With over 17 talks hosted in our packed Mozilla Devroom, more than 550 attendees at our booth, and our #mozdem hashtag earning 1,8 million impressions, Mozilla’s presence at FOSDEM 2017 February 4-5 was a successful, volunteer-Mozillian driven initiative.

FOSDEM is one of the biggest events in the Open Source world and attracts more than 6,000 attendees from all over the world — Open Source advocates, Technical developers, and people interested in Copyright, new languages, and the open web. Through our booth we were able to hear from developers about what they expect from Mozilla — from our tools and technologies, our involvement in the open source community, how we can improve our contribution areas. We had a full day Devroom on Saturday with 17 talks (8 from volunteers) averaging nearly 200 attendees per talk that covered several topics like Dev Tools, Rust, A-Frame and others. There were also presentations about community motivation, Diversity & Inclusion, and Copyright in Europe. Together these allowed us to show what’s important for Mozilla right now, what ideas and issues we want to promote, and what technologies are we using.

In working with volunteer-Mozillians to coordinate our presence, the Open Innovation team took a slightly different path this year, being more rigorous in our approach. First, we identified goals and intended outcomes, having conversations with different teams (DevTools, DevRel, Open Source Experiments, etc). Those conversations helped us to define a set of expectations and success for these teams. For example, Developer Relations was interested in getting feedback from participants on Mozilla and web technologies, since the event has an audience very relevant for them (web developers, technical developers). Open Source Experiments was interested in create warm leads for project partners, to help boost the program. So we had a variety of goals, which were shared with volunteers, and that helped us to measure the success of our participation in a solid way.

FOSDEM is always a place to discuss and have interesting conversations. While we covered several topics at the Devroom and at our booth, Rust proved to be a common talking point on many occasions. Although it can be considered a new programming language, we were asked about how to participate, where to find more information and how to join the Rust community.

All in all, the Mozilla presence at FOSDEM proved to be very solid and it couldn’t had happened with the help of the volunteers that staffed the booth and worked hard. I would like to mention and thank (alphabetically): Alex Lakatos, Daniele Scasciafratte, Edoardo Viola, Eugenio Petullà, Gabriel Micko, Gloria Dwomoh, Ioana Chiorean, Kristi Progri, Merike Sell, Luna Jernberg and Redon Skikuli and a lot of other volunteers that went there to help or only participate at the event. Also big kudos to Ziggy Maes and Anthony Maton, who helped to coordinate Mozilla presence.

Some highlight numbers of our presence in this edition:

Nearly 200 people on average per talk in our devroom

Mozillians directly engaged with around 550 people during the weekend at our booth

More than 200 people checked our Code of Conduct for our devroom

Our hashtag #mozdem, had around 1,8 Million impressions

The Survey we ran at the event was filled out by 210 developers

There are a lot of pictures and blogposts from mozillians on medium, or in their blogs. If you want to see some tweets, impressions and photos, check this storify.