The first MozCamp (of this kind at least) was held last Friday in The Netherlands, in Utrecht last Friday. Quoting the Wiki:

MozCamps are local events for people passionate about the open web. Each event includes discussion, hands-on-demos and collaborative scheming about ways to promote and protect the open participatory nature of the internet.

MozCamp Utrecht

MozCamp Utrecht

I have delivered two talks, one about the Open Web, and the other one about Mozilla Labs and Open Innovation. During the first one, I asked Paul Rouget to do 15mn of his now world famous demos around canvas and video to show that the Open Web is actually much more powerful than what people generally think. I can't wait to have modern browsers everywhere so that Web developers can use these new features! I also asked Olivier Gambier – a French volunteer – to demonstrate that one of the very cool things about the Web is that it's hackable, e.g. you don't have to passively consume content, but can in fact adapt the content to your own needs (for accessibility, mash-ups, etc.) Olivier has demonstrated how the browser can alter the appearance (via user style sheets), the content (via GreaseMonkey), the browser (via add-ons) and the the way to interact (via Ubiquity). Olivier's demo was quite astonishing in bending the Web.

There were additional talks, sometimes in parallel tracks, covering many things from legal to security and other goodies that the W3C is working on. Of course, local Mozilla volunteers did had a talk.

The final talk was very participatory, as we brainstormed about what the Open Web had to address, and how to participate to fix this. This last session was a blast, with people volunteering to work on specific tasks. One of the things that was mentioned as particularly important was the need to augment the market share of modern browsers (Opera, Chrome, Safari and Firefox) in the Netherlands. I hope to be here next year as I'll be able to measure progress on this important topic!

Now we want more of these MozCamps to be held by volunteers. I can share the slide decks in various formats, and we plan to have more details about the demo. I'm not sure yet if we can post videos of the talks (it's a lot of work), but we'll do our best.

Should you want to organize a MozCamp near, please get in touch!