I'd like to start out by saying that, as always, this year's FOSDEM was the best FOSDEM ever...

2 entire days of talks (mostly developer oriented but not always), of booths presenting different free/open source projects, and of Belgian beer (ah, what would be FOSDEM without beer?) make up one of the best weekends you can imagine. As always, this year's edition was hosted at the ULB University in Brussels, Belgium. And under the snow, if you please!

(Picture by ElectroLab)

As each year, Mozilla had it's own Devroom with many different and interesting talks. The only thing that was really different this year was that the event was dispatched amongst 3 different buildings, whereas the previous years we were all usually dispatched between 2 main buildings. IMO it was a good idea to expand the event, because it was getting more and more packed as time went by.

(Mozilla Devroom - Picture by Julia Buchner)

I attended many talks during FOSDEM but what I can describe the best is, of course, the talk we gave with Clarista. We presented "The State of WoMoz" (slides part 1, slides part 2), and described the different projects we have already done with Women & Mozilla, as well as the upcoming projects that we are working on.

Thanks to this talk, we then met incredible and inspiring people. Amongst them, 2 wonderful women who run the Greenlight for Girls project, and with who we share the same ideas and passion: getting more girls interested in computer fields, and involving more women in Free and Open Source.

Greenlight for Girls regularly run workshops for young girls around the globe, showing them how fun and exciting technology, electronics, maths, science, etc. can be. What they do is very inspiring and I recommend you take a look at what they do here.

(WoMoz talk - Picture by Julia Buchner)

Clarista and I talked for a long time with these fantastic women and we really want to join efforts and organize events together. And if you're interested in organizing the same kind of events, all you have to do is take action and DO IT! I'm sure we'll have many interesting things going on around this, so stay tuned, more will come quickly! As a matter of fact, a follow-up about this will be published soon on the WoMoz Blog.

We also talked about continuing the PyStar Paris initiative, and running a second event. PyStar are workshops for women that teach them Python programming. For more info about the first PyStar Paris we organized, you can read this post here.

So stay tuned for that as well

To finish this post, I want to say, as always, a big "BRAVO" to FOSDEM organizers who volunteer to help out and create such a cool and BIG event.

And an extra-special thank you to Benoit Leseul (long-time Belgian contributor in the French-speaking community), who took care of almost all Mozilla logistics and organization. From dawn until evening, he was always there to lend a helping hand and help out with any possible issue or question, mastering the unexpected as if he'd done this all his life! Merci Benoit

And see you all next year!

(Sunday Night, hanging out with members from various Mozilla communities - Picture by Santiago Hollmann)