Mozilla Kerala Community Meetup 2015

Twenty of the most active and passionate Mozillians of our community came together on October 2-3, 2015 to plan and discuss Mozilla Kerala for the year 2016 and beyond.

The planning for this year’s meetup had begun few months earlier itself. There were some blocking questions in front of our community which could only have been answered by everyone putting their heads together. There was a delay in the clearance of the budget which lead to the dates being pushed to this month, but in the end, all the pieces fell in the right places with some help from the newly-formed Mozilla Participation Team.

The overarching aim and the impact we wanted to have by the end of 2016 was to attract, build and retain contributors in the community. We started our discussions with that in mind.

Day 1

Housekeeping : How are we organized as a community?

There are a wide variety of platforms and tools available for various tasks. Using different services for the same kind of tasks leads to a problem of opaqueness. As an open community, we wanted to avoid that and bring visibility to all the communications we have. We decided to use the following (and only the following) tools for the respective tasks :

General Discussion	Kerala sub-category on Mozilla Community Discourse
Bi-Weekly Meetings	#kerala on MozNet
Documentation	Kerala page on Mozilla Wiki
Administration Issue Tracking	Mozilla Kerala Bugzilla
Development	Mozilla Kerala organization on GitHub
Development Discussions	Mozilla Kerala room on Gitter
Development Issue Tracking	Github Issues

A community can’t grow if its structure does not allow growth. Decentralization of power is an idea everyone agrees with that allows more contributors to feel that they are a part of the community and work for it. But when faced with the need to get things done quickly, many of our core contributors have to assume more responsibility. And in an open community, with great responsibility comes great power. In the long term this might make potential contributors feel powerless or intimidated when they should actually be feeling empowered to take on tasks.

To facilitate newcomers in getting the resources and privileges they need to feel empowered, we formed a set of SOPs. We believe that theses SOPs are enough to guide and resolve any issue of conflict that may arise in the future. We decided that our community would be generally governed by these SOPs and not by any one person in particular. We expect these SOPs to evolve over time to accommodate more things. If you feel that you’d like to contribute to these SOPs, feel free to spark up a discussion going on the community’s discourse or feel free to join us for our next bi-weekly meeting to bring this up.

Day 2

Reaching Out

There were brief discussions on new initiatives to be implemented in the coming months to meet the goals we set. We quickly discarded ideas that have poor Return of Investment (RoI) and divided among ourselves the responsibility to organize various large events. Wait for announcements of these in the coming weeks (or months).

To make better use of our website which has been left unattended for a really long time, the developers set out on multiple new projects. We will soon have a brand new homepage and portals for different contribution pathways. If you’re interested in contributing to these ideas, feel free to reach out to us on our IRC channel : #kerala.

You can view the exciting tweets about the event at #MozillaKeralaMeetup15 and read the raw etherpad notes. Also read this blog post from an attendant’s perspective.