Mozilla Weekend Tirana 2015

Again an overdue post, sorry about that, but they say “better late than never”, right? Okay, lame excuse, anyway, here we go with my short report about MozWeekend Tirana 2015.

With Mozilla Weekend Tirana 2015, we welcomed the 2nd edition of Mozilla Albania’s flagship event in the capital of Albania, Tirana.
We had a very successful first edition in February 2014, held in Tirana Ekspres, with special guests Flamur Mavraj from Norway and Christos Bacharakis from Greece, so we were afraid if we would be able to top it this year.

But of course at Open Labs and Mozilla Albania we are used to that. The 2nd edition of MozWeekend was held on 28th February / 1st March at TULLA Culture Center, a very cozy and friendly bar and space suitable for similar events. We welcomed fellow Rep from Kosova, Ardian Haxha, with whom we had some great chats and talks at the event.

I will keep this report rather short, but I’m going to include a quick SWOT analysis of the event in case you’re curious to adapt the Mozilla Weekend framework to your community or are generally just interested to find more about how the event went.

For all those who do not know what “SWOT” means; it stands for STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES, OPPORTUNITIES, THREATS and is very helpful when analyzing the status of any project.

 

Strengths	Weaknesses	Opportunities	Threats
Diversity: We have a strong female presence at our events with always around 50% girls/women	There was a lack of technical and/or practical workshops	Collaborate with Mozillians from Kosova to expand impact	Short-sighted contribution paths (contributors stop contribution after time)
Very friendly and easy going environment, with no much need for "icebreaking"	We expected more attendees, but the event was in the middle of the exam season, which we underestimated. We need to keep this in mind for next year.	Firefox Student Ambassadors is a VERY great opportunity to get new contributors involved, as 80% of our attendees are students.
Promo & Social Media is particular strong in Mozilla Albania and Open Labs, we are very coordinated with our online presence and dedicate (usually) the time it deserves.	A space for the local community to meet and work. People always ask us where we are based and it's hard giving them an answer.	A big focus of MozWeekend remains attracting new contributors, which works very well until now. We need to use this opportunity further.

I want to thank everyone at Open Labs who helped out bringing together such a great event! MozWeekend would be unimaginable without a community who backs it.
Especially Kristi, fellow Rep, did a huge job with the organization and I feel a bit bad I was able to have a few more hours sleep than her prior to the event. Big thanks also to Redon who kept the ball rolling while I was in Berlin for the Mozilla German-speaking Community Meeting.