Hosting community events
Hosting community events at Mozilla Spaces
There are many Mozilla Spaces with rooms available for community events. Here are some suggested practices for event hosting.
Contents
Site hosts
Currently a Mozilla employee needs to be present as a site host for events in community spaces.
Especially for weekend and evening events, the site host is responsible for making sure that participants are able to get in, that they stay in public areas, and that the space is left clean and everyone leaves at the ending time.
Scheduling your event
The site host will need to reserve the community space in the Google calendar. It can be a little tricky to figure out what the name of your home community space is.
For example, the main San Francisco community room is identified as SFO 152 Floor 1 Commons
It's good to allow some time between events, to give time for your event to wrap up, for your guests to leave, and for cleaning up and setup for the next event. Half an hour can be enough time for this, if you have a good crew to help close down the event.
For picking an event time, especially for small meetups and workshops, Doodle can be very useful.
Tickets or reservations
It can be very useful to track who is coming to your event with signups beforehand on a wiki page, etherpad, or other way to handle registration. While it isn't always necessary, it can help community organizers to prepare and follow up on their events. Limiting registration can also help keep the event to the amount of people that a space can comfortably fit.
There are several free services for registration and ticketing. It's possible to organize an event, ask for registration, and to "sell" free tickets on Eventbrite or Brown Paper Tickets.
Supplies and preparation
Consider what supplies you might need at the event. You may want to check beforehand to see if these supplies are available at your Mozilla Space. If not or if your event is large, you may want to find out if you can be reimbursed for supplies you buy for your event. It may be possible, for example, for Mozilla Reps to ask for funding for events through the Reps Council.
- Laptops
- pen and paper, whiteboards, signs, tape, sticky notes
- blank name tags or printed badges
- food and drink
- wireless password
- Hashtag for people to use for posts, tweets, and photos
- irc backchannel declared in the event announcement
- map and directions to the event
- accessibility information
- signup sheet for participants
- printed list of registered participants
- printout of introduction or workshop talk
- printed handouts or cards
- slides from speakers, gathered beforehand
- stickers or other swag to give away
- Press invited to the event
- release forms for photographs or video
Mozilla resources
Mozilla community spaces are set up for presentations run from a laptop or from the room's A/V setup. They also have the capability for audio and video streaming and recording. But the tools can be complex to set up and use.
Site hosts can ask through Workplace Resources requests for help and training in using the A/V equipment.
The San Francisco office has laptops available for checkout for events. Currently lsblakk has the keys to the cabinet with these laptops.
It is possible to ask for Mozilla to sponsor food and drink for an event also through Workplace Resources.
(TODO: ask WPR at specific spaces how they like this process to be handled.)
At the event
For smaller events you may be able to have a checklist of registered participants, or a signup sheet at a table by the entry. For larger events or if access control is particularly important, you may need to ask someone to staff the entry, check people in, and hand out name badges or other material.
Roles for organizers
- check-in and welcome
- chair wrangler
- audio visual / slides
- MC, presenter, or facilitator
- Video/audio recording or streaming
- Cleanup
Documenting your event
It's good to write up a blog post, email to a list, or report in some other way on your community event and what happened at it.
You may want to keep metrics on how many people were invited, who RSVPed, and who attended or participated.
Afterwards
Follow up with participants and thank them.
Is there a "next action" you want participants to take, like joining a mailing list? Just after (as well as during) an event is a good time to ask for this.
What events are appropriate for Mozilla Spaces?
The community spaces are meant for Mozillians and our cmomunities to use for purposes in line with Mozilla's mission statement and the Mozilla Manifesto.
Example events
(TODO: list and link to some example events hosted in Mozilla Spaces. )
Notes
Contact information for the various spaces is listed on the Spaces site.
