Look! Mozilla People!

I’m sitting in the hotel lobby in Brussels right now and reflecting on the last couple of days.  FOSDEM was quite a bit of fun and a chance to re-engage a little bit with the larger free and open source communities, largely dominated by Linux hackers and desktop folks.  It was good to see smiling faces, both old and new.

For me this trip served two purposes.  First, I wanted to be able to talk to my fellow Mozilla project members in person and get a sense of who they were and what they cared about.  And the second was to be able to get a sense of what Mozilla community looks like in Europe.  I harbored suspicions that they were concerned about different things than what we find in North America and this did turn out to be true.

First of all it was pretty amazing and somewhat humbling to experience the Mozilla community here in Europe.  The room at FOSDEM was overflowing with people for many of the talks, often to the point where we had to ask people to leave to avoid blocking the exits.  Tristan did an around-the-room introduction as part of the opening session and it was great to be able to connect names that I had only seen on IRC and email with actual faces around the room.  The global nature of the project comes into view when you see something like this – people from all over Europe and the UK all working on different things they are passionate about.

The people who care about Mozilla here in Europe, or at least those who were at the conference, are very different than what I’ve seen in the states.  Mozilla in North America is dominated by core development.  That is, platform engineering work, web development and design.  Europe is different – solving different problems.  The multi-language nature of Europe means that people are most interested in solving that problem so there’s a huge localizer community.  There’s also a long history of XUL platform development in Europe that doesn’t exist in a lot of other places.  Those two communities seem to form the base of people who are involved in the project here.

But I also suspect that this reflects only part of what Mozilla is in Europe.  FOSDEM self-selects a certain set of people.  Two other parts of the Mozilla community, those concerned with the continued advancement of the open web and standards as well as end users, felt under-represented in my mind.  I suspect they are strong here in Europe, but didn’t make it to this particular conference.  I’ll be working more to find and develop these contacts over the next year or so and see what I can find.

That being said I think that there were a couple of big takeaways from my time here:

1. I think that it’s important that we find a way for the XUL and XULRunner communites to grow and develop on their own.  (I’m aware that XULRunner still is controversial in the project so this dominated some of the conversations I had.  I have some more specific thoughts on this, but it’s too much to go into here and now.)
2. That the needs and activities in Europe are different than what we have in North America.  I suspected this before but now I have a better sense of it after spending a few days with my fellow project members.  It feels like something I can act on and carry into my thinking about direction.

So it’s been good and it’s inspired a lot of good thinking.  I’ll be in Paris for another day or so, spending time with Paul and Tristan, trying to make some plans for the next year.  Hopefully I’ll have the chance to come back and visit soon again – it was good to meet everyone.