It’s finally there! A few weeks ago confirmed Balkans inter-community meet-up, second of this kind hosted by Mozilla Europe, will take place in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, on (next) Thursday, 20th May. The meet-up will be separated in 3 major parts:

1. Internal meet-up for Mozilla staff and community
2. Public event led by Mozilla staff and community
3. General wrap-up of ideas

As noted on the official wiki page of the event:

The aim of the event is to enable Mozilla communities in the Balkans to share and learn from each other’s experience working on the Mozilla Project and improve collaboration in the future. All participants are asked to help each other define joint quarterly goals for the year.

This event will actually be a gathering of several Balkans’ Mozilla communities, including Macedonian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Montenegrin, Romanian, Serbian and Slovenian community. For the most of the things, we owe a beer to Gorjan, leader of the Macedonian community, for all his efforts over this few, very busy weeks of planning, organizing… Also, this all wouldn’t happen without endless support from our beloved Mozilla friends, William and Seth, among others.

When talking about schedule, we all agreed that we’d need a whole week to present everything we’d like to, and we needed to decide which topics need most attention. Therefore, we decided to talk mostly about promoting communities and its development, a little bit about development and add-ons, and also a bit about Support and Drumbeat. After all, we all hope that this is not the last meeting on Balkans, so we left some other topics for next occasion.

Mozilla Balkans 2010

Because most of you guys reading this post will not be able to attend this, we’re going to film it all so we can watch it again later and share it with all interested in it. What is most important, we’re also going to provide a live video stream for all of you to watch it directly in real-time, and we’re going to try to make the quality as good as possible.

A few last words: I’d like to thank all of you guys (you know who I’m talking about) for making all this happen, and of course, a big hearth <3 goes to Mozilla and Mozilla Europe for promoting and investing in our community!

After a lot of talk about possible event somewhere in South-Eastern Europe, we finally did it. We are now organizing a whole new and somewhat experimental event on the Rocky Balkans. Leaders of local Mozilla communities from the Balkans have joined their efforts to organize this event, the first of this type in the Balkans.

The spark that started all of this is an idea that came to the Mozilla Camp in Prague back in October 2009th when we presented that idea to William Quiviger from Mozilla Europe, speaking about the possible expansion of Mozilla ideas to the Balkans. William agreed with everything we have stated at that time and decided to support this idea. Fortunately, during this FOSDEM, which was held in Brussels this February, we had a little more time, few more ideas and a few more helpers. Support is provided by Seth Bindernagel and Stas Malolepszy, long-time and well respected members of the Mozilla community.

The very idea was to promote Mozilla Manifesto and to strengthen ties and encourage cooperation between local Mozilla communities from the Balkans. There are already several local communities in this area that are actively working on the Mozilla products and web sites localization. Kerim, Gorjan and Bogomil, representatives of Bosnian, Macedonian and Bulgarian Mozilla community respectively actively participate in marketing projects for a long time. Also, I can not overlook prominent Mozilla contributors, Alina and Mathjaz, who had been an active part in promoting Mozilla and its ideas for a long time now.

In early March, we organized several internal meetings which were attended by all leaders of local communities, and used to talk about the most important matters for the organization of events. We focused on the goals of this event, location and time of the event itself. Finally, in a democratic way, the city of Skopje was selected as the official location of this first event, and we also agreed that late May (probably the weekend 21-23rd) would be the best time for all of us.  Beside Skopje, we had Sofia and Belgrade as options.

In the end I’d just like to invite all those who wish, can and have the time to join our meetings and to contribute with new and refreshing ideas. You can always find us on channels #balkans and #europe on irc.mozilla.org IRC server. Also, you can add all your ideas on the wiki page at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Balkans:2010 . I have yet to quote William and say that this is “just the first event in the chain”, and to say that soon we will organize a competition for this event’s logo. Follow the news and stay tuned.

Our lives are full of choices. Where to eat? What to read? Who to spend time with?

The choices we make determine the quality of our life, and how we see the world. So many of these choices we take quite seriously, weighing the consequences, thinking about the implications, and choosing carefully and thoughtfully.

So it’s strange, then, that the majority of people in the world haven’t ever considered the Web browser on their computer or mobile phone — that so many people every day use the browser that comes by default.

It’s an important choice because the Web browser has become one of the most critical and trusted relationships of our modern lives – with nearly perfect knowledge of everything we do. It is the lens through which we look at the virtual world, and the medium by which we connect, learn, share, and collaborate. The browser you choose is responsible for providing you with the necessary tools to manage your online life, and to protect your privacy and security.

And so we’re pleased to support the European Commission and Microsoft in also recognizing how important choice is. In accordance with a landmark settlement, if you’re using a Windows PC in Europe and you’re still using the default Web browser, in the coming weeks and months you’ll see a Browser Choice screen appear. That screen will provide you the opportunity to make an active choice in the source of the software that acts on your behalf to broker your online experiences, and meet your own unique needs and interests.

As an international non-profit organization, Mozilla has always believed that the freedom to make smart choices should be central to making the Web, and the world, a better place. This shows through with Mozilla Firefox, a free, open-source Web browser that more than 350 million people around the world have chosen to use every day. Values of choice and self-determination are built into everything that we do, including Firefox.

We believe that the Browser Choice screen is an important milestone towards helping more people take control of their online lives — and we hope for the conversation to become broader and deeper. We’ve set up opentochoice.org as one place for you to discuss what this choice means to you — and we hope that you’ll add your own voice to this conversation and those to come.

Whether or not you decide to keep your current Web browser, we encourage you to learn more about your browser and the impacts it has on the way you see the world, and to make your own choice.

Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Chair & John Lilly, Mozilla CEO

Taken from:

www.opentochoice.org

Last weekend Brussels was the hometown of probably the biggest developers meeting in Europe. Our fellow mates from Mozilla did an awesome job inviting few dozens of us to participate in it, and we’re all greatfull that they made that possible for us. Vast variety of topics, a lot of presentation and community in general made this event even more great than it used to be.

I can say that I saw a lot of interested in many Mozilla-lead topics, ie. HTML5. About 50 people waiting in front of our dev-room says enough about it. Also, the WoMoz project was something we wanted to push a bit harder to the audience, and I think I can say that our mission was successful. Also, talking to David Tenser about plans for SUMO(Mozilla Support website and forums) was more than a awesome, as we both agreed that we need a powerful engine that will make SUMO experience for regular users more comfortable.

One more thing I’d like to point out is Mozillas initiative to educate users about the new browser choosing screen that will show to both new and existing users using Windows 7 operating system(Europe only). A lot of people were interested about it, and everyone wanted to talk about it more and see what does Mozilla community thinks about that.

Conclusion: One more event to strengthen Mozilla community relations made our weekend. Thanks to all attendants, and I hope we’ll meet again soon.