The fourth (and the last) workshop took place in Luxembourg from March 15 to 16.

We had over 130 attendees from Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, SAP, Wikipedia and many other important players in the field. The schedule was pretty tight for such a short event, but the format of 15-minute talks was really helpful.

Here are the slides from my talk on Pontoon:

Meeting with leading industry experts was useful at least for two reasons:

• To learn how they solve problems we at Mozilla are also dealing with.
• The amount of feedback on Pontoon (positive and negative) was really extensive.

Here are my slides:

I used DZSlides for the first time and it seems like the best HTML-based slide template out there. All of the code resides in one HTML file, so it’s really easy to use, but the best part are the shells. A Shell is a web page that embeds a presentation and adds a feature to it. For example, embedder shell adds controls and allows you to easily share your slides on a blog:

The other example is presenter display, which shows the current and the next slide, a clock and the notes, but also pops up another window that you put on the projector. Presenter display was the last bit that was keeping me from fully switching to HTML-based slides and now it’s here. w00t!

To collaborate on slides with Life of Brian, we used htmlpad.org. It allows you to easily create web pages using Etherpad technology and preview them instantly. Since DZSlides are basically web pages, you can collaborate on them this way, too. Beat that, Keynote!

I can’t remember when was the last time I had privilege to speak publicly about certain topic in such a short period of time. This clearly shows two things:

• People in my country do care about online privacy.
• ACTA was negotiated in private, so many questions remained open.

The speech I gave in The Slovenian Parliament is available on the Etherpad (in Slovenian), and was mostly based on The Mozilla Manifesto. I focused on the two principles that we believe are critical for the Internet to continue to benefit the public good as well as commercial aspects of life:

• Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability, and trust.
• Commercial involvement in the development of the Internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial goals and public benefit is critical.

ACTA failed at both of them.

I’m happy to report that half of Slovenian Members of the European Parliament and many Members of the National Assembly were present, but the only one out of 25 speakers speaking in favour of ACTA was the foreign representative of the EU Commision, Anders Jessen. Slovenian government informally decided to freeze ACTA ratification.

But how can it save the whole World, if it’s only available in English? Well, not anymore. In less than three weeks, our volunteer localizers have translated BrowserID to 29 locales (English included)! This is more than Firefox 1.0 was available in, which clearly shows the importance of BrowserID inside Mozilla community.

BrowserID is the first project I’m driving localization for and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome so far.

So how does BrowserID work?

When you create a BrowserID account, you’re sent a verification email that lets BrowserID know that you really own that email address. Then when you use BrowserID to log into a website, the website is given your email address and told that you really do own it but they are never given your BrowserID password.

What are the benefits of using BrowserID?

• You can use one easy-to-remember log in for all sites that support BrowserID.
• You never have to trust a website with your password because they never know it.
• Your password can’t be stolen if one of those websites gets hacked.
• BrowserID doesn’t track your activity on the websites you visit (privacy policy).

I’m sold, can I give it a try?

• Mozilla Developer Network
• Mozilla Apps Developer Preview
• Mozilla Add-On Builder
• Firefox Affiliates
• Pontoon

• HTML
• JSON
• PO (gettext)

I’ve temporarily disbled BrowserID login, which will be available again after we finish the migration to Mozilla server infrastructure.

Croats also wanted to learn from other communities about their activities, marketing projects, events, localization efforts etc., so they also invited Ioana from Romania, Oskar from Serbia and Brian and me from Slovenia.

With most of the members only joining the Croatian community last year, Brian and me tried to provide them with deeper understanding of Mozilla mission and our plans for the future. We presented various opportunities for contribution Mozilla offers. Check out our slides.

Being a localization driver, I also spoke about the importance of localization, what do we localize, where can people find documentation, what tools do we use and of course I couldn’t avoid demoing Pontoon.

Looking back, I can say I’ve spent two wonderful days in Zagreb, I’ve met a lot of clever people and I’ve got many interesting questions from them. But none of this would have happened without Nikola, this time Matosović (not Tesla).

This guy is a true Mozillian, who not only revived Mozilla community in Croatia with dozens of members joining in a couple of months, but also proved to be a superb event organiser. Many thanks to him personally and to his team for all the effort they are making!

On my way home I got caught by a police radar. But that could not even partly ruin my general impression, that Croatian community has a great potential for spreading the idea of open web all the way from Čakovec to Hvar.

This photo was taken on 31 December 2011

Long story short: NSID is one hell of an experience. Highly recommended! Also, check mart3ll’s impressive series of NSID mugshots.

Almost a month ago I delivered a talk at »Information Society and Information Technologies« conference in Dolenjske Toplice. It was mostly about Mozilla, what we do and why getting involved matters to everyone, so you might be interested in my slides. Thanks Nino for translation to English.

It’s even easier if Pontoon operates in aided mode using hooks. In that case the new menu shows up with all subpages of the projects.