MozCamp EU 2012 trip report

Mobilize Mozilla! was the theme for this Mozcamp in Warsaw, Poland September 7-9. So, it was all about mobile, while remembering that Desktop is where we have all the users and where our market share is ever-growing. Warsaw at night

Opening night and Buddy program

We had a nice welcome on Friday night where everyone found their “buddy”. We were all paired with a buddy and we have a mission that we will work on through October.

My buddy is Robert Kaiser of Vienna, he works on stability for desktop Firefox, so we spent lots of time talking about how to get things like crash reporting into Firefox OS. He’s the original SeaMonkey lead and he’s in a ton of conversations everywhere, so I was very glad to get to work with him.

Keynotes

The keynote from Mitchell was great, as usual, and she made strong points about building great products and our values. But, she also said we need to be ready to launch things that are imperfect and that even today Firefox is not the perfect reflection of our values and so we need to plow ahead with our values in mind, but not with perfection as our goal.

Tristan’s keynote talked all about the new spaces in Europe and how well it is going there. And we got to sit with him at dinner Saturday night and he told us more about the amazing Paris office.

Jay Sullivan’s keynote was a combination of product presentation bullet points and demos. He had a Telefonica big-wig demo the Firefox OS phone and talk about their excitement and partner excitement. Wes Johnston demoed the new Firefox for Android and reader mode, touch events, and marketplace.

David Slater, the new Marketing/Engagement leader at Mozilla, gave a keynote that was really funny and great to watch. He is poised on stage and made a lot of good jokes about marketing and graphs and T-shirts. His whole message was that he wants to fund small marketing initiatives all over the world and he wants anyone with an idea, no matter how crazy, to tell Gen Kenai and they will consider funding it if its good.

Mark Surman, was the most inspirational keynote. He talked all about education and the web and putting a “Hack Me” button on everything. He talked about how we live in a digital world and increasingly, it will be important for people to understand the structure of that world to thrive.

Finally, the Community Quilt keynote, where 33 language communities presented their accomplishments and goals and challenges to the audience in succession. This quilt keynote is my favorite presentation at Mozcamp. It always makes me feel that I can do so much more and that I should have bigger goals and that I want to make Mozillians proud and support them fully because they are so passionate and compassionate and driven. Many of the communities around the world said that for 2013 they were preparing to support or localize Firefox OS. So, I feel that I am part of a truly global effort to bring this smartphone to market and I welcome all of you to join us in our mission!

Firefox OS demos & desktop build install fest

There was a program for 20 people to have prototype Firefox OS phones to demo throughout the weekend. So, I demoed my Firefox OS phone along with them. I completed 12 demos during the weekend, which seems like none, but I felt like I was constantly showing it around. People really liked the interaction model and the overall experience. We had a great time sharing thoughts about the device, collecting initial feedback and found that everyone is very enthusiastic about the progress of the future product!

The best part of my demo-fest was talking to people about the infinite possibilities presented by Firefox OS for people to hack on mobile and customize their experience and build apps and be part of the ecosystem. We spent hours talking about how it fits in with everything from civilian participation to bio-gardening. Mozillians are truly awesome, let no one tell you otherwise.

Me and Ibai Garcia led a workshop on installing the desktop build of Firefox OS that was very well-attended. thanks to Roland Tanglao for leading the Windows installs! Alex Kebyl gave a similar talk the previous day and also referred to verdi’s How To article describing setup of the desktop builds of Firefox OS and our workshop. We got at least five people up and running and felt that the rest of the attendees at our workshop would certainly get it running. So, it was a real success for us and Firefox OS. Here is a great picture of me and some awesome workshop attendees: Firefox OS desktop builds workshop

The ultimate goal of running the desktop builds is to document the features of Firefox OS in the following Knowledge base articles for future users of the product and to learn how it works in preparation for answering questions on the forum. The Mozilla Support knowledge base is a wiki that anyone can contribute to, so feel free to join in!

We will start with English articles, then localize to Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish toward the end of the calendar year. We have created Firefox OS discussion forums where we can talk about how we will support future users and you can ask any questions you have about the documentation wiki. We are just getting started, so I welcome your participation.

Vivien, a lead developer on the Firefox OS attended our workshop and I heard lot of talk afterward that they would simplify the steps to make setup of the desktop builds easier and I think I already saw something come across the wires about bundling the profile into the build somehow. So, showing people trying to do it had its own impact. We gave out Firefox Clinic T-shirts and Firefox stickers to everyone and told them it was a contract that required that they help users on SUMO. So, we’ve seen some new contributions come across this week as a result. Thanks to all of you who attended and have contacted me or contributed to SUMO since I met you! You and your spirit of collaboration are what makes Mozilla great!

Firefox for Android feedback presentation

My other workshop was for Firefox for Android non-English feedback. A big group of SUMO contributors were there and I talked about the manual feedback collection we currently do for English Google Play reviews. Wes Johnston of the mobile-dev team attended and said how super-helpful it is to get user feedback summaries in mobile engineering each week and how it changes and often guides their priorities.

I asked that contributors read reviews of Firefox in their native language and consider providing a simple list of the top three problems that show up in their language for the mobile engineering team as a great way to contribute to the project if you are just getting started in your locale. You don’t need to be technically savvy or use any special tools, you just need to read the Google Play reviews and send a list of the top three problems that users comment on to me, mluna, each week on Tuesdays. We will then report it to engineering, so they can prioritize issues that appear in non-English locales. You can also just add it to the mobile engineering weekly meeting roundtable section on wiki.mozilla.org.