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The Mozilla Summit far surpassed my expectations. The event was personal, technical, creative and inspiring all at once.

The Mozilla Summit is an invitation-only gathering of some of the most active contributors in the Mozilla community. This year's theme was "Be More Like the Web".

I was lucky enough to be among those who were invited, due to my involvement with the Drumbeat project. There were a total of around 600 Mozilla community members at the event: hackers, localizers, testers, marketers, and the individuals formerly known as 'users'.

Background

Mozilla is most well known for the open source browser, Firefox. In addition to Firefox, there are number of other software projects like Jetpack at Mozilla Labs. Although Mozilla has been incredibly successful with open source software, they're ambitious and ready for the next big challenge. As stewards of the open web, Mozillians around the world are banding together through Drumbeat: a collection of practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas that improve the open web. The Summit was our forum to share the project with the greater Mozilla community.

Day 0: Arrival & Reception

I flew in from Alaska, direct from my family vacation to Vancouver and then hopped on a bus to Whistler, BC. I arrived on Tuesday afternoon just in time to join the Mozilla Foundation meeting and presenter's workshop. I spent the better part of the afternoon working on a speed geek with my new partner in crime at P2PU, Pippa Buchanan. We rehearsed our talk a few times and got valuable feedback for the next day.

The rest of the attendees arrived in time for a reception, where we had a chance to get to know each other and kick off the event properly.

Day 1: Getting Started

The day started off early with a few inspiring keynote speakers and an extended lunch break to watch some of the World Cup. After lunch I headed to a session from Mozilla Messaging where they demoed experimental Thunderbird mail client features.

Photo CC-BY-NC-SA, Nathaniel James

The next session was "Drumbeat in 2100 Seconds," led by Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. Mark took about four minutes to describe Drumbeat and why it is important to Mozilla before splitting the crowd into groups for the speed geek sessions. All three of the featured Drumbeat projects (P2PU School of Webcraft, Web Made Movies, &amp Universal Subtitles) were represented along with Drumbeat Events and a couple others. The speed geek session went really well; we got a few people to join the project.

Day 2: In the Groove

The second day was filled with more sessions, and some especially interesting HTML5 demos including WebGL and the <audio> and <video> tags. I had a chance to talk to Ben Moskowitz about open video and the upcoming Open Video Conference in New York City.

The Flight of the Navigator is a WebGL demo rendered in the browser that built by the Mozilla audio team. The demo pulls in live data and video from the web while rendering. Everyone in the crowd was awe-struck.

I spent the better part of the afternoon at the Summit Science Fair. There were around thirty individual booths showcasing all kinds of software. Everything from accessibility for the blind to a JavaScript framework for building Firefox extensions.

Photo CC-BY-NC-SA, Michael Morgan

We rounded out the day with the Summit World Expo and International Dinner, where representatives from the over forty countries in attendance showcased their local communities and cultures.

After dinner, there was a late night JetPack hackathon. I built a Firefox extension (more details in a later blog post) in just a few hours. The extension is called 'Clickable Phone Numbers' and it makes any number on the web into a click-to-call number using the Twilio API.

Day 3: Grand Finale

The final day of the conference was a bit more laid back, we talked about the Drumbeat event strategy and did a bit of planning for Drumbeat NYC (August 7th) and the Drumbeat Festival (November 3-5) which is going to be held in Barcelona. I attended a few more lightning talks and a session on the future of client-side debugging.

Pippa and I ran our session on the P2PU School of Webcraft. There was a 10 minute intro, and then we split the audience into four groups with tasks:

1. Design a course for P2PU School of Webcraft
2. Brainstorm a list of core web developer skills
3. Brainstorm a list of 'soft-skills' that employers look for in web developers
4. Come up with ways to legitimize P2PU School of Webcraft so that we have some 'street-cred'

The session went incredibly well, so well that we had a lineup of people to talk to for almost 30 minutes after it was over.

At the end of the day, we took a Gondola ride up to the peak for a farewell party of sorts. The views of Whistler were magnificent and the "Army of Awesome" was incredibly fun. We enjoyed a delicious dinner, cartoony mascots, toasts, and a dance party before calling it a night.

Day 4: Departure

We left Whistler by bus through the mountains, luckily unobstructed by rock slides. Now I'm on the ground in Seattle for the next week, followed by a trip to Portland for OSCON. Get in touch if you're nearby.

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The Mozilla Drumbeat Festival is going to be happening in Barcelona right around the same time as the P2PU workshop and the Open Education Conference. I'd say it's very likely that I'll be there, you should come too. Spread the word.

Save the date: November 3-5, 2010, Barcelona

The web is changing how we learn. It surrounds us with a massive and remixable tapestry of perspectives, facts and data. It gives us the freedom to learn whatever we want at our own speed and in our own way. It lets us become our own teachers. Fundamentally: the free and open nature of the internet is revolutionizing learning.

Who among us has not fallen into a long journey across the web on a surprising topic? Or learned a new skill by making, building or creating something online? Or, for that matter, found a new mentor or apprentice in a forum or on a social network? More and more, this is how we learn.

The open technology and culture of the web are at the heart of this revolution. They give us raw material to take control of our own learning. Teachers and learners around the world are experimenting, inventing, creating, exploring and building in wonderful ways with this raw material. They are living at the intersection of learning, freedom, and the web. Mozilla's 2010 Drumbeat Festival is a gathering of these people.

Sign up for updates: http://drumbeat.org/drumbeat_festival_2010

What? Shaping the future of learning right now.

Drumbeat Festival 2010 will showcase people, ideas and projects making connections between learning, freedom and the web. Things like:

1. A secure 'data backpack' where students control their own learning materials and credentials
2. Libraries transformed into digital garages where kids learn to make, do and create with an agile, hacker attitude
3. Massively scaled apprenticeship, we people learn by diving into the world of open source master craftspeople
4. Hackerspaces where people teach each other about everything from robots to lasers to knitting
5. Alternative accreditation models based on web and open source peer review techniques

The idea is to gather people with the puzzle pieces needed to ideas like these real: data portability; open educational resources; secure, decentralized storage in the cloud; open content licenses; agile thinking; open, user controlled online identity; massive, credible informal learning opportunities; passion.

Who? Inventors. Learners. Hackers. Teachers. Artists. You!

The good news: we have all these puzzle pieces in our hands already. We just need the right people to get into a room and use them. That's the spirit of the Drumbeat Festival.

People and orgs we'll invite to Barcelona include: Web tech companies. P2P University course leaders. Digital learning startups. Hackerspaces. Creative Commoners. Online identity experts. Wikipedians. Software developers. Filmmakers. Web standards nerds. Open web activists. Artists. Web developers. Teachers. Foundations. And, of course, learners of all stripes.

Why is Mozilla doing this?

We believe that everyone has a role in keeping the web open and vibrant. That's why we started Mozilla Drumbeat: a collection of practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas that improve the open web. The annual Drumbeat Festival is a part of this, bringing together people doing things at the intersection of the open web and other important aspects of our society. The first Festival will focus on the connection between learning, freedom and the web.

Drumbeat Festival 2010 is being organized in partnership with Creative Commons, MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. If you are interested in joining as a partner, please email drumbeat-events@mozilla.org.

The Festival will take place on November 4 + 5 in Barcelona, with an opening keynote and reception on the evening of November 3.

I'm in San Francisco for the month of June getting ramped up at my new job with Twilio and it just so happend that Google hosted a Summer of Code Meetup at their office just a few blocks down the road.

I joined a group of about a dozen others, including Carol Smith and Cat Allman from Google's Open Source Programs Office. There were GSoCers from all over California, including two exchange students and one who came all the way from Guadalajara, Mexico.

We started the event off just after 3PM with introductions and some background info on the various projects for GSoC 2010. There was one other GSoC alum from 2008, João Antunes, who worked on a file transfer protocol for SIP Communicator.

After João shared his experiences and advice I talked a bit about my experience working on a Summer of Code project while I was living in China. In addition I gave three lightning talks on projects I'm working on after GSoC.

I started with an interactive demo of Twilio followed by a Q&A on the technology. There were a lot of great questions and there seemed to be a very high level of interest. After I finished up with Twilio, I shared an update on Mozilla's Drumbeat initiative which naturally segued into a discussion on P2PU and the Open Web Craft project.

After my presentation, a few guys from Scripped gave advice on communication and it's importance in project management.

Carol was super nice and gave us a tour around the office. We got some free food from the micro-kitchen and rode the Google Slide.

We rounded out the day with a trip to a pub on the waterfront overlooking the Bay Bridge. Overall, it was a pretty sweet day.

Flickr Set

UPDATE: Guest post on Google Open Source Blog.

Yesterday, I posted "More Than Code, It's a Community Too" on the Google Open Source Blog. The post is about my recent experience with GSoC students in India, go check it out!

I just received the email below on the Google Summer of Code Students mailing list. In 2008 I worked on Gallery as part of Google's Summer of Code. I did the bulk of my work while I was on exchange in Beijing, China. Luckily, at the time, the Summer of Code management application wasn't censored, apparently it is now.

This really hurts. If the Chinese Government doesn't lift the ban on the GSoC site, there will inevitably be a drop in participation by Chinese students. Further, these tech-savvy individuals will likely bypass the firewall by using a proxy and may be in direct violation of the law.

This could all be sidestepped by providing an alternate URL & IP address for GSoC, but this is really just one example of censorship catching more than intended.

I'm a GSoC 2008 student from China. If Google hold SoC this year, I will apply it. But I found I can't access socghop.appspot.com in these days.

In China, sometimes socghop.appspot.com was accessable, but in most time it is unaccessable. Under GFW(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project), many websites can not be visited in China. The govenment thought these sites threaten country's stability. Websites like YouTube, Blogspot, and any website with "appspot.com" domain name were blocked.

The govenment have no intention to ban GSoC, the reason of blocking appspot.com is that Google App Engine can be used to set up proxy sever and circumvent the GFW, so the government blocked all sites with domain name "appspot.com".

Yes, it is very ridiculous, but what we can do? There are many Chinese students participated in the past GSoC seasons and made remarkable contribute to Open Source. It would be a heavy losses to Open Source if there are no Chinese(and other undemocratic countries) GSoCers in 2010.

If google can provide an alternative entrance besides socghop.appspot.com and students can commit applications on it, that would be enough.