Mozgull

The first ever Drumbeat event in Bulgaria will be held during the prestigious P2P Conference in April.

I will try to talk about “What is Web” in front of students, artists, politicians, IT professionals, teachers and business owners.

The main idea is to clarify what Web means to all groups present. Is it the space where you publish some files for your clients or is something more. Is it all about sharing or it is some place to meet new friends?

After the speech we will make a large group workshop for creating idea how to make the web better. The group with the best idea will receive a prize – a journey, immediate after the workshop.

P2P Conference
I am organizing this event since 2004. This years speakers will be Michael Widenius, Patrick Finch, Robert Nyman, Jeremmie Zimmermann, me and other good guys and girls.

I will share more details and ideas soon.

Martenitsa is a small piece of adornment, made of white and red yarn and worn from March 1 until around the end of March (or the first time an individual sees a stork, swallow or budding tree). The name of the holiday is Baba Marta. “Baba” (баба) is the Bulgarian word for “grandmother” and Mart (март) is the Bulgarian word for the month of March.

Baba Marta is a Bulgarian tradition related to welcoming the upcoming spring. The month of March, according to Bulgarian folklore, marks the beginning of springtime. Therefore, the first day of March is a traditional holiday associated with sending off winter and welcoming spring.

Romanians also have a similar but not identical holiday on March 1 , called “Mărţişor”. If and how these two holidays are related is still a matter of debate between ethnologists.

The Privacy Fox project is alive.

The project shall form a working group to create a common platform for sharing of information concerning our digital rights and personal space in the Internet.

The point is the users to be informed of their digital rights, of what is happening with them in different countries, how the users can protect them from violation and to have answers to different questions.

On the other hand, the website must create a community around itself, which community should share information, help developing the idea and participate together with different NGOs in the process of law-making and other legislative changes in different countries, so the Internet could stay in a way that could help the Open Web.

Milestone 0
Until 12.04.2010 we have to collect ALL NGOs working in digital rights area, advocacy groups and lawyers structured by country and continent. Please help us!

How to help?
1. Join Drumbeat.org project;
2. And/Or join our wiki here: http://wiki.iseegecko.org and fill the information.
If you need any help with wiki or with anything else, please feel free to contact me immediately.

Follow us
You can follow our twitter account @privacyfox

Drumbeat?
Never heard of it? See more here.

According to Gemius, Firefox is the leading browser in Bulgaria.

Starting from October 2009 (yes, after Europe MozCamp and after bgzilla.org creation) the tendence is for growing up:

Congrats to all Next target: 50%

You can see the slides from my speech about how to Increase the OpenID security through the mobile telephone SIM card as a combination of elliptic curves and Diffe-Hellman algorithms:

Finally we started support in Bulgarian language for all Mozilla products and for the manifesto.

Need help?
Forum
Since february 15th our forum is active and you can use it to ask your questions or to read F.A.Q section.

IRC
Our IRC channel #mozilla.bg at irc://irc.mozilla.org is up and running.

Jabber
You can join our jabber conference on mozilla.bg@conference.jabber.minus273.org

In SUMO 1.5.2 Bugarian language will be available, so we will have one more channel to use.

It is not a secret anymore. I applied for a SUMO community manager position at Mozilla Corp, but I didn’t get it, as I expected:)

I will share here some ideas and a project plan I prepare for my interviews. It’s a strategy for making SUMO team a community.

Presentation:

Here you can see more about me and my vision on SUMO’s objective, goals, success criteria, implementation plan, etc.

(Flash movie is embedded. If you don’t want to watch it, you can download the ODP from here.)

35 point project plan

I invest a lot of time to understand the community and to create a basic plan for community development. Here it is (.html) (as a project overview). Feel free to use it and to comment it. I’ll be more than happy if someone can execute it.

Thanks

It was my pleasure to meet and talk with Stas, David, Seth, Tristan, Pascal and William

1. Freedom
On January 14th , 2010 there was a massive protest around the Parliament building in Sofia under the slogan “Bulgaria is not Big Brother, 2010 is not 1984”. The protest unites citizens, political parties and many organizations around their demand against the latest change in the data retention legislation.

Here I am:

2. Family
Daddy, could you walk faster, please. Mammy, please keep us on focus

3. The fucking weather

Last week, the weather surprise us all. -21 C is a temperature level for Scandinavia, not for Bulgaria:

I am thinking how to improve SUMO project and how to get more members into the community using this website:

The entry point

First of all, we MUST have our start page localized in all world languages. This is not a big deal, because I think, the start page should look like this:

Why? Because this is the user’s entry point to the Mozilla SUMO project.
How? No more than 100 strings for localization. Cool !

Meet and greet

Why not greet people on their own language when joining the SUMO website. If I am from Germany or other German speaking country or community (or even if I am using a German localization) or I am entering this website from Germany, based on my location (shared), why don’t I see the German website instead of English one :

Missing in action

So, we are having users on SUMO website, but we still don’t have the KB translated.

Let’s ask them for help and point them to “How to contribute” information:

Coming next: SUMO: Improving the user experience

If I were a SUMO Community Manager I would have 2 main directions to work on:

Internal – strengthen the existing community and external – to get more people to the community. I think SUMO community is one of the most dynamic ones in the World and there is a lot of passion inside.

Maybe is a cliche, but we are now in the age of participation, we must give the chance for all users to participate.

OUT

I think the external priorities should be something like:

• Teaching users what is the difference between website and a browser.
• Better communication with them – after asking a question, for example, they can be asked to help other people if their area of expertise is good enough.
• Get more members for the communities using existing platforms. We can communicate with people using their own language to educate them HOW and WHY to join the community. There are A LOT of people helping the users on Twitter, Facebook and different non-community forums – we must reach them and integrate them into community.
• Better integration between crash-stats and SUMO. People expect to see more information and help when is available about:crashes info.
• Why not greet people on their own language when joining the SUMO website.
• SUMO welcoming parties – once a month, new members will be invited to a “virtual” welcoming party.
• Integration between social network tools and TikiWiki.

and IN

If we are talking about internal community, we can find a way to reach every member of the community with:

• Put a member to be responsible for a task. For example : Please make a report for latest 100 non answered questions from SUMO forum.
• Line up areas of expertise and expect people to give feedback on that. For example if I belong to the group responsible for answering questions about UI, I can give better feedback on that issue, than other who is responsible about malware, for example.
• We have to improve our existing web tools and we need more feedback on that. I am ok with Spark, but it is not user friendly for non-technical community members.
• I know we have a lot of members, but the active members are not so many. So, we have to activate them with more personal and local tasks. We need something more stimulating than ‘Carma’.

How do I know such things?

I am dealing with communities since 2004 when I started organizing a Web technology conference. I t was important back then as it is now to find proper approach to reach the different community layers. The Combination between on and offline methods helps strengthening its integrity.

Currently I am managing several communities, one of them is based on our digital rights and freedoms and includes working with social network and services like FB, Twitter, Linkedin and so on, different types of people and politicians and organizing different actions such as protests, flashmobs and various topics discussions, concerning our digital rights.

I am participating in the Mozilla project since 2004. I started developing some search plugins and toolbars for Firefox, then I started to evangelize along with my open source and open standards activities in Bulgaria. I have participated in a number of meetings for Open source adoption in our government.

I am a member of an international group of organizations which work directly with the EP to stop software patents (again), the data retention directive and other violations of our digital and human rights. I ran for European Parliament in 2009.

Now I am working on building and stabilizing the Mozilla community in Bulgaria. I can communicate in English, Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian