It's official ! The next Mozilla Camp Europe will take place in Prague, Czech Republic on October 3rd and 4th, 2009. For those of you who are not yet familiar with the conference, the MCE is a large 2-day community event that aims to bring together active European community members and Mozilla staff for a weekend of presentations, discussions, brainstorms and workshops around specific areas of the Mozilla project, all with a special focus on Europe. The event is, of course, also the opportunity for Mozilla to thank contributors for their amazing work and have some quality IRL time together.

Last year's MCE took place in Barcelona, and brought together 120 community members and staff. The focus areas were: DEV, l10n and QA. It was our first ever large-scale community event in Europe and we didn't quite know what to expect nor how it would be received. It turned out to be a fantastic event and we learned a lot from this first experience. Building on this momentum, and tapping into the great feedback we got from last year's participants, this year's Mozilla Camp Europe will be even better.

To be sure, we're going to stick to the same format, ie. 2-day conference with parallel tracks covering different areas of the Mozilla project. Participation-wise, it will be slightly larger as we expect to be able to sponsor about 150 people.

There will be two main novelties to the MCE this year. First, we're adding a fourth track to the program that will focus on “Advocacy”, with sessions and workshops on community building, on community marketing and on promoting the Mozilla mission. Second, we'll be organizing of a small public developer conference on the Friday right before the camp (October 2nd), followed by an open Labs hacking session in the afternoon. Instead of opening the morning keynotes of the MCE to the public, like we did last year, we opted this year to hold a public event the day before the camp. The Friday dev conference, lab session will be for a non-Mozilla audience interested in learning more about the Mozilla project and meet Mozilla staff.

Irina has created the official Mozilla Camp Europe 2009 wiki page which we'll build on going forward. It will be your ultimate source of info for all matters related to logistics, schedule, track info, registration etc...

Preparations are in full swing: we've just secured an awesome venue (thank you Matt and Pavel!!!) and we are currently working on the final program of sessions and tracks. We expect to have a tentative schedule nailed down by early end of August.

So that's it for now, tune in regularly on this blog and on the wiki for the latest info, i'll be giving weekly updates. And as always, don't hesitate to drop me a line if you have questions or with any suggestions you may have to help us make this conference a huge success !

(Photo by Daniele Muscetta under CC-SA)