Last Wednesday was very great day for Mozilla Korean Community. It was Firefox 3 launching day and Mitchell Baker’s first meet-up with my community in Korea. Firstly I thank to Mitchell very much for her tireless speech although she had very tight schedules in Korea.
In early morning 7:30 am in June 18th, she gave live broadcasting for celebrating Firefox 3 launching day via Air Mozilla in Yahoo! Korea office.
After busy time of OECD ministerial meeting, she had a dinner with core members of Mozilla Korea in 18:00 pm.
It includes Jungkyun Kim and me (l10n module owners), Mark Inhwan Kim (SUMO manager), Seunggun Yoo (MDC coordinator), Joone Hur (mobile firefox supporter), Astrea and A2 (forum moderators) with Gen Kanai.
We talked about how to join Mozilla and the status of Firefox in Korea. Especially someone asked why she met community people and Mitchell answered “Mozilla is people and you’re Mozilla.” It was very impressed to us.
After dinner, we moved to Firefox 3 seoul party in 19:40 pm. Hall was already crowded by people with balloon sticking Firefox logo.
[Party attendee]
[Various Firefox stickers from Mountain View]
Although waiting list was over 100 people, but we couldn’t get only 50 people because of a small hall. Fortunately over 15 women users joined this event through women quota from registration.
When we came to hall, they had a ice breaking with introduction and volunteers helped event progress such as registration booth, ordering hamburger and moving microphone etc.
[Volunteers for Firefox 3 Seoul Party]
Mitchell started her greeting and Q&A session in 18:10 pm. Her speech also carried live on Air Mozilla too. Maybe most of people watched her speech. There were various questions from personal things such as her dream in youth and her hair style to Mozilla’s strategy such as standards and mobile.
One asked “Is browser platform?”, but Mitchell said Internet is platform, so it’s very important value openness, transparency and standards on Internet and it’s reason of Mozilla.
After long conversation, it finished at 10:10 pm. I drew lots to give Firefox rare items such as Robot and Mozilla 10th posters and t-shirts from Mountain View.
Many folks wanted to take a picture with Mitchell and requested her autograph. Though Mitchell was very tired, she was willing to accept them. Thanks again.
She returned to Hotel for CNN live broadcasting in early morning 8:30 am and keynote speech of Global Web Technology Workshop in next day.
On conversation with us, Mitchell said “Mozilla Korea is small but strong community despite of Korean closed web environment hard to use Firefox.” Within 5 days, we archived 100,000 download count in Firefox Download Day. It’s just 0.5% in the world and 1% in Korea, but it will be seed for Korean open web with Mozilla.
Photos by Gen Kanai, Channy Yun and Jinho Jung and you can refer blog posts in Korean for this party.
Paul Kim
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