Firefox has been seen rubbing elbows with the Tron Guy and more.   You never know where Firefox will show up next!

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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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The runners up were Kevin Weagle, Ali Riyaz, Mathew Anderson, and Brett Rex Cannell.

We received close to 2,000 submissions representing many hours of hard work from a global design community that came together on the Flickr contest group. Selecting the top 5 was a very challenging task as there were many great designs to choose from. We’re proud of the talent that has come through in support of Firefox and are looking into ways to “open source” these designs so that they are publicly available for print. Thanks again to everyone for your support and creative contributions throughout this process. Please join me in congratulating all the winners!

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No Monday blues around here today — it’s Mozilla’s 10 year anniversary! On March 31, 1998 Mozilla was officially launched and the Mozilla source code became publicly available for the first time. Mitchell Baker has a write up of what Mozilla and its community have accomplished in these past 10 years and what’s in store for the next 10. Here are a few highlights:

• Converted a closed, proprietary development process into a vibrant, transparent, open source project
• Grown into a massive global community, quite possibly the largest open source project in the world
• Developed a set of long-term, vibrant projects — Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, Bugzilla, Calendar — most, and possibly all of which have millions of users
• Become the software provider of choice for over 170 million people
• Proved that open source development can produce great end user products
• Brought the Internet to millions of people in their language
• Moved the overall state of browser software forward dramatically
• Become a technology platform others use to create products built on Mozilla technologies, and in some cases competitive with Mozilla products

A huge thanks to our wonderful community that has helped make this all possible! Please stay tuned for more details on how we’ll honor the anniversary over the year.

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So please join us on Monday for this special Air Mozilla Live.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, Mike Shaver, and Chris Hofmann.
When: Monday, March 31, from 11:00:00 - 12:00:00 PDT (UTC-07:00)
Where: View the webcast and join the chat at air.mozilla.com.

Also: As part of the year-long celebration of Mozilla’s 10 years, we’re gathering up video memories from our community of contributors. If you’d like to share some of your experiences with Mozilla, please upload them to YouTube and tag them with “mozilla-anniversary” so that we can locate them. You’ll be able to see the first batch of video memories starting one hour before Monday’s show and we hope to add another batch at least once a month.

(If you do record a video memory, hold onto the clip so that if we decided to put it into the Air Mozilla program, we can use the higher quality footage rather than YouTube’s downsampled version.)

A special thanks goes out to Mogulus for supporting this production of Air Mozilla.

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Please take a moment and help us select the official Firefox 3 t-shirt by voting for your favorite design on the Mozilla Store. Voting will end on Sunday March 30th at 11:59 PM (PST). We’re excited to see which design wins!

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We’ve already received close to 1,200 submissions and have created a community of over 2,800 members on the Flickr contest group! There are many great designs in the image pool and we’re proud of the creative talent that has come through so far. The winning design, as chosen by the Mozilla community, will be featured in the Mozilla Store as the official Firefox 3 t-shirt.

Please make sure to read the submission and design guidelines on the contest website carefully when creating your artwork. I also encourage you to join the Flickr group FF3 T-Shirt Design Contest to view the current submissions and to get more detailed information about the contest posted on the discussion boards.

Thanks again and keep up the great work!

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OR, you can affect change and invite 15 of your friends to play a game and feed 25,000 people. With your help we can break another milestone today with FreeRice.com –500,000,000 grains of donated rice in one day. Imagine helping to feed the hungry while picking up some new vocabulary too!

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