Hello planet Mozilla. For my first post appearing in the planet I’d like to write about a recent community aspect I experienced, the rest will probably be more technical.
While we have some great volunteers participating in Mozilla, there’s aren’t any Mozilla representatives in Israel. To be exact, there are a few Israeli that do work for Mozilla (and I think they work from within Israel), but we don’t feel them in the local free software community.
I was very surprised to see 5 people from Mozilla attending Wikimania 2011, but this is of course a good surprise. I would have excepted to see representatives in a free software conference, but we still haven’t had any international free software conference in Israel (maybe some day I could bring Debconf here).
A week later I had another representative arriving for a free software conference I organized called August Penguin. This is the first time having someone arriving from abroad just for the local conference.
For me, a free software user and contributor, Mozilla is mostly a software project. Meeting the various representatives gave me the chance to know some of the other sides of the organization and its activities. For me that was really interesting and I think that it would be positive to do many of the activities also in Israel.
Besides the interest in the organization, I had the chance to host some of the representatives by showing them around, providing a place to crash at and making sure they stay after the conferences would be as easy and enjoyable as possible.
Reflecting back, my place would probably could be the Moziila Inn as I had 3 people from Mozilla as guests in one week (on separate days). For me that was fulfilling the community side of the term “free software community”, as we’re not only a technical community. Others might even call this an outreach program (a term I heard from all 3 guess in various contexts), but I’m still not sure who is outreaching to whom (:
So if you happen to work on Mozilla stuff, and arriving Israel, drop me a note…
Free Software Universe 
You are forgetting that Mozilla Israel are local Mozilla representatives. In fact, without us, you probably had no opportunity to see any activities by us in August Penguin (including a talk, a booth and a lot of discussions outside of the session rooms), and probably to activities in Wikimania will fade away.
Yes, we are not working for Mozilla Corporation (for now, at least), and are not getting money for our activities, but you neither for your FOSS activities.
In short, saying “I want more things to be done” doesn’t mean “the things already been done or the people who did it are not good”.
I didn’t forget at all: “we have some great volunteers participating in Mozilla”, but volunteers can’t do everything (well, they can, but we need more of them for that). Being a volunteer has its limitations, and as most of the stuff related to free software I do as a volunteer, I’m usually hitting these limits quite often.
Being a representative doesn’t mean you have to get a salary, but more resources to be able to do stuff. In some cases these resources are actually used with buying someones’ time and in other cases it’s for helping volunteer organizing events.
While I joked about the “outreach” term in the post, I do think it’s really important. We should find a way to get people to know more about open standards and keeping the web open.
This remind me our plans for taking part in W3C’s HTML5FEST which will happen in October (more information is available right here). Currently this is only a rough plan and I’m not sure if we could make it happen alone, unless we’ll see some interest from other Mozillians…
Thanks so much for the hospitality!
I love the idea of Mozilla Inns spread across different cities, connected by community members who care about the project and the people. It’s a fantastic chance to get to know the local contributors and a way to find a home wherever you go. I think we’ll start to see more of these opportunities as MozSpaces, the 5+ offices in various cities, start to spring up, but importantly, regardless of whether there is a MozSpace or not in a city, having people share, and meet up, and exchange ideas around a common project is always a great thing.
Oh, and let’s start the Disloyalty Card. 😉