#mozsummit

The Mozilla Summit 2013 ended last week after three days full of fun, productivity and action. Lots of ideas were shared, lots of delicious food eaten and lots of people met each other. The Summit saw a diverse range of activities, ranging from dance parties, karaokes to hackathons and code-sprints. The Summit was organized simultaneously at Brussels, Toronto and Santa Clara. Most of the people from India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were invited to the Santa Clara venue. Mozilla had taken over then entire Santa Clara Marriott during the three days — October 4 to 6, 2013. I will not try to write an event report, but share some of the exciting things that I did at the Summit and how it helped to uplift the feelings I had towards Mozilla. This is about the experience.

Know more. Do more. Do better

This is the mantra of Mozilla and the slogan of the Mozilla Summit 2013. This is how Mozilla explains what “open” means. The Summit opened with a speech from Mitchell Baker, recorded at the Brussels Summit. This is how Mozilla strives to keep the internet open and available for everyone out there. With the internet, everyone should be able to know more about the world around them, do more rather than being restricted, and make their lives better by doing something better with the internet. The logo of the Summit 2013 reflected this mantra, and it is something that draws me close to the Mozilla mission. I love the internet to be what it is — a standard of openness and transparency.

Rosana Ardila & Madalina Ana

For those of you who don’t know about who Rosana & Madalina are: They are Community Manager. At Mozilla Support, I didn’t get a chance to talk to Rosana & Madalina on the first day. The second day I made sure I went ahead and greeted them. (You should have seen me smile). But the main attraction was meeting and working together with them for preparing a Open Session regarding SUMO. Finally we did it!  It was thrilling talking to them in person and seeing them sitting right next to me .

Meeting cool people

This should have been number 1 on the list. Nothing can beat meeting those people in person whom I have been following on the internet for years and whose writings, techniques and attitudes have inspired me. Here is a list of some of them:

Michelle Luna & Roland Tanglao

Michelle & Roland another of those people whom I wanted to meet at MozSummit. They were one of Firefox for Android and Firefox OS support ninja. It was interesting to have them seat beside me on the first dinner. An extremely helpful and “cool” person! Many thanks to them for helping/mentoring from the day since i joined SUMO! 

The experience

I was absolutely thrilled and excited all through the Summit. I remember not being able to sleep the first night I was there. I woke up at 5:30am and went down to the lobby just to be able to talk to the people there. There energy I saw in the community was staggering. Honestly, I hadn’t expected this level of energy in a community of any scale. The same energy resonated from almost everyone present there. It was amazing to be among such energetic people. Commitment was another important attitude I noticed all around at the Summit. People were not just energetic, but seemed to have a deep commitment to the cause they are volunteering for. The same commitment was also reflected among all the paid staff of Mozilla at the Summit. Almost everyone was focused. Each had something in mind that they wanted to take back from the Summit. The hackers took away experiences of nice group-hacking, the localisers participated in localisation, and the FxOS fans had their day as well.

The Sum-it

Michael Wu on Flickr.

I mentor people for empathy.

After my teammates Jess Klein, Chloe Varelidi and I brainstormed on fun (hackable!) buttons to take with us to gatherings of Mozillians throughout the month of October, I was excited to see a colleague pick up a marker and write the above phrase on a three inch-wide piece of plastic.

Participants at Mozilla Summit and the more making-focused MozFest two weeks later were invited to pick their preferred fill-in-the-blank button. These aren’t “actual” Open Badges that have digital counterparts, though those were available at both gatherings. But they were part of a fun international experiment to see how individuals would edit these three lines: I mentor people for ______; I’m a _____ nin.ja (or expert); I’m a ____ n00b (or beginner/newbie). After the first round of white buttons were snatched up, we reprinted 1,000 more in neon colors.

I was surprised to see more women reach for the mentor button and more men go for nin.ja, and this seemed to be repeated across the four different cities where we did casual observational testing. The only case I saw of displaying buttons beyond bags, shirts, and lanyards was the London-created collage you see here:

It was a ton of fun to watch people get to scribbling. I was especially excited by people who shared personal characteristics, a sympathetic n00b and inspirational nin.ja among them. These made up 2 percent of responses of the 85 buttons photographed—it wasn’t easy to snap everyone who took one in the midst of large scale science fairs. But I thought this analysis of the sample was worth sharing:

18 percent were humorous (lots of total n00b responses);

25 percent were related to vocation, though some of them corresponded more to specific teams within Mozilla (I mentor people for Persona) while others were more broadly related to professional skills (I mentor people for UX research);

Another 25 percent were related to personal passions and causes (I’m an open data nin.ja);

30 percent were related to specific technologies, including languages and localization.

These sets of characterizations were named by yours truly, and I encourage your thoughts on better ways to consider groupings. I found myself stuck as to how to most accurately characterize “Webmaker” when it was listed across buttons: as a vocation, a team, a passion? Also, my initial category of “affiliation” felt too broad given the uniqueness of involvement with the Mozilla Project. Whether in coaching people to use the Mozilla wiki or being a security rockstar, this process has shown me the massive amount of of energy and effort that goes into our open source learning and Internet undertakings. I’m struck by the diversity of responses and feeling grateful for the glance!

The last button I saw upon packing up was a barista sporting I mentor people for caffeine deficiencies. Thanks for all you do, you and you and you.