There and Back Again

To those just joining this broadcast, it’s not you, it’s me.  It’s taken me about a month to blog about last month.  Late July and early August were just really eventful.  I spent a week in Norway, where I attended what I suspect will go down in history as being a pretty landmark ECMAScript meeting.  The upshot of my time in Norway was “ECMAScript-Harmony” and I’ve blogged about that on the nascent Mozilla Standards blog.  There will be much said about the Oslo meeting and Harmony from various principals, and some said about this subject that captures the spirit of the thing but may yet be a bit misleading or sensationalist.  And, here’s a press release from ECMA International.

A day after getting back home from Norway, I took off for Whistler, British Columbia (taking my Scandinavian jetlag with me) to attend the Mozilla Summit.  In case you haven’t heard yet, here’s a brief summary of the various adventurous goings on: on Day 1, a traveler with worse jet lag than me saw a black bear rummaging through garbage; on Day 2, the Sea to Sky Highway collapsed, leaving us stranded atop the beautiful glacier park; on Day 3, the power went out in the conference hotel.  I opted out of the 8 hour bus drive back to Vancouver, and chose to circumvent the rock slide via sea plane  It was just… splendid.  I documented the whole thing in my Moz08 Flickr set.

I gave two talks at the summit — one on standards (links to my slides and a blog post summarizing what we talked about), and one with Seth Bindernagel on Firefox in India, my particular passion.  The India discussion occured on Day 3, when there was no power in the hotel.  So, a group of interested parties huddled around my laptop in a semi-circle, and we had a small, intimate and dimly lit discussion in a small room about fonts, the Indian government’s e-governance initiatives, and the propagation of standards-based platforms.  I had a deja vu moment when I realized that so many problems with the top Indian sites reminded me of the early era of callow markup, when the evangelism team was first constituted.  Seth and I are going to talk to major Indian ISVs about Mozilla, and plan some workshops to coincide with foss.in in November. India is like the new old frontier of the Web; proprietary stuff (like MSHTML particularities and Microsoft’s Dynamic Fonts) still permeate the marketplace. At the same time, the comScore data about India tells us that it has “one of the fastest growing Internet populations.”  It is high time Mozilla did something there.

See what I mean by eventful two weeks? Scandinavia and the Canadian Rockies, all for the Web.

2 thoughts on “There and Back Again”

  1. Live in Vancouver, had European visitors staying here and they got caught in Whistler because of the rockslide. It was quite hectic (for me) to find a way out for them – they are from the flattest country in Europe, so nu mudslide or rockslide expierence. (They got out by taking a bus to Squamish then a water taxi to Horsehoe Bay (a suburb of Vancouver).
    All is well that ends well, I hope you still had time to enjoy the scenery at Whistler.

  2. Hi,

    I came across your blog from Glazman’s blog and was really happy to know that you had a presentation about Mozilla in India at Summit’08. I looked at your slides and am excited about your plans. I was present at FOSS.IN last year and met Myk, choffman and others, but I could participate full time. This time I will make it a point to be part of the event right from the planning stage.

    I am particularly interested in your idea of bringing Mozilla officially through the government. I believe that it is open source that can transform India from a country of “just service companies” to that of “product companies” where innovations can happen. And I having been associated with mozilla community for a small time now tried to bring in Mozilla based products in a couple of government offices here personally as an individual. I succeeded only by a small fraction. I can provide you the details separately. As of now I would like to know if I can be in loop for the initiatives/activities happening to bring Mozilla in India and where the Govt of India is involved. I have subscribed to your blog. I am generally on Moznet as brahmana.

    Let me know if I can do something form my side regarding Mozilla in India and also FOSS.IN/08. It would be great to be of some help.

    Regards,
    Brahmana
    (Srirang)

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