FISL 14

Two weeks ago, almost the entire Mozilla community in Brazil assembled together in Porto Alegre to attend FISL, the largest free software conference in the country, which brings together about 7000 people every year to talk about every side of open source: communities, business, government, education, etc.

I think the community had its best attendance ever this year. For one thing, it was the largest group: there were about 30 contributors from all over the country who contribute to every area of Mozilla. For another, our participation this year was entirely planned and run by the community, and everyone was working together in sync to make it a success.

Our activities included various talks on the main conference track, an apps hackaton, a Mozilla room, SUMO sprints, and just a lot of engagement with the students and developers at the conference. As expected, interest in Firefox OS was very high, and this brought to us a lot of people who wanted to hear more about the OS, take a look at the devices (we had a few Geeksphones for demonstrations!) and learn how to build apps. With the dedicated Mozilla room we were able to run several “Apps 101” sessions to get people started on apps and the hackaton (at times back-to-back sessions to keep up with the demand!), and to provide a welcoming place for them to hack on the apps or to get some hands-on help when they needed.

Welcome to the Mozilla Room at FISL 14

In true free software spirit, most of the talks at FISL are live streamed and also recorded, and you can see the full program here. Below are all the talks we had (I think I’ve included them all but apologies if I forgot any).

• Ricardo Panaggio – Emscripten (in Portuguese)
• Sérgio Oliveira and Armando Neto – Django at Mozilla (in Portuguese)
• Lucas Rocha – Firefox for Android and how to have a Career in Open Source (in Portuguese)
• Fabricio Zuardi – Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone — two new open platforms (in Portuguese)
• Marcio Galli on exploring B2G/Gaia internals
• François Marier – Persona, or: User logins – can we do better than passwords and avoid centralized services? (in English, slides in Portuguese)
• Mark Surman – The Web is Lego (in English)

(p.s.: if you want to see an entertaining explanation of how Persona works I highly recommend you watch François’ presentation at the 11’30” mark)

The hackaton ran during the conference and finished on Saturday afternoon. We got a total of 7 apps submissions, which are all posted on github, and the winner was announced at the end of Surman’s talk and received a Geeksphone Keon! There were also e-books as prizes for other teams. Big props to Adriano, André Garzia and Morvana for running the hackaton!

With all that, what I have to say is thanks to all the contributors who helped with all our activities. It was great to meet again some of the old-timers and specially nice to meet the newer members of the community to whom I had only known online before. I was very impressed with everyone’s dedication and passion for Mozilla! Attending FISL is always a special experience for me because that’s where I started my true involvement with open source and Mozilla. After meeting Marcio and Fabricio in São Carlos in 2005 and been following things online for a while, I attended my first FISL in 2008 where I gave a presentation about add-ons development and there I met Chofmann, Blizzard, Taras, Mitchell, Mary, and that was a big push for me to start contributing. I’ve been attending the event ever since, and nowadays I often get people asking my story and how they too can get involved and I hope that I can too serve as support and inspiration for the new people joining who wants to participate and grow in the community. Last but not least, a special thanks to Sérgio for being the lead organizer and volunteering an incredible amount of his time in the past N months to make FISL happen this year!

Until FISL 15!