It's that time of the year again. No, I'm not referring to holidays, but the moment when the Mozilla Europe team starts working on the FOSDEM event. In 2010, FOSDEM will take place on the week-end of the 6th and 7th of February.

Mozilla community members jumping in joy at Fosdem, Brussels

Mozilla community members jumping in joy at Fosdem, Brussels

Mozilla has had a devroom at FOSDEM for the past 9 or 10 years (I only started attending in 2002, by distributing cool Mozilla T-shirts) and we all know how much the Mozilla project has changed over these years. For years — when our resources were extremely limited — FOSDEM has been a great opportunity for the Mozilla community in Europe to get together. But as Mozilla grew bigger, we have started organizing events ourselves, focused only on Mozilla:

The Mozilla Europe board and I have been thinking about the goals of Mozilla participating at FOSDEM, and we have decided to evolve things a bit. Now that we have our own events, it's time to approach FOSDEM differently and focus on making the Mozilla presence an opportunity to interface better with the other Free, Libre and Open Source communities. FOSDEM is wonderful in this regard, since it hosts dozens of other FLOSS projects, with people being able to work freely between devrooms.

In order to achieve this goal and become more approachable, we'll do two things:

  1. The agenda will be significantly different from the previous years:
    1. more 5 minutes lightning talks
    2. joint talks with other projects
  2. Because we have so many Mozilla specific events, we've decided to invite the most active people (and those who have not been invited yet) rather than all the European contributors. This will also leave more seats available in the Devroom, making Mozilla more approachable for other projects. This will also enable us to spend more on Mozilla-specific event that will take place later in the year. Of course, if you want to attend FOSDEM without being sponsored, you're more than welcome to participate!

Now, should you feel that you need sponsorship, go read the selection criteria! With regards to the content of the various talks, Axel Pike Hecht and Brian King should let us know soon how to deal with the program committee he leads, so that you know how to submit a proposal for a talk.