The Mozilla Summit 2008 is over.

I’ll be doing other blogs on the many specific topics that came up during the Summit, but here are some quick impressions now that I’m back in SFO.

• Smooth efficient organization getting us there, (and back!); nice hotel, nice town, nice scenery.
• Bears:  Gary, from Hong Kong, couldn’t sleep because of jet lag so went outside to catch some fresh air at dawn… and discovered bears trying to get into the hotel kitchen doors. [link]   “Coincidentally”, the early morning joggers start buddy-signup lists 🙂
• Rockslide closes the main road from Vancouver to Whistler [link], damaging a bus [link], but no-one was hurt.
• Power outage when laundry trunk hit power transformer for a few hours. [link, link]
• Improvised presentations given in dimly lit conf rooms with emergency lighting powered by the hotel generators. Some had people gathered around a borrowed laptop (Thanks Asa!), others were done from memory at a flipchart.
• Truck rollover blocked the remaining road (called a “paved goat trail” by a local taxi driver) for a few hours.
• Dinner on the mountaintop was spectacular; the ghostly trees and pylons gliding silently past the gondolas in the fog; the glowing robots at the window, with snow falling in the background outside; getting the local band to rickroll us.
• schrep’s going away speech was very personal and moving. It caught all of us off guard, and there were quite a few bashful engineers around me discretely dabbing eyes and pretending not to be crying. I remain very honored to have worked with schrep, and wish him the best in his new role.
• Meeting localizers and developers from around the world was absolutely priceless. Everywhere I looked, there were impromptu breakout groups; there were even some around RelEng and l10n, and one *very* late Wed night breakout session with Nick dialed in from New Zealand.
• A few people stayed at Whistler after the general group left. After the hectic times of the last few weeks, I was hoping for a quiet few days. Imagine our surprise to discover the hotel bar packed with a rowdy “Art Walk” crowd; some were the usual art gallery types, but quite a few were also Burners. Suffice to say, the antics and dress-code were surreal.
• Fog cut out the floatplanes option for most of Fri and Sat. Thankfully, I woke up Sunday morning to crisp, clear skies and just about perfect flying weather. Made it into Vancouver, and across town in plenty of time for my connection to SFO.

I was really impressed by how everyone handled this week, and rolled with the punches. Its easy to be a gentleman when everything is going perfectly; a true measure of a gentleman is how he behaves when things are not going perfectly. Everyone happily chipped in whenever needed. Before coming to the summit, I was already impressed by the sheer number of people who instinctively “do the right thing”; so now I’m even *more* impressed by everyone at Mozilla. Makes me proud! I dont care what ZDNet says about the summit; I was there, and it was fan-tas-tic.

The Mozilla Summit 2008 is over. The impact of Mozilla Summit 2008 is *not* over.

[updated 03aug08 to fix some typos, formatting, and link to bug#448604]