Mitchell Baker, Chris Hofmann, Chris Blizzard, Taras Glek, Marcio Galli and myself just wrapped up an amazing visit to Porto Alegre for FISL, Brazil’s largest open source conference.  The conference drew over 6,000 people from Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, Angola and more!  I wanted to extend a huge thank you to Bruno Magrani, Ronaldo Lemos, Mario Rinaldi, Clauber Stipkovic Halic, Giullermo Movia of Argentina, Felipe Gomes, Antonio Gomes, Andre Pedralho, Fernando Silveira, Marcelo Terres, Juliano Bittencourt and everyone else who helped make our experience so great!

Some of the highlights:

• We met many, many, many passionate Firefox users.  In fact, 6,000 of them and not nearly enough Firefox t-shirts to go around.  You can imagine the stampede!
• Our Brazilian contributors helped conduct a workshop on the various ways to get involved with Firefox and Mozilla.  Despite the heat and far off location we had a great showing of people. Stay tuned for video!
• In line with the Brazilian culture, we had a great community party to thank our Brazilian contributors and get to know some new people.
• Juliano Bittencourt of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project took us to a local deployment where we met students who’ve been enjoying, customizing and learning with the computers.  It was pretty amazing to see OLPC project coming to life.

It was great to see all the contribution that is going on in Brazil and to meet new volunteers.  Thanks for the hard work!

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Bruno Magrani

Next week, Mozilla will participate in the 9th Fórum Internacional do Software Livre (International Free Software Forum - FISL) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This is the second time that Mozilla will be in Brazil on an “official” visit. This time, the group includes Mitchell Baker (Mozilla’s Chairperson), Chris Blizzard, Marcio Galli, Mary Colvig, Taras Glek and Chris Hofmann. In their visit, they will be in touch with a vibrant and growing community of free software users, developers and enthusiasts. This is a great opportunity both for Mozilla and for the Brazilian community to get together and work with Firefox and other initiatives that promote the core values of the net, including openness and freedom.

Ronaldo Lemos and I have been helping support Mozilla’s presence here in Brazil and at FISL.  This is not the first time that our institution, the Center for Technology & Society at the FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro has participated in the Forum. We’ve worked closely with FISL in the past few years and we launched the Brazilian branch of the Creative Commons project at the Forum in March 2004. This was an unforgettable event, I believe both for us, and for the more than 1,500 participants attending the launch, anxious to hear Minister Gilberto Gil, Marcelo Tas, Terry Fisher, Lawrence Lessig, Luis Nassif, André Midani, Claudio Prado, Joaquim Falcão, and so many others who care a lot about the future of the internet. A video of the launch can be watched here.

This year we are very happy to be back again at the Free Software Forum (this will be our 4th year at the event). Besides organizing/participating in a few panels, we will be there to support Mozilla´s visit the best way we can, including their workshop. We are very honored to do this, especially because we believe Mozilla will find in Brazil a place where not only we share common values, but also, put them into practice, thanks to our natural “tropicalist” mindset, and to the fact that the meaning of “openness” is very strong for us. One symbol of that is the fact that President Lula is expected at the Forum this year, and Brazil is well-known worldwide for its support of free software and free culture. Without further ado, we look forward to a great conference and Mozilla visit!

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If you haven’t already, this is a great opportunity for you to get involved with Mozilla, regardless of your interests or expertise. We need people to write articles, create screenshots, correct spelling and grammar, answer people’s questions in the forum, or interact directly with Firefox users in live chat — just to name a few of the many ways you could help us out. Even if you’re just curious to learn more about the project and don’t really plan on participating, we’d be really excited to have you joining us on Friday.

Of course, we’d be even more thrilled if you stayed with us throughout the Firefox 3 launch, which is going to be an exciting event for the SUMO project. Have a look at the SUMO Day home page for more information and please pop by on Friday!

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After a visit from Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s community director, a group of us, including those who helped organize Asa’s visit and translators who had localized Mozilla’s applications, decided to build up Argentina’s Mozilla Community. Our goal is promote the use of Mozilla’s products, as well as the Open Web and open standards. We translate Firefox and Thunderbird, and are now starting with Sunbird and Seamonkey.

On October 5th and 6th , the Cafeconf conference took place in Buenos Aires, and we committed our efforts to be there. Cafeconf is the most important conference devoted to free software in Buenos Aires. Though we didn’t have much time to prepare for the event, off we went and the outcome was really positive. We had a lot of chats with people from different cities in the country, and Felipe Lerena gave a presentation to 50 people on developing websites using Firebug and Firefox. We also had the chance to talk with people working on other projects, which helped us start developing a new Firefox add-on.

Thanks to the Firefox and Mozilla products that the Mozilla sent us (also thanks to Mary Colvig and Asa Dotzler), we distributed pins, stickers, posters and Firefox tattoos, which were hot stuff at Cafeconf. (We were like Santa Claus bringing gifts to the community :-P).

Now, we wish to have our website up soon in order to spread Mozilla’s applications, and recruit more people to the Argentine community to test the translated applications, to help us with new add-ons and to continue spreading the Open Web and the open standards.

Thanks for all your support!

Argentina’s Mozilla Community

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My name is Giuliano Masseroni (aka jooliaan) and I’m currently the president of Mozilla Italia.
To tell you a little about myself, I’m a 44-year old Italian chemist working with the Italian R&D Lab of a Dutch international chemical company called Akzo Nobel researching and developing new paints and application systems for the restoration of historical buildings. You’re probably wondering how I got involved with Mozilla. As you can see I’m not an IT guy, I’m just a chemist who loves everything about computers and the Internet.

Four years ago while reading an article in an Italian monthly computer magazine, I found a copy of a new browser then called Firebird (today it’s Firefox!) and decided to give it a try. The browser was in English so I started to frequent MozillaZine Forums and one day asked why such a great browser couldn’t be available in Italian. To my surprise, it was!

That was a watershed moment in my life: I met the people who would get me involved with volunteering for Mozilla. We decided to band together to form a non-profit association dedicated to our volunteer work and called it Mozilla Italia.

The goal of Mozilla Italia is the localization or translation of all Mozilla Products and Projects in our language, giving support to them through our forums, evangelizing web standards and spreading Firefox and the other Mozilla software around Italy. We’ve worked hard to provide Italian users with translated add-ons, Italian-specific Live Bookmarks, updated versions of Firefox, as well as answer questions from Italian reporters and so much more!

The year 2007 has been wonderful for Mozilla Italia and me. In fact in April, we had our first “official appearance” as Mozilla Italia at a three-day event called “Fa’ la cosa giusta” (Do the right thing) in Milan, that had something like 30,000 visitors, in order to make Firefox and Thunderbird better known in our country (see this photo set). We also had a visit from Tristan Nitot, head of Mozilla Europe, that resulted in great media coverage.

To summarize, I can say that as an Italian Mozilla volunteer I really enjoy the opportunity to work in the international Mozilla environment. Sharing knowledge and suggestions allows me to be more and more open-minded and greatly improves my ability to build interpersonal relationships.

Please drop me a line at giuliano[dot]masseroni[at]mozillaitalia[dot]org if you’d like to learn more about Mozilla Italia or to join us!

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They’re even providing us with front row seats at a Firefox Rock Festival…well, virtual seats!

Our European team will come online shortly from Paris and then we’ll pick up for a day of sessions at Stanford on the future of the Web. We’ll then wrap with a global discussion at 6:00pm PDT that will include Vint Cerf live from Washington, D.C. and Mitchell Baker at Stanford.

Check out the complete schedule of online Mozilla 24 activities and join us!

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We’re just a few days away from Mozilla 24, our global community event that will be taking place in Paris, Tokyo, the S.F. Bay Area (Stanford University) and now Thailand! Here is a recap of the Mozilla 24 events near you:

* Mozilla 24 at Stanford University’s Center for Innovations in Learning (9/15, 11:00am - 8:00pm PDT): The U.S schedule for Sept. 15th is now online and features a keynote from Larry Lessig and a global discussion with Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google Inc. and Dr. Jun Murai, professor of Faculty of Environment and Information Studies and Vice President at Keio University. Please register today!

* École Nationale Supérieure de Télécommunications, Paris, France (9/14, 10:15am – 1:00pm CEST): Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe, will host a workshop on Open Source and Localization. Register here.

* Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand (9/15, 12:00pm – 8:00pm ICT): The Asian Institute of Technology is hosting a viewing of global Mozilla 24 activities. Register here.

* Mozilla 24 Japan, Tokyo (8:00pm, 9/14 – 8:00pm, 9/15): Our Japan team is hosting a series of sessions and a rock concert! Details and registration can be found here.

You’ll be able to participate online from www.mozilla24.com if can’t make the in-person events. Details will be posted shortly!

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• Dr. Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google Inc
• Dr. Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and Society
• Dr. Jun Murai, professor of Faculty of Environment and Information Studies and Vice President at Keio University
• Dr. David Humphrey, professor at the School of Computer Studies at Seneca College, Toronto, Canada
• Mitchell Baker, Chief Executive Officer of the Mozilla Corporation
• Mike Shaver, Director of Ecosystem, Mozilla Corporation
• Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe
• Satoko Takita, Chairman of Mozilla Japan

Are you a Web developer, researcher, engineer or end user interested in shaping the future of the Web socially, technically and culturally? Join us online or sign up to attend the U.S. event at Stanford here. Come be a part of our inaugural event!

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In the Mozilla context, it’s particularly true that we often take for granted working as part of a global team. In the mornings, California time, the marketing staff in Mountain View will meet up with Tristan, Pascal and Anne-Julie from Mozilla Europe.

Towards the end of our work day, we will catch up with Gen and Kaori at Mozilla Japan. Countless other interactions happen every day online for the development and localization teams working to release Firefox in dozens of language versions. (All of the non-US English versions of Firefox are localized by volunteer contributors.)

International collaboration is part of Mozilla’s DNA.

So it wasn’t a surprise to us when the Mozilla Japan community recently came together to host a full day developer event in Tokyo, and, well, it rocked. Check out Gen Kanai’s wrap-up post, with links to photos, presentations and reactions from bloggers in Japan and elsewhere.

If getting involved as a volunteer with Mozilla sounds interesting, it’s easy to learn more. You can visit our directory of ways to get involved, or, if you’re using Firefox, click on the pre-installed bookmark called “Get Involved” in the “Mozilla Firefox” bookmarks folder.

Congratulations and thanks again to the Mozilla Japan team for hosting a terrific Firefox Developer Day event.

*From Wikipedia: A truism is a claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device. Guilty as charged.

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