Moncton’s open source community is growing

This week I attended the Social Media Meetup in Moncton and had the opportunity to spend some time with guest speaker Jevon Macdonald and several other folks, hosted by Steve in his new business digs. I met Steve Mallett over five years ago when I gave a presentation on open source at the local Cybersocial. Steve has been running the Open Source Directory for many years and at that time I’m sure he was trying to figure out who this local guy was talking about OS. Our meeting was my first glimpse that there may be people “below the radar” who work globally on open source projects but don’t advertise their local presence.

On my flight back from Ottawa on Friday evening I was lucky to meet another open source evangelist. Deb Richardson, the intrepid girl reporter, was on her way back from Silicon Valley after this week’s successful mega launch of Firefox 3.0. Her post on the Field Guide to Firefox 3 is worth a read for those +14 million who have downloaded it so far:

We’re done. Firefox 3 is going to be launched very soon. In anticipation of this long-awaited event, the folks in the Mozilla community have been writing extensively about the new and improved features you’ll see in the browser. The new features cover the full range from huge and game-changing to ones so subtle you may not notice them until you realize that using Firefox is just somehow easier and better. The range of improved features is similar — whole back-end systems have been rebuilt from scratch, while other features have been tweaked slightly or redesigned in small ways. Overall the result is the fastest, safest, slimmest, and easiest to use version of Firefox yet. We hope you like it.

BTW, Deb, since you like the Peterson Field Guides so much, you’ll have to try your eyes on all the species in Sackville, or at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute [I work there from time to time].