Mozilla Meeting in Köln I was hired by Mozilla to help support and assist community efforts across Europe. As community mobilizer, galvanizer, gatherer (call it what you will) my job is to listen to communities, identify gaps and opportunities, bring Mozillians together around a table (or around a few beers!) and see how Mozilla can best assist them in moving the Mozilla project further.

Enter the German Mozilla community.

Sipping my coffee in the waiting room of Vancouver Int'l Airport back in July, returning from the Mozilla Summit, I happened to be sitting next to Abdulkadir and Henrik, two of our star German localizers whom I hadn't really had the chance to chat with yet. We discussed at length the state of the German community and the relatively low level of activity compared to neighboring countries like France or Poland. We quickly began brainstorming on ways to improve communication and collaboration amongst German mozillians (and there are many !) scattered all over the country. The obvious first step we agreed on was to organize a real life "kickoff event" and get everyone together around a table for a full-day meeting/informal get-together.

Mozilla Meeting in Köln

That meeting took place yesterday in Cologne. A little more than 20 Mozillians converged in the city, eager to participate in what turned out to be an amazingly interesting and productive meeting. It's safe to say, we achieved much more than we had hoped for. You can expect lots of interesting Mozilla projects/events/initiatives surfacing in Germany in the coming months :)

Over the next couple of days, Abdulkadir, Henrik and I will prepare a wrap-up document highlighting the points covered and a list of next steps agreed upon which we'll publish on our respective blogs.

In the meantime, I really want to thank Abdulkadir for his tremendous help and everyone who came to the meeting (some many hours away by train!) and who stayed on for the excellent (and improvised!) Kölsch beer fest that followed :) It was awesome to meet you all and can't wait for our next treffen!

Volle kraft voraus !