Based on the BarCamp and Open Spaces concepts, the first DemoCamp was held in Toronto and inspires events of the same name in many Canadian cities and other locations around the world. Victoria organizer Mark Lise was inspired by attending DemoCamp Vancouver.

The following demos are currently proposed:

• Why DemoCampVictoria was created (Mark Lise)
• Fortuno (Jesse and Jason)
• Genetify (Andrew)
• BountyUp – Social Commerce (Joshua McKenty and Todd Khozein)
• DailySplice (Rian)
• Flock – the social web browser (Clayton Stark and other Flockers)
• Songbird (Steven Bengtson and Peter Van Hardenberg)

The format usually has the audience (participants) vote on what demos they want to see. What doesn’t get voted in at one event, often gets voted in at the next.

As BabyCamp could start any day within the next month, I hope to make it for the first hour tomorrow night.

Hat’s off to Mark and crew for putting this together. I’m sure it will be an awesome event.

Update: I did make it to the first half of the event, and took some photos. It was an awesome event! Dave Chard and team were incredible hosts! Dave is the founder of the real estate development company Chard Development and behind the Juliet condominiums being developed in downtown Victoria. Urbanist Yule Heibel made the introductions that resulted in this venue, and it seems this relationship will continue to grew and be a great benefit for entrepreneurs and technologists in Victoria– Dave welcomes other opportunities to host similar events!

I had a very interesting conversation with Yule about urbanization of downtown Victoria, got to catch up a little with Boris Mann, and have a little face time with the incredible — and recently relocated to Victoria — Darren Barefoot. I saw some people I haven’t seen in a while and met quite a few wonderful people. The demos were great!

Looking forward to the next one.

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 sounds like he will have a similar community role combining evangelism and technical leadership in internalization and localization there. It seems like a natural progression in his career. He will be continuing his work that was previous volunteering for Mozilla and combining it with a mandate. He is a incredible addition to the Mozilla Corp team!

Zbiggy is a lot of fun to work and hang out with. His energy and passion for open source and helping everyone (around the world) get access to great software and web services is infectious.

I’m not surprised that he studies sociology at university. He really cares about people and tries to improve things on the greatest scales. He is one of my inspirations.

Zbigniew was generous enough to answer some of my questions about his transition over email.

If one has recently read “not-invented-here syndrome in Mozilla” they might be very surprised by you joining Mozilla Corp, except if they really know you. If they know you then they would appreciate the article as your usual candor, and that you were and are as passionate and positive about Mozilla as ever.

This isn’t the first time that Mozilla has considered hiring you and you considering joining their team as an employee, what made the union successful this time?

Tricky question. I can’t say there is a single reason, it’s more that I have grown. I consider any projects as a kind of adventure, a challenge. It has to have the excitement factor, it has to be worth taking, but on the other hand, you have to be mature enough to be a useful part of the team — not the one dangling at the rear of the group. It’s much easier to just stay a volunteer. Mozilla is a unique kind of organization, successfully experimenting with merging corporate business with community and openness to the extend not tested before. It’s unwise to jump in, scream a lot and try to influence the direction of such a huge and tremendous effort, when you don’t feel ready yet. And it’s not worth jumping in to sit down in the corner. So now I feel I can at least whisper something from time to time

Another factor is that Mozilla is reaching the first major creative reorganization since Firefox was accepted as the flagship product. With David Ascher leading a new communication-focused effort, John Lilly taking over the CEO role, stronger investigation of mobile zone and what’s most important, Mozilla 2 project shaping up, there’s a lot of exciting things going to happen I spent the last years volunteering in Mozilla, and, honestly, Flock was the place where much more exciting things were happening for me – as it always happens with pre-1.0 startups. Thanks to the Flock team, I had a chance to participate in the birth of a new web browser, focused on the social web, free to experiment with each and every part of the UI… that was amazing – you should remember that too

So post 1.0 “My World” is much more reliable, and I’m so happy to see that Flock 1.0, Flock 1.1, and Flock 1.2 are all pretty much ready in terms of internationalization without me spending sleepless nights on it

The last factor is the right project. I’m studying sociology, I’m fascinated in how the community works, and while being a member of Mozilla Europe board, I was always pushing in the direction of human social studies on the communities. To understand them better and help them help us So it seems that I managed to get my proposal through

Who will you be reporting to?

I’m extremely proud that Paul Kim, who was always extremely helpful to me, agreed to be my manager Besides that, I am, of course, reporting to, and cooperating with Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, and Jane Finette, who’s Director of European Marketing at MoCo

What new opportunities and challenges ahead are you most excited by?

Everything. I’m diving through Mozilla’s corporate culture, routines, learning new names, I must say a lot has changed in Mozilla since the Firefox 1.0 days. Jane is extremely helpful in guiding me through the first weeks, and, what’s maybe even more important, she’s very patient. Thank you, Jane!

I hope to start blogging much more often about my major project in Mozilla, but first I need to prepare for FOSDEM and do the backlog after my exam session.

No one would question your integrity, but many people appreciated your independence, is there anyone else that will provide your previous perspective straddling the Mozillas?

I’m surrounded by extraordinary people, who’re participating in one of the biggest open projects in the history of the Internet. I know many of them for almost 8 years now. I don’t feel that anything changes here. For last 2 years I’ve been a member of the board in Mozilla Europe, so I don’t feel like I’m getting any new inclusive view.

I also hope that my friends, who know me, will be able to kick my butt if they feel like I’m getting conformist It includes you!

Who will be asking all the interesting questions?

Hey, I can promise there are no brain washes on the way into Mozilla. Noone asks you to sign any chirography and nobody “proofreads” my blog posts. Everything is still the same

I don’t expect my questions to stop appearing, I expect myself to have a bit more influence on causes of those questions. As I mentioned at the beginning. It’s a responsibility. I’m joining people like Axel, Pascal, Seth who’re on the first line of communication with our community. This is a kind of role that requires a lot of pushing here and there to get things working better for outsiders.

Don’t worry, there’s always this kick-in-the-butt or slap-with-the-trout whistleblowing system applied in case of emergency

What will your legacy at Flock be?

Flock can be localized to zillion+one language. And Flock has localizers that are localizing the trunk. If one is in the l10n business, he knows what that means.

Besides, I think I was the initial concept author for what’s now called My World, and there are some other small things that were shaped when I was around. I think I brought the coffee for Chris when he doing some nice mockups – that counts, right?

Have you found any time for working on Bugzilla lately?

Nah. I’m still in the very same point with this: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/gandui/ being quite a good concept IMHO

I’m not going to promise that I’ll find time for this. I won’t work on the dashboard until I feel I have a lot of time for my girl, hobbies, job and life

Zbigniew responses share his usual exuberance, humor, and humility. He is too modest. I remember him championing the My World experience based on Netvibes and similar experiences long ago. It became one of my favorite ideas, and I still am looking forward to a more customizable experience being in Flock, a related experience being part of all web browsers, and tighter integration of widgets in desktop OSs, but I digress.

When I asked Clayton Stark, Flock’s VP of Engineering, who would be filling Zbiggy’s big shoes, he said that the responsibilities would be shared among various folks. He had nothing, but extreme appreciation to his work and contribution at Flock:

Gandalf has been a major contributor to Flock for a very long time, and he has been instrumental in securing localizers to create the long list of language versions we now have. Beyond this, Gandalf has always been an active voice in the evolution of Flock, and a great person to work with. I congratulate him in his official move to Mozilla — in my opinion, Mozilla Europe has lucked out to get such a great person on their team.

Definitely, this is great news for Mozilla. Congratulations Zbigniew! Congratulations Mozilla!

PS. Zbiggy has created a Open Projects community survey. Please take the little time to help him in this project.

Thankfully, I was able to find the article using the Wayback Machine provided by the Internet Archive. I also found some of the awesome articles written by Vera Horiuchi.

Eli and Vera are among the most talents people I’ve ever worked with, but alas even more than me they weren’t software developers, and we were living in a software developer world.

Sure, there is some nostalgia mixed into my sadness, but the destruction of these documents is a good reminder of some things:

• Software is a lot more than code. It is an experience and different participants will appreciate different aspects.
• A team needs to have diverse leadership to create an experience that will meet many people’s needs.
• Respect and love your leaders even if you don’t understand their expertise. Seek guidance from experts you trust that do understand that area.
• Do garden your knowledge, but be careful not to discard knowledge out of ignorance. Technology today allows us to archive the knowledge for others to benefit from, refresh, or transfer.

Our software and services are far from perfect, and when things go wrong people aren’t shy about contacting us asking for help. We consider the support side of the user experience to be vitally important because it’s the person who interacts with our customers most and makes the biggest impression in their time of need. In fact everyone who joins Automattic, regardless of position, does support for 3 weeks. The customers range from the everyday blogger to VIPs like CNN, Flickr, and People Magazine. The job requires:

• Patience and grace.
• Excellent writing skills.
• Working knowledge of WordPress, HTML, and CSS.

This is a pretty sweet opportunity, I must say, for someone passionate about working with people and WordPress.

You will be collaborating with Mark Riley (the artist formerly known as Podz), who truly is a support maven. He is the best technical support person that I’ve ever worked with and I’ve worked with a lot. Every position in my 7 year career has been related to support: doing it, leading it, or collaborating with support teams.

At IBM DB2, I was very familar with “customer sat.”.

With Flock I enjoyed a more personalized delivery of it, but as I suggest in Flock’s Kryptonite and Flock, the Awkward Child of Open Source I ultimately didn’t feel at the time that we were positioning ourselves to support our different groups of customers well.

When I joined Automattic, I was immensely impressed that really caring about the people that are our customers is in the DNA of the organization. Support is important to every member of the Automattic team, and most have the passion and skills to contribute to it directly.

Barry, the Systems Wrangler, particularly impresses me with how much time and energy he spends caring for our customers. Not only is he the best web hosting person I’ve ever seen in action, he goes many extra miles to work directly with our customers having problems.

WordPress is a lot bigger than us, and if you join the team you will meet a lot of passionate people from all over the world and some that seem right out of it.

I was surprised by how passionate and awesome people that blog are, but I really shouldn’t have been. These are the people who have found their voice online and are sharing what is important to them.

I learn a lot of the most interesting and important things from my customers, so supporting them well is really important to me.

For many companies support is often an afterthought. Little of product revenue is invested into support. Although a support team is responsibly for customer satisfaction, they often have little influence on the product.

The sad reality is as consumers we have allowed ourselves to be trained to accept poor service and support particularly when it comes to software products.

The statistics showed this at IBM DB2. The DB2 Support team was always incredibly stretched, but thankfully often mediocre support was sufficient for IBM to be an industry leader in supporting “enterprise” customers. The result is that IBM wasn’t influenced to invest in the DB2 Support organization.

Luckily, leaders like Blair Adamache, Marc Wilding, Chris Fender, and quite a few others invested a lot of their own personal energy to shake it up, but it seemed like a straight up hill journey. I would love to find out how this journey is going? Are these leaders still personally involved? (This information may be locked within the IBM walls.)

Large organizations can get away with mediocre, but small teams can’t. Showing your customers you really care is how you can differentiate yourself from the competition, and that is exactly what we try and do.

This is an important piece in WordPress being the best. “We consider the support side of the user experience to be vitally important” sums it up perfectly.

Mark Riley is our best kept unsecret. He gets hundreds of thank yous a week and many over the top kudos.

It is a significant reason why we develop bbPress.

How we can provide even better support was a significant part of the conversations at our “onsite”, discussing what is the next steps in technology we need and what people we need involved. It relates to the conversations we have every day.

So here we are. We are developing and experimenting with creating and refining some tools, but we also need you, a Technical Support Professional. Bring your energy, experience, and tools, and come to your new home at Automattic.

I actually own a Google shirt and enjoy wearing it. I admire the people of Google.

While at Flock I had the tedious, but very important task of reading (and responding) to all of the emails sent to feedback@flock.com — this was one more task in my 14 hr+ day and there was a lot of spam both automated and hand written, but I digress.

Sometime in the first few months of 2006, a friend told me that the following was on their internal forums:

Change the default search to Google.

With the response from Lloyd Budd of Flock:

It takes two clicks to change… your loss.

Dang, I thought, I must have been in a really bad mood to have written such an inappropriate response. So at the time, using gmail ironically, I quickly found the discussion. Dec. 4, 2005 the feedback read:

Change the default search to Google.

Why on Earth is it Yahoo!? I’m not going to use Flock based on this alone for now.

Now, my response is still poor, but it makes a little more sense in that I was responding to a hostile email. I definitely should not have responded if I wasn’t able to respond politely.

I’m not going to share who that feedback was from, but I did email them letting them know that it hurt hearing that they had misrepresented the conversation.

Its good to know that if you ever write or say anything about Google it may end up on their internal forums, maybe not the way you said it. It’s highly searchable.

Code Rush tells the story of Netscape in 1998 thorough the first quarter of 1999 trying to recover their business after the attacks of the now convicted monopolist Microsoft and to open source the Netscape browser.

Without these actions, we probably won’t have Firefox, I might not be open source employed, and the open source landscape might be very different.

Code Rush gives me a rush!

It is a well done PBS documentary produced and directed by David Winton. In the film, Jamie Zawinski, Michael Toy, Scott Collins, Tara Hernandez, Jim Roskind, Stuart Parmenter, Brendan Eich, Jim Barksdale, and Ellen Ullman are inspirational and all, of course, play themselves.

My copy is recorded from one of the times it aired on PBS. I have watched it numerous times. Unfortunately, like the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank you probably won’t be able to find a copy.

Like any recording of history, it only tells a few of the many people’s stories. People who’s story is missing include Frank Hecker, Mitchell Baker, Mike Shaver, Marc Andreessen, and Terry Weissman. Who else’s Netscape story from that time inspires you?

I don’t think there is an company creating open source software with a greater heritage than Mozilla. Nor do I think there is a greater company that continues to demonstrate that trust is well deserved.

To anyone that has contributed to Netscape, Firefox, JavaScript, Thunderbird, Bugzilla, Tinderbox, Bonsai, Camino, Flock, Songbird, Joost, AllPeers, Nvu, Komodo, and numerous other products, I thank you!

You contribute just from using Firefox, the browser responsible for a better web!