Alix F.

FISL took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil from June 24th through June 27th and had over 8,000 participants. It was the conference’s 10th edition, but only the second year for Mozilla. For me, it was the opportunity to finally meet the community I had been working with for the past year and a half, and they were even more amazing than I expected! Thank you to everyone who participated this year, it was a fantastic experience!

Mozilla community

First a huge thanks to the Mozilla community from Brazil and Argentina. You went above and beyond! At any given time we had a minimum of half a dozen volunteers at the booth! Everyone pitched it to answer questions and to come up with activities. In addition, Andrea Balle and Mario Rinaldi gave a fantastic talk in front of a few hundred people on building the Mozilla community in Brazil. Finally, Felipe Magrani, Felipe Lerena, and Clauber Halic, among others, gave talks and demos at the booth.

Mozilla talks

Mozilla participated in 6 talks during the event – each time the response was great:

• Andrea Balle and Mario Rinaldi explained the Ecosystem of the Fox: the Mozilla Community in Brazil
• Mark Surman discussed Education for an Open Web
• Nick Nguyen talked about Mozilla Add-ons: Past, Present, and Future, and Marcio Galli provided the point of view of an add-ons developer in Brazil
• Mark Surman, Fabricio Zuardi, and Bruno Magrani participated in the Open Video Alliance event
• Chris Hofmann presented the latest on Mozilla and Innovation: Mobile, Labs, and the Road Ahead
• and I participated in a panel on Open Source Community Development

Mozilla booth: camisetas central!

This is the first year that Mozilla had a booth, and it was a great experience. It enabled us to have a central point to direct people to talks and various activities, to advertise contests, and most important to distribute t-shirts! Including to Lula (President of Brazil) who visited FISL and gave a passionate speech about the importance of free and open source software.

Booth Activities

• Mini Design challenge: 18 submissions
• Firefox demos
• Tagvisor demo
• Campus Reps presentation
• Drawings: we asked people to sign our guest book or make a drawing, many chose the latter, so we now have a few hundred drawings from Brazil, including some very creative ones! It was an opportunity to talk about the new Mozilla Creative Collective project with local artists.
• Personas contest
• Games:
  • Treasure hunt with clues hidden at friendly booths
  • Quizzes: how well do you know Mozilla
  • Flickr challenge: take a photo related to Firefox and post it on flickr
  • And many more…

Videos

We used the TV and a laptop running Ubuntu to show videos during the 4 days of the conference. They included the Firefox 3.5 demos and videos as well as the Firefox Flicks and Japan Flicks. They were quite popular and we could see people just stand by the booth for a while to watch them. People were amazed at the quality of the Flicks created by the community and many had never seen them before!

Materials

We created and localized materials to distribute at the conference:

• Mozilla Service Week brochure
• New fliers for add-ons, QMO, Campus reps, and Sfx, courtesy of williamr

FISL Aftermath

New contributors and projects

• Campus reps:
  • localized the campus reps signup survey
  • increased awareness of the program via Felipe Magrani’s talk
  • 18 new sign ups so far!
• Add-ons development:
  • 7 submissions under way for Extend Firefox 3.5
  • New discussion group for local add-ons
• Localization:
  • We have 2 new localizers interested in helping with web campaigns
• Design community:
  • High interest and new signups to the Mozilla Creative Collective project
• Open video:
  • the Open Video mini conference led to new initiatives like the project for open subtitles
• Mozilla Education:
  • Many new contacts, including students and professors, interested in participating in the Mozilla Education project

Press:

• O Estado de Sao Paulo
• Info Abril
• Baguete
• El Argentino
• Radio Software Livre

For more Mozilla FISL goodness:

• All tweets and pictures are tagged with #mozfisl10 on twitter and flickr
• My pics

Blog posts:

• Nick Nguyen
• Clauber Sitpkovic Halic
• Guillermo Movia
• Felipe Lerena
• Vinicius Medina
• Bruna Griebeler
• Marcio Galli

We have accomplished so much in Brazil since my last update that I thought it was time to report on the latest news and activities.

The community is vibrant and involved in all the current projects, and Firefox usage is increasing! Net Applications reports that market share was 38.6% in March 2009, up from 19% in November 2007 when we started increasing our activity level in Brazil.

Here are some highlights of the exciting projects that have taken place over the last few months:

LAN Houses:

LAN houses are the cybercafes of Brazil, they are a very popular way to get access to the Internet.

• Mozilla held a LAN house workshop in Rio with 33 in-person participants and 42 via live video stream. The conversation with LAN house owners is now ongoing. Restults can already be seen with a recent change in regulations that now allow for LAN houses to be more easily incorporated, reducing informality, improving their conditions, and contributing to increase the number of people online in Brazil.
• Check out pictures from the events
• Read the full meeting notes on the LAN house wiki (in English and Portuguese)

Video testimonials

• Launched testimonials campaign, gathering over 300 testimonials at campus party.
• Campus party pictures
• Watch the resulting video highlights (with english subtitles)

PR

• Launched the Mozilla Brasil Blog
• Started the Mozilla Brazil twitter account
• Ongoing proactive outreach to press, response to inquiries
• Recent articles:
  • Mozilla at Campus Party (Jan 22, 2009)
  • Lan Houses (Feb 3, 2009)
  • Firefox market share (March 2, 2009)
  • Mozilla releases Firefox 3.1 beta 3 (March 12, 2009)
  • Firefox add-on: Greasemonkey (April 5, 2009)

What’s next?

• Video project: submit your own video explaining why you love Firefox
• Planning for FISL 2009 in Porto Alegre from June 24th to June 27th. See the wiki. We’re having a public call to plan for FISL on April 22nd at 2pm PDT. Contact Alix (alix at mozilla dot com) to get the call info.
• Community meetup in Sao Paulo on April 18th with Mitchell Baker – contact Alix (alix at mozilla dot com) or Bruno (bmagrani at mozilla dot com) and sign up on the wiki if you would like to participate. Everyone is welcome to join.
• Continue working with lan houses and press
• Increase Mozilla’s involvement with campuses

If you would like more frequent updates on Brazil, check out the Mozilla Brasil blog and follow firefoxbr on Twitter. You can also join the moz/br community.

Firefox was just chosen by Info Magazine as the best software and best browser of the year for 2008. See this year’s complete list of nominees and awards on the Info website

Mozilla was represented by Bruno Magrani, Mario Rinaldi, and Clauber Stipkovic.

The ceremony’s photos are available on the Info site

In addition to the award, we’re also excited that NetApplications reports 30% market share for Firefox in Brazil for November 2008 (up from 19% in November 2007).

Many thanks to everyone in the awesome community in Brazil for making all this possible!

Follow the new Mozilla Brasil blog for the latest news!

A few weeks ago I summarized some of the activities of Mozilla in Brazil so far and promised an outline of the next steps. Here they are:

Introducing the Mozilla Brazil blog

Check out the Mozilla in Brasil blog to see the latest news about Mozilla and Firefox in Brazil, in Portuguese! We’re hoping to have a mix of updates on current activities in Brazil, release announcements, and guest posts from the community. We’re very excited to launch this new blog!

Announcing the LAN House project

LAN Houses are the cybercafes of Brazil, used by 49% of Internet users. Mozilla is suporting a new initiative to understand better LAN Houses and see what Mozilla can do to help. We’re creating a forum for LAN house owners to bring up the issues they are facing, and communicate with each other. We’re also organizing a meeting with LAN house owners in Rio in December. Let us know if you’d like to participate!

Firefox in Brazil survey

Brazil was part of the pilot for the Firefox in your country survey. We’re still analyzing the 1,510 responses, but here are some highlights:

• 87% of respondents use Firefox as their primary browser
• 91% are using Firefox 3
• 96% have recommended Firefox
• 43% say a recommendation from a friend is the biggest factor in getting people to try Firefox
• 41% say that not knowing about Firefox is the biggest inhibitor to getting people to use Firefox
• 92% of respondent have installed an add-on
• Tabbed browsing is seen as the most compelling feature for people the respondents know
• Firefox is primarily used at home

Many thanks to everyone who took the time to respond and spread the word about the survey! We will be posting more details shortly.

More online fun

Stay tuned for details on an upcoming online contest… all we can say is that it will involve video.

As always, we will also continue focusing on events, PR, campus reps, and most of all supporting the community in Brazil in any way we can. If you have projects you’d like help with, let us know!

I wanted to share the tremendous progress that has been made so far in Brazil in 2008. Here’s a summary of the activities and some of the results:

• The number of daily active users has doubled from 1.2 million in November ‘07 to 2.5 million in August ‘08
• Market share has increased from 19% in November 2007 to 27% in July 2008 (Source: Net Applications )
• Brazil was an integral part of the Firefox 3 launch!
• Mozilla participated in FISL, the largest open source conference in Brazil
• The community is more involved than ever!

Community involvement:

Campus reps, evangelists, events organizers and contest participants, you name it! The community in Brazil is thriving, and we’re very excited to see so much enthusiasm.
In fact, one of the 3 grand prize winners of the Extend Firefox 3 contest is from Brazil and has been a very active member of the community this year. Congratulations to Felipe Gomes for the Tagmarks add-on!

Firefox 3 launch:

• Firefox 3 and mozilla.com were fully localized
• The Download day project was localized and everyone helped spread the word! Brazil was one of the top countries in terms of number of pledges.
• Press: localization of the reviewer’s guide, direct press outreach for download day and the launch, extensive press coverage in all major press outlets (including the printed version of Folha de Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper) and many blogs
• Launch parties in 5 cities with 700 attendees

Fisl (April 2008):

• Mozilla Project overview by Mitchell Baker, Firefox in Brazil and Beyond panel, Mozilla XUL Runner by Felipe Gomes
• a day long workshop on Mozilla, Firefox and how to get involved, including:
  Firefox A developer’s best friend by Clauber Halic and Mario Rinaldi, Localizing Firefox 3, Mozilla, and how to get involved by Fernando Silveira, Offline Online Web and Firefox 3 by Marcio Galli, Mozilla Testing Sprint by Chris Hofmann
• a community party for 100 participants
• press coverage by Globo, PC World, Terra, Baguete

Thank you all for making this possible! In particular, thanks to Marcio Galli, Bruno Magrani and Ronaldo Lemos for initiating and helping coordinate many of the activities. Thanks also to the fantastic team of localizers, including Jeferson Hultmann, Fernando Pereira Silveira, and Marcio Galli.

Stay tuned for more on what we’re planning next for Brazil!