Since mid August I am living in Huntsville, Alabama as a part of Kosovo Youth Exchange Program.  I will be here till the school year ends. I am taking classes at Huntsville High School.

I was very lucky to come this year, Huntsville City  Schools which is in charge for all schools in Huntsville decided to switch to laptops for all it’s 23,000+ students. The laptops are HP and all of them run in Windows, knowing that Internet Explorer doesn’t work as good as other browsers, and the student were having problems with the textbooks etc in  the test phase. They decided to switch to Firefox, as a better and more stable alternative to Internet Explorer. Is a big thing for the Mozilla Community, to get 23k+ users at the same time in a single day, they update Firefox regularly and students didn’t have any problem so far.

Last weekend I was glad to be a part of Mozilla Balkans Communities Meet-up that was organized by the Slovenian community in Ljubljana at Kiberpipa hackerspace during the 4th and the 5th of December.

I was there together with my friend Heroid Shehu as representative of the Kosovo community, traveled by plane on 3th for our first time which was a really interesting experience. After our arrival with shuttles from Airport to Hostel Celica in Ljubljana, we checked in and met the community representatives from most of the Balkans countries at the bar. That night we had a community dinner at Stara Mačka (Old Cat) near Ljubljanica river in downtown, dinner finished and we decided that we should get back to the hostel (no party) because we had a lot of work to do tomorrow.

(Photo by Axel Hecht)

(Copyrights to Alexandru)

We woke up tomorrow for breakfast with others at 7:30am because we needed to be present at Kiberpipa around 9am for starting the sessions. Everything started with a Welcome message from William Quiviger and a general review since the Skopje meetup through Skype because he unfortunetly couldn’t make it. Then ~5 minutes talks for each community. After our talks, Brian King gave us a Firefox update, Kadir Topal from SUMO community gave us a SUMO update, Axel Hecht from Localization project gave us a l10n update, Pierros Pappadeas from Greek community in stead of Alina Mierlus because she also couldn’t make it gave us a Drumbeat update, Gorjan Jovanovski from Macedonin community gave us a Community Marketing update and 30 minutes before Lunch, Milos Dinics talked about Mozilla Communities Sites project. While we were heaving lunch Pierros Pappadeas talked about Open Web.

After the launch the session started with with a SUMO sprint by Kadir Topal,followed after by Axel Hecht with a l10n sprint,Brian King showed us how to build our first Firefox add-ons with Jetpack which was a lot of fun and in the end Milos Dinic gave us a QA sprint. In the end we fastly got ready and got back to the hostel to prepare for dinner and meeting the special guest/s.

We had dinner on Saturday at Figovec, a traditional Slovenian restaurant. There we had a really amazing suprise, Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla and others were waiting for us. There we had a great time discussing to each other.

(Photo by: Tristan Nitot)

(Copyrights to Alexandru Szasz)

In the end I would like to thanks Mozilla for giving me the chance to be a part of the community and the meetup, indeed.

If you want to see more photos from the meetup: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/mozbalkans10/ I will also post my photos nowdays!