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One thing I am hearing consistently in posts about the Summit is that there just wasn’t enough time to meet everyone we wanted to meet. This holds true for me, but even if the conference had gone for another three days (and however many additional disasters that would have entailed), there still wouldn’t have been enough time.

This is the painful dichotomy of working with a distributed community, I guess. The global nature of our community means that we get to work with some of the best and brightest people working on the Web anywhere in the world. The global nature of our community, however, also means that we very rarely have an opportunity to meet face-to-face and talk about things in person. When we do, it’s incredible — this Summit was just mind-blowing in that it gave so many of us a chance to meet people we’ve been working with remotely for years. Online collaboration is great, of course, and is an astonishingly powerful tool that allows us to do what we do, but there’s something deeper you get from in-person meetings. Finally seeing the faces and hearing the voices of long-time friends is…something. I’m not sure how even to describe it. But it’s valuable. Immeasurably so.

I’m already looking forward to the next Summit, whenever and wherever it ends up being. I also think I will try to travel more (if I can) — more conferences, more visits, more chances to meet other Mozillians face-to-face and to talk about things. I have so many ideas swimming around my head from just three days of chatting with folks — making it a regular thing can only be even more generative, creative, and energizing.