2008: More and more people from Mozilla come every year and that's great. Eighty persons registered on Mozilla's wiki, from almost every part of the world.

On friday afternoon, there was a localization meeting, but it was announced a bit too late since many people had already booked their flights/trains. Interesting, but I don't have great technical skills, and Camino uses apple tools, so it was not so interesting for me.

Saturday... hmm I must admit that morning was almost done when we arrived at university. I was recruited as a photo-reporter to help spreading Firefox all over the world (this week end, world was limited to FOSDEM):

Sticking a big fathead poster on a wall

I quickly came into the developer's room but I gave up. This room really deserved its surname of sauna.fosdem.org. Too hot! I came back on the booth and helped Anne-Juie to tattoo people:

David with a Firefox Tattoo

We tried to tattoo Peterv but he managed to escape, even when we told him that he couldn't be chief without tattoo. He grumbled something like But Mitchell told that developers... chief..., we did not listen: no tattoo = no chief.

Saturday evening: traditional dinner? Oh no, Not the traditional one. This year, we celebrate the 10 years of Mozilla. Mozilla-Europe had booked the 2nd floor of a bowling in Brussels, we could eat at the buffet and drink whatever we wanted and moreover, we could play bowling! Yeah... To tell the truth, the first time (and last time until FOSDEM 2008) I played bowling was 8 or 9 years ago. All I know about that is one basic rule: you throw the ball and the pins should fall. How? Well, that's a good question, I bet on chance. So, I played for fun and I had fun, yep! For me, the main goal of the evening was to get to know more people in the mozilla community.

  • First game: Benoît, Adrien, Sébastien from Frenchmozilla/Geckozone (those I already know) and Gabriele and Prometeo (2 italian localizers) and I. My score? well... can't remember, but I'm pretty sure a few pins fell.
  • Second game: Benoît, Adrien, Sébastien, Mic Berman and Lio (Hebrew localizer, sorry if I misspell your name) and I. We had a break in the middle of the game because of the anniversary cake and champagneand T-shirts. Sébastien gave me his glass while he threw the ball and I sipped alternatively in his glassand in mine while he was playing. I can't help but play the clown especially when everyone around is laughing. My score? Well, with the help of Champagne (or practice) I think I had a better score than the first game. But enough with bowling, it's fun but tiring. Those balls are heavy. Some guys are putting their new shirts on or are they just doing a strip-tease? Did someone put something in Tristan's drink?
  • Third game: Sébastien, Nick Thomas, a russian guy (perhaps Konstantin Lepikhov) and I. OK... I said I quit, but Nick asked if I wanted to play and who knows when I will play bowling again, so let's play. Who won? Nobody knows, the machine started to bug and did not count anything anymore. We decided to stop when I had played for the 5th time and the machine was still not counting anything. I may have found an explanation in this video.
  • Time to leave... The bowling is closing around midnight and we need to sleep if we want to be at FOSDEM tomorrow morning. Good night everybody.

Sunday: well, morning is before lunch, ok? I'm still at the mozilla booth womaning the stand like Brian King says. I like the expression and I like to be at the booth, giving goodies, talking to people, laughing. I also take the time to wander in the FOSDEM and complete my collection of open-source badges.

It is widely admitted that most of the people coming to FOSDEM are geek, so I was amazed when a few people (4 or 5 in the day) came asking What is Mozilla?. On saturday evening, there was a video presenting FOSDEM on belgian TV news and on sunday, some Brussels inhabitants came to see what it was. We switched to french and talked about Mozilla, Firefox, Open-source, FOSDEM... And when they left, we said See you next year! and I like to believe that they will indeed come back next year. Tristan wants to take photos from the mozilla team, strangely we all look, serious, boring, so Tristan tells us to do something silly (that's more like us, I think). The plushie flying on the second photo is really flying and it's mine, but it is back on the mozilla store.

Time flies, the sun is setting down. Time to leave for station or airport. Farewell folks, I hope to see you again in FOSDEM 2009!

My photos on flickr