2015-07-19 at 19:24:18
At the Community Meetup of the German-speaking community back in February we decided to organize a Mozilla Day or Mozilla Weekend in 2015 to get more visible in Berlin, tell people about Mozilla's mission and projects, and recruit new Mozillians.
First we had a "Call for Speakers" which did not turn out as hoped, since we didn't have a lot of proposal for talks. Further we were missing quite a few people to facilitate the workshops. Fortunately there was a Mozilla Leadership Meetup on July 10 in Berlin, so we contacted the Leadership team and asked, if they wanted to participate and have a few talks about Mozilla and its projects. This worked out really well and it was great to have part of the Leadership Team at the event as well. I think this helped to get contributors as well.
It was the first time we created a website for an event in the German-speaking community. We decided on mozweekend.de which we will be able to use also for future Mozilla Weekends in Germany. I think we need to do that as well for future, big events since we had quite a lot of visitors and registrations. Until one day before the event we had about 120 registrations.
For the first day, we had planned talks to introduce Mozilla, and dive deeper into the different projects. Since we had about 120 registrations we applied our standard 33% no-show rate and expected about 80 participants. In the end, we had around 55 participants, but nevertheless the attendees were very interested. This is a sign that quantity is not always the goal, quality is way more important.
| **Begin** | **Topic** | **Presenter** |
| 10:00 | Welcome & Introduction to Mozilla | Elio Qoshi & Michael Kohler |
| 10:15 | What's new in Firefox? | Michael Kohler |
| 10:30 | Speech Recognition at Mozilla | Kelly Davis |
| 11:15 | Ask us anything | Mitchell Baker, David Bryant, Axel Hecht |
| 12:00 | Lightning Talks | Elio Qoshi & André Fiedler & Axel Hecht & Mario Behling & Per Guth/td> |
| 13:30 | Firefox OS - Current status and the future | André Fiedler |
| 14:00 | Why I am at Mozilla | David Bryant |
| 14:30 | Shape of the Web | Mary Ellen Muckerman |
| 15:00 | WoMoz - Women at Mozilla | Kristi Progri |
| 15:45 | Leaving behind the designer ego in open source communities | Elio Qoshi |
| 16:00 | Opportunities to Contribute at Mozilla | George Roter & Michael Kohler/td> |
| 16:45 | Closing Session | Michael Kohler |
All these talks will be available on air.mozilla.org once their uploaded as well! I think we had quite a good mix of projects, even though Firefox was not represented as good as it could have been.
Awesome talk about @firefox OS by @sonnenkiste at #mozweekend @mozilla pic.twitter.com/fcd39pdK6R — Mario Behling (@mariobehling) July 11, 2015
What an eye-opening talk about Women in the Tech industry by @KristiProgri #mozweekend pic.twitter.com/LaCGMJ2dIY — TheOne (@wagnerand) July 11, 2015
The "Ask us Anything" session was very important and it was great to have Mitchell Baker, Chairwomen of the Mozilla Foundation, and David Bryant (VP of Platform Engineering), and Axel Hecht (contributed since the beginning of Mozilla). We had a lot of interesting questions from the audience.
QA with @MitchellBaker @david_bryant and @axelhecht at #mozweekend pic.twitter.com/uzLgfNKUd8 — Brian King (@brianking) July 11, 2015
You can find all the pictures and tweets with the hashtag #mozweekend.
Excited to see @geroter and @KohlerSolutions talking about Contributing at Mozilla, incl. fun exercises! #mozweekend pic.twitter.com/dicfLSJGhE — TheOne (@wagnerand) July 11, 2015
#mozweekend #berlin 2015 pic.twitter.com/laK02rAP6Q — ANIL KUMAR (@anilbms75) July 16, 2015
Go ahead and read about Day 2 as well!
A big thanks goes out to the organization team and the 10 speakers, you all did great work! And thanks to everyone who showed up even though it didn't rain!