FISL took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil from June 24th through June 27th and had over 8,000 participants. It was the conference's 10th edition, but only the second year for Mozilla. For me, it was the opportunity to finally meet the community I had been working with for the past year and a half, and they were even more amazing than I expected. Thank you to everyone who participated this year, it was a fantastic experience.
Mozilla community
First a huge thanks to the Mozilla community from Brazil and Argentina. You went above and beyond. At any given time we had a minimum of half a dozen volunteers at the booth. Everyone pitched it to answer questions and to come up with activities. In addition, Andrea Balle and Mario Rinaldi gave a fantastic talk in front of a few hundred people on building the Mozilla community in Brazil. Finally, Felipe Magrani, Felipe Lerena, and Clauber Halic, among others, gave talks and demos at the booth.
Mozilla talks
Mozilla participated in 6 talks during the event - each time the response was great:
- Andrea Balle and Mario Rinaldi explained the Ecosystem of the Fox: the Mozilla Community in Brazil
- Mark Surman discussed Education for an Open Web
- Nick Nguyen talked about Mozilla Add-ons: Past, Present, and Future, and Marcio Galli provided the point of view of an add-ons developer in Brazil
- Mark Surman, Fabricio Zuardi, and Bruno Magrani participated in the Open Video Alliance event
- Chris Hofmann presented the latest on Mozilla and Innovation: Mobile, Labs, and the Road Ahead
- and I participated in a panel on Open Source Community Development
Mozilla booth: camisetas central!
This is the first year that Mozilla had a booth, and it was a great experience. It enabled us to have a central point to direct people to talks and various activities, to advertise contests, and most important to distribute t-shirts! Including to Lula (President of Brazil) who visited FISL and gave a passionate speech about the importance of free and open source software.
Booth Activities
- Mini Design challenge: 18 submissions
- Firefox demos
- Tagvisor
- Campus Reps presentation
- Drawings: we asked people to sign our guest book or make a drawing, many chose the latter, so we now have a few hundred drawings from Brazil, including some very creative ones! It was an opportunity to talk about the new Mozilla Creative Collective project with local artists.
- Personas contest
- Games: Treasure hunt with clues hidden at friendly booths Quizzes: how well do you know Mozilla Flickr challenge: take a photo related to Firefox and post it on flickr And many more...
Videos
We used the TV and a laptop running Ubuntu to show videos during the 4 days of the conference. They included the Firefox 3.5 demos and videos as well as the Firefox Flicks and Japan Flicks. They were quite popular and we could see people just stand by the booth for a while to watch them. People were amazed at the quality of the Flicks created by the community and many had never seen them before!
Materials
We created and localized materials to distribute at the conference:
- Mozilla Service Week brochure
- New fliers for add-ons, QMO, Campus reps, and Sfx, courtesy of williamr
FISL Aftermath
New contributors and projects
- Campus reps: localized the campus reps signup survey increased awareness of the program via Felipe Magrani's talk ** 18 new sign ups so far!
- Add-ons development: 7 submissions under way for Extend Firefox 3.5 New discussion group for local add-ons
- Localization: ** We have 2 new localizers interested in helping with web campaigns
- Design community: ** High interest and new signups to the Mozilla Creative Collective project
- Open video: ** the Open Video mini conference led to new initiatives like the project for open subtitles
- Mozilla Education: ** Many new contacts, including students and professors, interested in participating in the Mozilla Education project
Press:
For more Mozilla FISL goodness:
Blog posts: