the outcome/brainstorming:

Use badges for contributors
Identify Student Ambassadors in Germany
Response to "Contribute" form needs to be edited
Reach out to other tech communities to find new contributors
Better integration of Mozilla employees
Inform other communities about our next events (JS groups, user groups, ...)
Big Mozilla Hacking Days (see above)

Thanks again for joining us! See all photos on Henrik's flickr page.

OKCon 2013 in Geneva

Sun, 03 Nov 2013 12:39:52 +0000

Mid of September I attended the Open Knowledge Conference 2013 in Geneva. To be honest, I had never heard of the Open Knowledge Foundation before (or I just don't recall), so I was quite happy to see that this year's conference was in Geneva. I just found out about it, because Kaitlin Thaney, Director Mozilla Science Lab had a talk there.

I had heard of Open Data and seen some examples before, but I didn't know, that there was a whole conference about it. Open Data, Open Government, Open Science, you name it. I tried to go to an OpenData.ch event last spring, but unfortunately I couldn't make it. Otherwise I would have been involved with OpenData before, since it's a great cause. At the Open Knowledge Conference the Swiss government announced their Open Data Portal, which (in my opinion) needs a lot of improvement and more different datasets.

Since OpenData has a strong correlation with the Open Web Mozilla wants to build, I was there talking to people about the Open Web and Mozilla's Mission. Also I talked with people about Mozilla Webmaker to show them how easy it can be to publish their data with the Webmaker tools. One problem I was faced with was that the event registration was sponsored and so everybody had the same (sponsored) lanyard. Since I had Firefox lanyards with me, I couldn't just go there and tell everyone to switch them. Or could I have? In my opinion that would have been quite unpolite. Nevertheless I handed out the lanyards, but didn't ask them to switch them instantly (but some of them did on their own).

I met a lot of inspiring persons with whom I will get in contact shortly to create more events to get the general public more aware about Open Data and the Web.

Barcamp Erfurt 2013

Mon, 05 Aug 2013 23:03:07 +0000

On the 15th and 16th of June (long time ago, I know), I was invited to the Barcamp Erfurt 2013. Since I had never been at a Barcamp before, I didn't exactly know what it will be like. I gotta say: Barcamps are awesome!

This year's theme was "youth media", so I had the possibility to talk to tv youth program creators, youth educators and other interesting persons. On Saturday I had the opportunity to talk about Webmaker. My goal was to give an intro and then do an interactive workshop, but unfortunately the participants didn't have a laptop with them. So I did an extended demo and showed the capabilities of the Popcorn Maker, X-Ray Goggles and Thimble.

After the demo a teacher from Germany came up to me and said that he will possibly try to use these tools with his class. I will get in touch with him within next few weeks and give further support.

Since I had my Geeksphone Peak with me, it got a lot of attention and I got asked to do a session about Firefox OS on Sunday. The interest was quite amazing, I let people touch and play with the device and ask questions. Due to the theme of the Barcamp, a discussion about a "kids-friendly" Marketplace came up. In my opinion, Firefox OS provides a great ground for these kind of applications and it would be great to see a "kids-app-only" marketplace.

It was a great weekend and I'll probably join them next year again!

You can find pictures from the Barcamp here.

Firefox OS App Days - combined with Webmaker

Sun, 23 Jun 2013 23:20:59 +0000

In late May 2013 we (Mozilla Switzerland) organized a Firefox OS App Day in Zurich. At this event we wanted to give local developers a chance to play with Firefox OS and write some apps for it. It was a great event, which I don't need to blog about further since it has been documented very well elsewhere.

In the beginning of May 2013 I attended the Vienna Firefox OS App Day. This event was awesome and got me to think about combining Firefox OS with Webmaker.

Firefox OS App Day Vienna

At the App Day in Vienna I met three really brave women. You may ask why I call them "brave". Well, they have never created a website before and didn't have any idea about HTML or CSS. I spent about 10 minutes stripping down the Boilerplate App to have a white "workspace" and explained them where they can put the HTML elements. I showed them how to insert an image and they were already happy. After that I showed them the HTML reference with all the elements. About 15 minutes later I came back to them and they already inserted a button on their own.

With a little help from us they managed to connect to button to a music file with JavaScript and they got a Firefox OS App they made themself! It's a "laugh app". When you click the button it plays a laughter.

Firefox OS App Day Zurich

At the App Day in Zurich we were joined by a Java developer who has never written any HTML. This time it was easier to explain it since he already got enough knowledge to quickly understand the concepts. Nevertheless I stripped down the boilerplate app again and we started to create the app.

Since he already heard about the different awesome features in HTML5, he wanted to create an app which stores the value of an input field in the localstorage after clicking the submit button. Since the boilerplate app already had form fields he just needed to change the labels and write the JavaScript code. After about 15 minutes he had a working Firefox OS app! Once again we could #teachtheweb to somebody and saw one more smiling face in the room.

You can see the code at https://github.com/ohumbel/sffoa.

How can we combine these two topics?

I think using Firefox OS to teach others HTML is a great possibility since most of the learners have never created a phone app. Why not learn and have something wonderful in your hands?

This is the reason why I created some resources. I'm sure this is not the final version of the resources, feel free to remix them!

Activity and cheat sheet: You can find the activity sheet and the ressource sheet remixable on Thimble. Webmaker Firefox OS template: I created a github repository, so I don't need to strip down the boilerplate app every time. Feel free to send a pull request: https://github.com/MichaelKohler/webmaker-firefoxos-template.

What do you think about this combination? Would you use it yourself to teach HTML? Please leave a comment!

BackupSoft

Sun, 30 May 2010 20:09:58 +0000

Our backup application "BackupSoft" is now officially available for download. You can download it on the "Downloads" page of this website. Currently there is only the Linux version available, because the Windows version takes up to 50MB. I'm sorry you need to compile it for yourself. You need to download the linux version if you want to have the source code. Further Qt needs to be installed.

Tabs-on-Top

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 21:30:48 +0000

Currently there is a discussion about the Tabs-on-Top feature in the mozilla.dev.apps.firefox newsgroup. Tabs-on-tops has been pushed to the nightly (trunk) development branch of firefox on April 6th 2010. Pretty much every new feature introduced to Firefox leads to a more or less active discussion but this time it is very important to find the right decision since this is a major change in the front UI. Of course there will never be an agreement because GUIs are still a matter of subjective. Now the FF UI design team needs to find a decision which is best for most of the users.

Firefox is currently used by millions of users. This means a lot of people who need to be satisfied. Otherwise they will just think about changing the browser. But wait, is there a good browser which has the option to place tabs on the bottom of the location bar? Yes, it is Firefox. Of course there will be an option to place tabs on the bottom. It is just about where to place the tabs by default.

It is well known that good design is getting more and more important (e.g. the iPhone or iPad design). Unfortunately a lot of people think that good visual design (good looking interfaces) are the best ones. This is in most cases absolutely false. The best GUI is the one that allows the user to do the needed actions in the most comfortable way. A browser is still just for surfing the web (at least in most cases) and not for looking at something beautiful.

Coming back to the actual discussion I think it is difficult to get to a good decision. There are pros and cons which I will explain now.

Pros

Often tabs indicate that the content will change. Already with tabs on bottom the content of the tab changes when clicking on another tab. This will not change. But have you ever thought about other things that change when focusing another tab? The first thing that comes to mind is the location bar. Sure, that was logical, wasn't it? The other thing are the forward/back-arrows. The location bar indicates the URL you are currently on, the arrows represent the history. Even though you don't see the change of the arrows right away, their content changes. In my opinion it would be more intuitive having the tabs on top (even though a few things are constant like the home button).

Wait, the bookmarks toolbar doesn't change. So why should it be below the location bar? It would be way better if it was right on top of the tabs (i.e. right below the window title bar). So just move it on top, so the bookmarks toolbar doesn't disturb the user's view.

(thanks to Alex Faaborg for these mockups)

An important fact in user-centered UI design has always been Fitt's Law. I don't want to explain it here, but one aspect of it is really important: It is easier to click on an element which is located at the top of the screen than on one that is somewhere in the middle of the screen. This is because you can move your cursor straight to the top and it automatically stops there and then you can move it a few pixels down and you are right over the element to click on. Unfortunately nowadays the screen resolutions are very high and a lot of users don't have the windows maximized. Due to this fact Fitt's Law doesn't work here anymore.

Further it is better to have the tabs on top because they do not disturb the vision of the user when watching away from the location bar to the tab's content. Every feature has its disadvantages, though.

Contras

As mentioned above a lot of users don't maximize their windows, so Fitt's Law doesn't work. I cannot mention this enough times: Fitt's Law is still important! It is probably better to place the tabs right on top of the content, like that there is at least less way to move the cursor.

A question I always ask myself is why it would need a change. The most users know the current UI design, why should they get used to another layout? Sure if it was more comfortable it wouldn't be a problem. If a user has always used Google Chrome and now decided to use Firefox, he would probably want to have the tabs on top because he is used to that. But honestly, do we really want to copy Google Chrome? Is its design really that well done? In my opinion there is absolutely no reasons to do so. An unified browser design would be very indeed, but unfortunately that is something that will never be achieved..

Another problem with tabs-on-top would be the menu bar. I don't think it would be good to have the menu bar and the tabs this close together. It would make it much easier to click on a top instead of a menuitem and that is definitely not something the users want. Sure, this will not be a problem anymore when the "Firefox App Button" will be introduced in a future version of Firefox.

In conclusion I think the tabs-on-top feature is very nice-to-have, but as always there are disadvantages, too. Some UX (user experience) experts need to weigh the facts and decide. Either way (tabs on top/bottom) there will be an option to change the layout. In my opinion the tabs should be placed at the bottom where they are now. Having them at the top by default has too many disadvantages.. Please don't forget one thing: eventually the majority of the users needs to be satisfied.

my mozconfig

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:55:11 +0000

As you probably know I have already fixed a few bugs in Mozilla Firefox. For this I need to build Firefox from the source files. Therefore I need a "mozconfig" which sets some general options how to build Firefox.

Feel free to copy it if you want to use it too:

ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser`

ac_add_options --enable-tests

export MOZ_DEBUG_SYMBOLS=1
export CFLAGS="-gstabs+"
export CXXFLAGS="-gstabs+"
export BUILD_OFFICIAL=1

mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=../fx-obj