Mozilla German-speaking Community Meetup 2015 in Berlin

I had the pleasure to be invited to the annual Mozilla german speaking community meetup in Berlin this year. Although I am based in Albania and not in Germany, Austria or Switzerland; I contribute from time to time also to the German community, having helped out for the Firefox 10h Anniversary campaign and various other stuff (Firefox has a market share of almost 50% in Germany!).

As I grew up in Germany, I am quite familiar with the culture and speak the language also fluently. However I am most of the time unable to put my German into good use in Albania, for obvious reasons, so it always feels good to practice it.

This was my first time in Berlin and my first time in Germany in almost 4 years. I never visited a Mozilla office before either, so I was really excited for the meetup this year.

Disclaimer: This is a short summary from everything which happened during the community meetup. I am including here Michael Kohler’s notes from his blog, simply due to laziness. Kudos to Mexikohler for being so awesome! Check out his blog for the German version also.

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Day 1

The meetup was held on February 20 to February 22 2015. To facilitate the coordination between all volunteers and staff living/working in the German speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) we meet once a year to discuss any topics, plans and goals for the year. Further it’s important to meet regularly to have certain discussions in person since these are faster and more efficient. In total 27 persons attended this meetup.

On Saturday we started the first official day at 10am.

Start	End	Topic	Duration	Who?
10:00	10:30	Getting to know each other, Mozilla in general	30′	Everyone
10:30	12:00	Introductionary Discussions + Mozilla Goals	1h 30′	Everyone
12:00	13:00	Discussions / Group Planning	1h	Groups
13:00	14:00	Lunch in the Office	1h	Everyone
14:00	15:30	Feedback of the working groups + Discussions	1h 30′	Everyone
16:30	17:30	Participation 2015 (English)	1h	Everyone
17:30	19:00	Community Tiles	1h 30′	Everyone
20:00	22:00	Dinner	2h 30′	Everyone

We began the meetup with a short introduction round since not all of the attendees knew each other. It was nice to see that from all around the Mozilla projects people came to Berlin to discuss and plan the future.

After that Brian introduced us to Mozilla’s goals and plans for 2015. Firefox (more focus on Desktop this year), Firefox OS (user driven strategy), Content Services (differentiate income) and Webmaker were the focus. To reach our goals for the community we also need to know about Mozilla’s overall goals so we can align them.

To know where we currently stand with our community, we did a “SWOT” analysis (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).

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 Strengths:

• L10N:  amount of work that was done and the quality of it
• a lot of different projects are worked on by the community
• we had more (and more impactful) events in 2013
• Being spontaneous
• …

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Weaknesses:

• a lot of work
• “bus factor”
• communication
• not a lot of social media activities
• weekly meetings aren’t very efficient
• ….

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Opportunities:

• Web Standards
• Rust
• Privacy
• Firefox Student Ambassadors
•  …

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Threats:

• Fragmentation
• Chrome + Google Services
• …

 

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We splitted up in different groups to discuss group-specific topics and report back to everybody. We had “Localization”, “Developer Engagement / Programming”, “Community Building” and “Websites”.

We discussed the first outcomes of the groups together. Please refer to day 2 to see the results.

Markus, a local developer from Berlin, came by on Saturday. He’d like to organize regular events in Berlin to increase the presence of Mozilla in the city and to build a local community. We like this idea and will support him in 2015!

(Photo: Mario Behling)

After the group discussions Brian had further information: Participation. Please refer to Mark Surman’s blogpost to get more information about that.

At the end of the official part of the day we had a discussion about the “Community Tile”. When you open a new tab in a new Firefox profile you’ll see an overview of different sites you can visit. One of these links is reserved for the community. We discussed our proposal and came to the conclusion that we should focus to tell everyone what the German speaking community does and especially that there are local people working on Mozilla projects.

 

(Photo: Hagen Halbach)

Want to see who was there? See for yourself!

(Photo: Brian King)

You can find all pictures of the meetup on flickr.

 

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Day 2

On Sunday we once again started at 10am at the Berlin Office.

Start	End	Topic	Duration
10:00	13:00	Plan 2015 / Events / Goals / Roles etherpad	45′	Everyone
13:00	13:45	Content mozilla.de	45′	Everyone
13:45	14:15	IRC Meeting + Summary Meeting	30′	Everyone
14:00	…	Departing or other discussions	…	Everyone

At first we had the same breakout groups again, this time to evaluate goals for 2015. After that we discussed those together with the whole group and decided on goals.

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Localization

The l10n group has worked out a few points. First they updated multiple wiki pages. Second they discussed several other topics. You can find the overview of topics here.

Goals:

• Finish the documentation on the wiki
• Get in touch with the “Localizers in Training”

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SUMO

SUMO has done an introduction into the new tools. Further they decided on a few goals.

Goals:

• Have 90% of all articles on SUMO translated all the time
• For Firefox releases all of the top 100 articles should be translated

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Programming

Goals:

• organize a “Mozilla Weekend” (this does not only cover developers)
• give a talk on Jetpack
• continue the Rust meetups
• developer meetups in Berlin
• recruit 5 new dev contributors

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Community Building

In the community building group we talked about different topics. For example we looked at what’s working now and what’s not. Further we talked about Firefox Student Ambassadors and recognition. You can find the overview here.

Goals:

• have at least 10 FSA until the end of the year
• have 2 new Reps in the north of Germany
• get WoMoz started (this is a difficult task, let’s see)
• finish the visual identity (logo) until end of Q2
• have at least 5 events in cities, where we never did events before
• Mozilla Day / Weekend
• define onboarding process
• better format for the weekly meeting

 

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Websites

All German Mozilla sites are currently hosted by Kadir. Since Kadir doesn’t have enough time to support them, the goal is to move them to Community IT. This was agreen upon at the community meetup. You can find the relevant bug here.

Goal:

• transfer all sites
• refresh the mozilla.de content

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All these plans and goals are summarized in our Trello board. All German speaking community members can self-assign a task and work on it. With this board we want to track and work on all our plans.

(Photo: Hagen Halbach)

After that we discussed what features should be on the mozilla.de website. In general, all the content will be updated.

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• product and project overview
• landing page for the community tile
• list of events
• Download-Button
• link to “contribute”
• link to the mailing list (no support!)
• link to the newsletter
• Planet
• Social Media
• prominent link to SUMO for help
• link to the dictionaries

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(Photo: Hagen Halbach)

At the end we talked about our weekly meeting and drafted a proposal how to make it more efficient. The following changes will be done once everything is clear (we’re discussing this on the mailing list). Until then everything stays the same.

• biweekly instead of weekly
• Vidyo instead of IRC
• document everything on the Etherpad so everybody can join without Vidyo (Workflow: Etherpad -> Meeting -> Etherpad)
• the final meeting notes will be copied to the Wiki from the Etherpad

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Feedback / Lessions learned

• planning long-term before events makes sense
• the office is a good location for these kind of meetups, but not for bigger ones
• there is never enough time to discuss everything together, so individual breakouts are necessary

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I’d like to thank all attendees who participated in very informative and constructive discussions during the weekend. I think that we have a lot to do in 2015. If we can save the motivation from this meetup and work on our defined plans and goals, we’ll have a very successful year. You can find all pictures of the meetup on flickr.