FSCONS has become an integral part of Mozilla Sweden Community. The reason being that we started the revived journey of the local community last year at FSCONS. You can read my last year’s blog here. This year during planning for the event it was decided that we will increase our footprint and try to have more than just a booth. Two of our talks got accepted for FSCONS 2014.

Focus Areas/Objectives

• Increase Mozilla presence in Nordics with a Mozilla booth.
• Discuss about current l10n activities in Mozilla Sweden and how to increase our base. Try to involve more people to contribute to l10n.
• Try to recruit new Mozillians and contributors for Mozilla Sweden Community.
• Showcase Firefox OS and its various devices. Try and make the booth as a marketing podium for Firefox OS devices.
• Organize a Swedish Mozilla community get together to discuss about pitfalls and road ahead.

Event Takeaways

• With bit of last minute budget constraints we were still able to pull Åke, Martin and myself travelling to Gothenburg for the event. Thanks to all the folks to help in adjusting other needs which finally kept us within the planned budget for the event.
• Me and Åke spoke about “Webmaker, Connected Learning and Libraries” during Sunday morning. We were in the main keynote hall and had a full on attendance during the whole session. The talk went well with us explaining about how Digital Literacy and Connected learning acts as a epicenter of present day knowledge map. There was lot of questions asked and hopefully we lived up to the expectation in answering them.
• The next talk same day was about the journey of Mozilla community starting from last FSCONS. Oliver was the co speaker with me. Sole purpose of having such a session was to make the attendees aware of Mozilla Sweden community, attract more contributors, share the hiccups, success metrics of our journey and all in all to be more visible across communities in Sweden. The talk went full house as well
• The conference mainly runs for two days, and we were fortunate to have our talks on 2nd day. Why I say fortunate because on 1st day normally people are packed with enthusiasm, willingness to know/learn and are very patient and curious about everything they perceive, but 2nd day is lousy (and Sunday). So our booth was super busy on Saturday (1st day) with full on questions, answers and feedback. The 2nd day we had our sessions (talks) which went full house (lucky !) and after that our booth again got lot of attention due to post session feedback, questions and getting along. So when other booths were doing so-so on 2nd day we kept the fire burning
• Our community talk went right on the spot, we got 4-5 queries about how to contribute and where to start looking for things which interests them in Mozilla. We took no time to respond and provided them with all needed details. (4-5 people coming forward to contribute is big thing for us, considering we are a small active community).
• 2nd day we also had a community meeting to discuss the roles, the task list and things to do for future in l10n for Sweden. Åke, Martin, me and Oliver joined in and we really had an effective l10n meetup.
• I spoke with the Language team of the Gothenburg University (FSCONS Venue) and they promised to help us in securing more l10n contributions for Mozilla in the days ahead.
• This time we had multiple flame devices and all flashed to the latest Firefox OS. They were a crowd puller specially as Flame is not so common here in Sweden, few people who have Firefox OS phones got it from Ebay (ZTE Open). Crowd coming to our booth were curious and took a lot of time playing with the device and asking a list of similar questions. They were super excited to see Flame and Firefox OS advancing the charts so fast.

Conclusion

FSCONS this year was seemingly much more successful than last year. We tried to fulfill all the goals and agenda metrics we set for the event and were very happy to complete it so satisfactorily. Thanks to Åke. Martin and Oliver to lend a big hand in the whole event, without whom it would have not been so worthwhile this year.

We will keep coming to FSCONS to sort of mark the community anniversary and increase the community presence in Nordics.

Below are photo sets –

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mozlib/sets/72157649046225346/

https://500px.com/oliverpropst/sets/fscons_2014

https://www.flickr.com/photos/soumya_c/sets/72157650201287896/