seth’s blog

We are in Tokyo, attending the Mozilla Gumi 8.0 party. Seth S presented about Firefox 3 and I spoke about the Mozilla Community. There were so many great presentations by other members of the community. Experts presented on SVG, Javascript, new extensions and web apps, an explanation of Mozilla’s trunk, and more. Really very impressive stuff…Osaka was also an excellent visit. In addition to presenting to a joint meeting of Mozilla community members and the Nippon Sun User Group, we also had the chance to meet some of our key Japanese contributors who are maintaining the localized version of Bugzilla.

Just a few observations as a visitor to Japan. Everyone seems to be incredibly friendly. The food is fresh and very tasty. I have tried to say yes to every suggestion, just to get the full perspective and experience. In some cases, it has left me tasting things like raw beef liver, sea urchin and fried crickets (OK, the crickets were actually in Taipei). Not surprising to me, every recommendation so far has led to a very positive experience.

Additionally, the Japanese community is very hard working (probably also not a surprise). Hats off to our contributors, Kaori, Gen, Takita-san and all the community members for continually showing us hospitality and amazing dedication to Mozilla. Our visit has been seamless because of them.

The community here is thriving and I believe we can do some good things to help empower everyone who is driven to contribute to Mozilla in Japan. The Gumi event has been fantastic and I think we have members here who we can support. It is my hope that the Japanese contributors will nominate many ideas for the program to support.