Review of Mozilla Balkans meeting @ Sofia

If you follow my identi.ca or twitter account, you might had noticed that Pierros , Freddy and myself wore our Mozilla hats and went to Sofia for the Mozilla Balkans meeting. An easy trip since Bulgaria is very close to Greece.

On overall : it was a great experience! How could be otherwise? I met new people (including Chris Hofmann, William Quiviger and others), got in touch again with cool people I’ve already met (in Ljubljana, Slovenia) and had the chance to discuss the hot topics that concern the Mozilla Balkans community.

I shouldn’t whine at all, but there was no wifi at the meeting area. But! We got through it using Fedora (actually the Network Manager internet/wifi sharing coolness) and one Ethernet port available on the room.

By the way, sticking post-it notes with what’s good, bad, giving a thank you and expressing ideas on the wall (each category was a part of the wall) was beyond cool, making it even more interesting than using our laptops.

What I suggested was to run a DemoParty[1] covering the Balkans area (Matjaž Horvat-approved suggestion 😉 ): each one of our communities (if possible of course) will run a DemoParty on its own, locally. I think this is a good chance to attract creative people as our goal is also to make the web better, not only the browser (we wouldn’t want the best browser for a web that sucks anyway). What is needed is the participation of the members of each community, an announcement on each Mozilla community website with the rules etc, judges, support from others in Mozilla that have already run a DemoParty and if possible a place (hackerspace or whatever) to announce the winners etc.

I also suggested aborting the Skype calls. It’s simple, imagine all the people in the room in Sofia participating via Skype. Suicide is next! I mentioned four other reasons as well. IRC meetings are much more productive since we can log our conversation and plan our discussion beforehand.

Furthermore, Athens was proposed to be the next city to run the next Mozilla Balkans meeting (we compete Belgrade!)

Not to forget the newly created ReMo project! hooray!!! [2]

What’s more? The Greek Mozilla community website is under construction. We will mainly post our news there to let you know what’s going on. I need to mention our new mailing list as well! You can join us here [3].

Anyway you can learn more (also see photos) for what happened in Sofia here at our aftermath page [4]. Once more a thank you to the organizers (yeah to Bogo too!).

<off-topic> This week has been very busy, since I am finishing my studies this semester. I am also looking for a postgraduate program in embedded systems/HCI/electronic automation (so far the universities of Athens, Leiden and Delft have what I want 🙂 ) . If you know something about that matter and want to share it with me, please do 🙂 </off-topic>

[1] http://mozillalabs.com/demoparty/

[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo

[3] http://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/community-greece

[4] http://wiki.mozilla.org/Balkans/Events:2011/Sofia/Aftermath