Mozilla UK Community Meetup 2012
Contents
Mozilla UK Community Meetup 2012
Date
The event will start on 2012/04/12 06:00:00 PM till 2012/04/14 03:00:00 PM.
Location
London, United Kingdom, EMEA
Owner
This event is owned by Leo McArdle
Attendance
It is estimated that 10-50 people will be at the event.
Description
This is the second community meetup in the United Kingdom, however it is the first at the new Mozilla space. The meeting is to discuss the future of the UK community, what we plan to do for the next while, as well as to get some of that all important face to face that seems to help make things happen all the better and quicker. (William Duyck (FuzzyFox)
Bugs Associated
Budget ticket : 747672
Swag ticket : [1]
Links
Event Website :
- "{{{eventdate}}}" contains an extrinsic dash or other characters that are invalid for a date interpretation.
- "{{{eventdays}}}" is not a number.
- URIs of the form "{{{http://mozmymeetup.eventbrite.com/}}}" are not allowed.
- Property "Eventswag" (as page type) with input value "{{{eventswag}}}" contains invalid characters or is incomplete and therefore can cause unexpected results during a query or annotation process.
Blog posts
http://blog.wduyck.com/2012/04/mozilla-uk-meetup-and-mozilla-org-uk-revamp/
Photos
https://plus.google.com/photos/116421583995830043745/albums/5736801123350621473
Results of discussions held
We discussed what to do as a community and split it up into two sections with the analogy of a building and scaffolding. The building is the reason for the community and why it's there. The scaffolding is the stuff that supports the building and therefore supports the community and the work done in the community. (Thanks for that analogy, Gerv!)
The Building
First, Gerv asked question after question after question about what the actual purpose of the community is, to ensure we didn't get stuck on scaffolding and instead allowed us to work out what our goals as a community is. This greatly helped find and refine our goals and made sure that we don't get stuck up in self perpetuation - our only goal being to maintain the scaffolding of the community.
Webmaking
It was decided that the main direction of the community is centred around Webmaking. This isn't to say it's our only direction but just our main one.
Our goals with Webmaking are to attend events (and organise a few) to teach people Webmaking at all skill levels so we can appeal to people with no past Webmaking experience up to people wanting to make things like add-ons with the SDK to beyond! (So, we'll probably be taking the Foundation's Webmaking concept to even more technical levels.)
As hinted above, our definition of Webmaking is anything related to building the Web or any part of the Web. This can range from teaching people how to remix sites to how to make Firefox add-ons with JS, from basic HTML and CSS to making a dynamic Web application.
Because of the educational aspects of Webmaking and the fact that it can be easily (but not exclusively) targeted at kids and teens, we agreed that we should try to organise or provide tools and materials to help organise Webmaking events in schools, libraries and community centres.
Webmaking is great because it's easy to tie lots of other things into it, such as marketing, PR and the general Mozilla Mission and Manifesto. (Webmaking in itself is a great example of how Mozilla is more than just Firefox.)
Product Hacking
We don't want to leave out other areas of Mozilla, so we devised the term 'Product Hacking' to cover areas that Webmaking can't cover like SUMO, Firefox and Thunderbird hacking and add-ons (although this could actually come under Webmaking when making add-ons with the SDK). This means that Mozillians in the UK organising or attending events not under the banner of Webmaking can do so without feeling like they're not doing anything to support the goals of the community.
Summary
Most of 'the building' of Mozilla UK is going to be events. We're a relatively small community so organising lots of events is too much for us; however we have the one and only Dees, who probably knows more about events than the rest of the UK combined, so we aim to attend lots of events and promote our agenda and the Mozilla Mission.
The Scaffolding
We still needed to focus on some scaffolding in order to achieve our goals. So, here's some stuff that we decided to do:
- Common tags on mozillians.org
- lang:en
- lives:gb
- Subscribe to mailing list
- community-uk@lists.mozilla.org
- Contact mozillians dev team for some form of API
- Remove duplication in general
- especially on mozilla.org.uk
- Mailing list to be "water cooler"
- Blog about main stuff on mailing list on mozilla.org.uk
mozilla.org.uk
A big area which was picked up on was duplication of content on mozilla.org.uk. Because the UK Commmunity speaks English, there's no need to duplicate content such as info like "About" and how to "Get Involved" with Mozilla.
Lucas and Chris proposed that we simplify it to just what we need, and on we spent the Saturday doing mockups of the site and working out how the backend was going to work. The functions of the site we ended up with were:
- Welcome
- A welcome message
- Link to mailing lists
- Link to IRC
- News
- Interesting stuff from the mailing lists
- Planet
- Aggregated content from the blogs of Mozillians in the UK
- Events
- A nice long list of events Mozillians are organising, attending and just might find interesting in the UK
Other Stuff
- Let social media die out.
