Mozilla Community events around the corner...
By William on Sunday, November 23 2008, 18:18 - Permalink
A couple of Mozilla community events are lined up these next coming weeks. Here's a quick update :
Nov 29-30, 2008 : Ubuntu Launch Party Paris - Mozilla communities will converge at "La Villette" in downtown Paris for two days of workshops and presentations organized with our friends at Ubuntu France. Members of Xulfr.org, French Mozilla and Geckozone will be giving presentations and answering questions. If you live in or around Paris, are interested in Mozilla and want to contribute to the Mozilla project, this is the place to be to get started :) More info on the event here.
Dec 3, 2008 : Mozilla Party Romania - Tristan Nitot will be keynote speaker at this year's NetCamp, a large tech conference in Bucharest, Romania. Mozillianas extraordinaire, Irina Sandu and Alina Mierlus, will be organizing a very cool get-together/dinner after the conference for Mozillians. They'll be posting more info next week.
Dec 13, 2008 : Add-ons Workshop Madrid - Paul Rouget and Pascal Chevrel will be hosting a half-day add-ons workshop at the Universidad Rey Jaun Carlos, in downtown Madrid. If you're in town that weekend and want to learn more about developing your own Firefox extension or simply get to meet lots of web developers, this is the place to be. For more info, check out the official wiki.
Feb 7-8, 2009 : FOSDEM '09 - we're preparing a fantastic programme for our Mozilla Devroom. Stay tuned for much more info on the Mozilla Fosdem 2009 wiki I'll be publishing very soon. In the meantime, check out the official Fosdem website here.
March 2009 : MAOW Berlin '09 - Paul Rouget and I have started to work on what promises to be a really exciting MAOW in Berlin (and our first ever large Mozilla event in Deutschland !). The format will be similar to the one used for the MAOW in Paris, namely, we'll have two keynote speakers, a dozen workshops throughout the day led by community members and some GREAT pizza. We'll also experiment with a new kind of workshop in the evening ;) More info very soon !
Comments
William did you consider using services such as upcoming (http://upcoming.yahoo.com) for maintaining calendars of mozilla based events ?
Benefits for the users would be :
- they can add the events to Google calendar, ical and other compliant calendar (sunbird anyone ?)
- they can subscribe to feeds and be alerted via their rss readers for all kind of events without having to watch mozilla blogs
Benefits for mozilla :
- Easy to tell that mozilla will be present at Event XXX
- Outreach to more people - those who do not follow mozilla closely but might be interested in more ways.
- Maintain an easy calendar page using Upcoming's API and widgets - so you'd get a nice calendar page that would get easily updated.
Look at how flickr is maintaining the flickr meets on the flickr blog using upcoming.
How could you do this -> create an account on upcoming.
The way I would approach this is to create a group called Mozilla or something similar. This would serve as the gathering of events that are in relation to mozilla. People willing to know could subscribe to that groups' event calendar. You should make sure that you control which events are added to the groups - so you make sure that the group ends up with Mozilla related events.
The other benefit of a group is that events that are not organized by mozilla can be added to the group (lets say that fosdem - http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/133... can be added to the mozilla group) - and for you it's way less work.
Hope I'm clear - would love to see this hapening.
Thanks Ludovic for your comment ! You definitely touch on an important point and I think it's important that we either try Upcoming or provide a similar type of interactive calendar of events. We do have an "events" calendar on Spread Firefox which does offer RSS feeds and iCal exports but it is mainly used by Mozillians in North America :(
I would certainly like to have a much more international calendar hosted by Mozilla featuring the same collaborative tools as Upcoming. At the same time, I really like the "group" feature of Upcoming which lets other relevant events not organised by Mozilla be easily added to the calendar.
I will definitely look into this and keep you posted in this blog :)
Thanks again for these really great recommendations !
Why not use a Google Calendar?
>Why not use a Google Calendar?
Why tie yourself to a vendor and limit your outreach while you have other tools that permit you to reach out more and give you more flexibility (Imho).
You're also tying yourself to a vendor by using Yahoo, don't you?
But I agree, Upcoming seems to offer more tools for better outreach.
Yes you are tying yourselves to yahoo if you register - users don't need to register to use the service.
Unfortunately, the population density around Berlin is very low. Hosting the event in Frankfurt or Koeln would reduce the time to get there for most German interested people (but increase mine).
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