• Beijing Open Party

    February 23rd, 2009 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    I finished up my trip this past weekend by participating in the “Beijing Open Party” hosted by Mozilla at the Thought Works offices in Beijing. Wendy from the Mozilla China team sent me the following links that surfaced after the event:

    The evening was pretty unique because of its completely open structure and unconference format. We started with an open mike so people could tell something new about themselves. After that, anyone who wanted to speak had to fill out an index card describing what they intended to discuss. After all the speakers had summarized their talks, the cards were posted on a wall where everyone gathered to hear the speakers read what they had written. The crowd then voted on what would be discussed at the conference. I got just a bit of a free-pass because Mozilla had helped sponsor the activity and I was guaranteed a slot. But, I still had to tell everyone what I wanted to speak about in order to gather interest and attendance at my talk. Hard for me to say how many were in total attendance, but I had about 30 people come to my session. It was a very democratic and borderline chaotic process.

    I proceeded to give my standard talk for the trip, describing Mozilla, showing on a few demos using Firefox 3.1, and then going deep into localization stuff.  I’ll post slides and pictures soon.  If you attended the event and have any feedback or remarks, please comment here, leaving some specific information about yourself so I remember just who you are.  After traveling for two-and-a-half weeks, I started to get a bit overwhelmed with remembering everyone I met.  :)

    Many thanks to Wendy, Amax, Jack, Jia, Bin and the rest of gang in the Beijing office.  I think the trip was a big success.