Yea… so the next FOSDEM is just about to begin.
This year, I decided to leave the part that I hate most till I arrive. I hate to look at the tracktable and have to choose between multiply exciting talks that happen at the same time. I mean. I really HATE it.
How cruel the world can be to put the talks about OpenOffice 3.0 UI, Crystalspace3D, Mozilla Weave, Opensuse 11.0, OLPC, Open source ATI and Nepomuk to overlap each other? Duh…
As some of you may have already noticed (and shamelessly tell the others) , starting from February, I got hired by Mozilla! After a period of careful transition that’s official now! :)))
So let me first introduce myself for those readers of planet.mozilla.org who don’t know me yet. My name is Zbigniew. It’s totally unpronounceable for majority, which is my parents revenge for UN not accepting Polish language as a Lingua franca. If you finished trying to pronounce Zbigniew, face a real challenge with my family name – Braniecki.
So it’s probably easier to just call me Zibi or ‘gandalf’.
I have an ultimate luck to great managers, and in Mozilla I’m reporting to Paul Kim himself 🙂 Beside of that I’ll be strictly cooperating with Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, and Jane Finette, Director of European Marketing, and I hope to fit into the matrix of great people working on communities in Mozilla like Pascal Chevrel, Axel Hecht, Seth Bindernagel and others 🙂
My first project is to help Mozilla Central/Eastern European communities and raise the awareness of what’s going there in Mozilla project. :)) It means that I consider myself as a kind of evangelist, strengthening Mozilla signal in Central and Eastern Europe and on the other hand strengthening the signal from those countries inside Mozilla.
It’s a very important and responsible position. Just to mention that in numbers, the population of the region is 400 mln people, which is half of the Europe. While the amount of population connected to the Internet is much lower than in the Western Europe or North America, it’s changing rapidly – at the end of 2008, Russia will be the second biggest Internet population in Europe. This is a very active region, rapidly catching up. My role is to make sure that Mozilla is there, our mission statements are known, and the web is open.
I’d like to thank Jane Finette, John Lilly, Paul Kim, Tristan Nitot, Asa Dotzler and Chris Hoffman for helping me get through this process!
I hope you’ll all find me a valuable part of this amazing project :))
If you have any questions, mail me – zbraniecki at mozilla.com 🙂
I can also be easily found on IRC, nickname gandalf.
I’d like to introduce you to my latest university project – studies on Motivation of Open Projects Volunteers.
I have spent a lot of time, with help from many of my friends, shaping it and polishing to the current form. I believe that it’s an ultimate opportunity to learn how the volunteers operate, what are their motivators and satisfactors and what are the core requirements for a successful open project.
For the needs of this survey, I coined a term “open project” to distinguish it from from FLOSS, OSS etc., raise above it and cover all activities that people consider open and coherent with the vision of various aspects of FLOSS community, be it kernel, FSF, Mozilla, Open Street Map project, OSCar, OGP, OpenMoko, Wikipedia etc.
So, if you feel you volunteer in any open project, please, help me by completing this survey! If you’re working with any open project communities, please spread the word about this survey! If you wish, I may profile the results for your project so that you can know better what’s the profile of volunteers in your project comparing to the average!
I emailed some community managers that I have email addresses of, but I really want it to reach wide audience.
So please, if you can blog about, digg it, send link to the survey to your community mail-list, forum, newsgroup it’ll be a great help!
