KosICT 2015 – Report

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As part of Mozilla Academy in Albania, a series of workshops focused on technical topics related to Mozilla, especially Firefox OS and Webmaker, we also had in mind to have a better cooperation with our fellow Mozillians from Kosova, to join forces for our next event held in Prishtina, Kosova: KosICT 2015.

With some other contributors from Open Labs, fellow Rep Kristi Progri and me travelled to Prishtina and met with Ardian Haxha, Rep from Kosova to get prepared for the event. KosICT is a non free conference ( paid entry) focused on new innovations in the ICT sector, concretely with a focus on Internet of Things, Virtual Reality and automation this year. Having said that,  the conference is not alike with any open source conference most Mozillians are used to, it’s quite more corporate and “fancier” than the average tech conference, so that should be noted. In any case, we as Mozilla Albania were going to have a booth there, so it was something quite casual where we also had experience with. No presentations from us this year (although holding a dev session might have been interesting).3

The conference went pretty smooth the first day, with a relaxed atmosphere (too relaxed for my taste) and we were able to take advantage of our booth at quite some points, especially the lunch break. The second day felt a bit empty, with a very few people in the sessions, at which point we slowly felt the need to kill time. I must say that the conference has an interesting viewpoint on technical topics, but fails to stay realistic. Attendants were almost exclusively industry leaders in the region, leaving out the young and enthusiastic startup folks outside its borders.

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In overall, we had lots of fun and were able to talk to quite some people, local and regional and it was definitely a great event for touching base with many people at the same time and place. I would not consider Mozilla’s presence as a success at KosICT ’15, but we definitely left an impression and come home with a rewarding experience on how to handle conferences which are more “corporate style”.