Moving from Local Events to Strong Local Communities

Breakout Session B054

Moderators: Nathaniel James, Sarah Doherty

Challenge: Local communities have developed strong relationships already, but Mozilla as a whole doesn't have relationships with all the communities. This session allows us to learn what has worked well for individual communities and help us understand how we can better connect across multiple communities.

Panelists

Each speaker introduced themself and talked about a tool they have found helpful with organizing successful events and building local communities.

Alan Gun / gunner (strategy and implementation for Drumbeat Events)

Tool: Interactivity in sessions Examples from Drumbeat events:

• Participants are seated in a circle so they can see face-to-face. Reasoning: A typical presentation room format is not optimal for discussions.
• No slide presentations are used.

Sarah Doherty (marketing events)

• Tool: Firefox Education Toolkit for fliers, videos, and presentations

William Quiviger (events in Europe)

• Tool: touch base with contributors on the ground as the first step

Gen Kanai (events in Asia)

• Tool: leverage events that are already taking place (ex: BarCamp, WordCamp events)

Tomcat (events in Germany)

• Tool: offer Open Source meetups (non-technical, for general information)

Marcia Knous (QA events)

• Tools: using Meetups.com, trying meetups at new events (ex: Blogher)

Rafael (Thunderbird events)

• Tool: using social media for publicity and getting the word out
  

Questions & Answers

How do we make plan events and make local communities sustainable?

Drumbeat Local Event Kit helps with planning events.

How do you mix social and formality of events?

Depends on your audience and who comes to the event. Lateral collaborations are great because participants learn from each other and build relationships.

What do we do next to keep the conversation going?

• Posting notes on wiki
• Emailing lists
• Creating an irc channel (possibly #events)
• Email Nathan (njames at mozillafoundation dot org) or Sarah (sarah at mozilla dot com) with questions using subject line "Event - Community"