The roads I take...

Last month, I was contacted within a few days by a local "open mobile devices" enthusiast, a Mozilla events manager and a fellow German-speaking Mozilla Rep, all of them pointing to an event here in Vienna called Firefox OS DevTreff Austria.

While the local just asked me if I'd go there, the Mozilla contacts had been asked by the organizers for a speaker to open up the event. We were trying to get someone more used to talking about Firefox OS, but everyone's busy this time of year, so in the end we settled with me doing this keynote.

Now, I have been giving presentations on different occasions and events in the last years, but I never have actually keynoted anything, so that made me somewhat nervous. The other talks that were lined up for the evening were about app development, to some part about very concrete pieces of it, so I figured I should give that some frame and introduce people to Firefox OS, starting with why we are doing it, moving to what and where it is and giving a bit of glance onto where we want to take it. So I came up with "Firefox OS: Reasons, Status & Plans" as the title (my slides are behind the link).



The audience was supposed to be about 50 people, I guess 30-35 really showed up (the pictures, taken "in style" with Firefox OS on my Peak, only show one part of the room), but those were an awesome bunch. They were really into the topic, asked interesting questions, and the talks following me were showing that we really had capable developers in the room, from those that do JS in their free time to those who earn their bread and butter by doing apps.
We also had two Mozillians, both of which I had not met in person before, even though I spent a lot of time in this city in the last decade!

As the event was going on, I was often the voice in the room who would have answers from the Mozilla side or could explain our point of view and initiatives - and in quite a few cases, I could loop back to something I said in my keynote. It was really great to see how apparently I had touched exactly on the right things there and gave everything else a good base to build on. Interestingly, there was quite a bit of interest in the DeviceStorage API, probably because accessing local files is something people can refer better to than storing items in-app. I was thankful someone did a talk on our Marketplace and in-app payment API/Services as that's one area I'm actually weak in, but it also sparked quite a bit of interest. The permission model did also get a few questions.

We surely had people with Firefox OS app experience in there, but I think more of those people might pick up web app development, esp. if more similar events come around, which would be cool. And maybe someone should tell them how to do simple apps without larger libraries or frameworks, and explain app manifests in more detail. I hope they will organize more of those and the chance for that will come along!

On Februrary 20, 2004, the day before FOSDEM 2004, I apparently made slides of my talks public for the first time, putting the L10n status update for that weekend up on kairo.mozdev.org for everyone to refer to.

It was nice to have them up on the web both for people to look them up and for myself in case there would be a problem with my laptop and I'd not have my "master copy" available there. Also, having the contents managed in a version control system (cvs) meant that recovering from accidental changes would be easier and that I could easily sync copies between my desktop, laptop and the web.

Over the years, I added all slides from any presentations I made to that site, and even those from the years before - even that "outliner" for the 2002 talk about what "chrome" was all about (which I wrote up during the presentation right before it, and which was my only slide for that talk - things were a bit different on our first FOSDEM appearance then nowadays for sure).

Fast forward to today: mozdev.org isn't all that well-maintained any more, I never did put up much more than the slides there as I ended up putting all my content on my own server (and domain) anyhow, and cvs also probably isn't the state of the art any more for version control. In addition, I recently discovered how I could do decent auto-deploy of changes on my websites with git hooks on the repos that I host on my own server anyhow.

So, I did a simple "git cvsimport" on a cvs checkout of my slides, and now am using the resulting git repository to host all this right on my server at slides.kairo.at.

I also improved the index page from a pure list into a tabular format, of course using the common KaiRo.at color scheme and my logo, and exchanged the URLs on the slides themselves to point to the new domain. Note that I didn't do any other changes to the slides, so some of them might not be optimal in usability or design in current Firefox versions (I relied on SeaMonkey's site navigation bar a lot in the earlier slide sets, and I didn't add unprefixed versions of some CSS rules I used), but the newer ones should be as good as they can.

Now all I'm missing is to find a way to do a smart redirect (or URL rewrite) from mozdev to the new domain. Oh, and I need to get to creating slide sets for my Linuxwochen 2013 presentations...

Yes, I'm watching NASA TV often enough by video stream that the mission of going "to the moon, Mars, and beyond" is hammered deeply enough into my head that anything with a "beyond" outlook reminds me of it.

As an IRC talk mentioned looking for speakers for a possible Mozilla event in Berlin, I was reminded of my previous post on 2009 talks and figured I shouldn't only contact the travel agency for booking a flight and hotel for FOSDEM (which is early in February this time!), but also make my talk plans more concrete.

I just just signed up on the FOSDEM 2009 session proposal with a talk title of "SeaMonkey 2 and the vision beyond", and I'm planning on not only presenting what SeaMonkey 2.0 has to offer, but also where the project is headed in the longer term, I hope to have a public version of the SeaMonkey vision by then.

For Linuxwochen in Vienna (April 2009), I'm planning to go more general and talk about something like "The Open Internet and Mozilla" or so (anyone having a better idea for the title?), presenting mainly on what we understand as the open Internet, why it is important, what our goals are, what we are doing ourselves to move all this forward, and what others can do for the open Internet. This includes the Mozilla Manifesto and probably the 2010 goals in some way, as well as some small peeks on our products and some way of challenges for the audience to be part of the movement. Maybe some ideas of the great Clay Shirky talk from the Web 2.0 Expo in April 2008 could help there as well.

This second talk is quite different from all I've ever done before, as it's not just about the work I've been in all the time, but I think I know all the topics quite well and it's what we really need to get out to the public, to those who are not yet in our community.

Any suggestions, tips, comments?

As many of you probably know FOSDEM is up once again in February 2009, once again with a Mozilla developer room. I'm planning on being there and probably also to give a talk, but I don't have a good topic for it yet, and I wonder what the audience would most be interested in. What SeaMonkey 2 brings functionality-wise? What our concepts for the future of SeaMonkey are? How the SeaMonkey project is working together with other parts of the community? Statistics on SeaMonkey popularity and usage?

Additionally, I have received a first call for papers (CfP) for the "Linuxwochen 2009" event here in Vienna, which will be in April. There's even more time for planning something there, the deadline for that CfP is in February, but I'm thinking hard about possibly giving a talk there this time, which would be my first time doing this at an event around here. The talk could be 45, 20, or 10 minutes, and I'm also wondering what the more general audience there would be most interested in. SeaMonkey 2 functionality? What the SeaMonkey project is? Organizing and coordinating a volunteer open source project? The Mozilla vision? The wonderful choice of different products from Mozilla? Mozilla-based software development?
What I'm pretty sure I won't be doing is Firefox tricks or such, I'll leave that to people using that browser in their daily lives - though it would be really nice to have someone from Mozilla at this event, as we've never been present at an Austrian event before.

Any ideas for those talks from you, dear blog/planet reader, would be highly appreciated!