Balkans/Events:2010/Ljubljana/Postmortem

Event background

Mozilla Europe once again sponsored Balkans Communities meet-up, which now happened in Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia. Lead contributors from Balkan communities were invited and sponsored by Mozilla Europe to participate in a 2-day workshop. The aim of the workshop was to enable Mozilla communities in the Balkans to share and learn from each other's experience working on the Mozilla Project, improve collaboration in the future, and work on specific tasks, based on the 5 goals defined in the previous Balkan Meetup in Skopje and in light of the upcoming Firefox 4 release.

Participants

Every community was represented by 2 contributors:

• Bosnian community [Aleksandar Savic]
• Bulgarian community [Bogomil Shopov and Mihail Chilyashev]
• Croatian community [Edin Huric]
• Greek community [Pierros Papadeas & Kostas Antonakoglou]
• Macedonian community [Gorjan Jovanovski & Novica Nakov]
• Romanian community [Alexandru Szasz]
• Serbian community [Milos Dinic & Marko Jovanovic]
• Slovenian community [Matjaz Horvat, Brian King, Vito Smolej, and others]
• Kosovo community [Heroid Shehu, Gent Thaçi]

Mozilla Europe also invited some staff to join:

• Axel Hecht - Localization Shepherd, Mozilla
• Kadir Topal - SUMO Community Manager, Mozilla

Beside community members, we had several Kiberpipa community people helping us organise the event and make sure all the tech requirements were met. Also, for the Saturday dinner, Mozilla contributors from Balkans had a chance to meet and speak to:

• Gary Kovacs - CEO, Mozilla
• Tristan Nitot - President, Mozilla Europe
• Chris Beard - Chief Marketing Officer, Mozilla
• Mary Colvig - Marketing, Mozilla

Sessions and workshops

• All talks were both filmed and streamed live at http://video.kiberpipa.org/live.html
• Every community had ~5 minutes to present their current and future tasks
• Workshops led by Mozilla staff and contributors - everyone was involved

Pros & Cons

Milos Dinic

- WHAT WORKED:

• Hostel in a good position - near to Ljubljana downtown, near to bus and train station, near to the venue
• Venue was perfect - main room big enough and small enough; a few other rooms when we needed privacy
• Equipment was fantastic, we had everything we needed, and a few more things over it
• Venue was provided by open-source community, so there was an additional stimulus
• New community members played amazingly well
• We had experienced community members helping out, as well as an intern(myself)
• Due to the lack of strict management, community members felt empowered enough to shape the event flow
• Excellent participation from all community contributors
• Employees(along with the ones who joined us for the dinner) were all community members, behaved as such and therefore contributed to a relaxed atmosphere
• Partying wasn't pushed(say necessary), and we had a nice dinner hours (7-9) so we could get enough rest if we wanted

- WHAT DIDN'T:

• No swags nor promotional material(badges, stickers etc) for contributors to bring home
• Only ~5 mins per community to talk about it's achievements and plans
• No discussion on how each particular community will continue its work
• Sandwiches for lunch are not considered a meal for Balkans people
• No community business cards made for contributors
• No note that laptops shouldn't be used during sessions
• Thunderbird wasn't mentioned almost at all at the event

- SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT:

• Everything was about the community, but we kind of focused on the contributors, but not communities. We missed a strong and long brainstorming about how to build and strengthen communities, how to recognise and solve problems, how to attract more community members...
• Just one session related to community promotion, which is the most important bit in getting more community members. No(or in case I missed it, very short) time spent on Marketing and engagement
• We should have someone explain Mozilla's(or Mozilla Europe's) global next 2 quarters plan, to get contributors more aware of what path are we taking, so they could adjust their plans to such goals
• No promotion before the event. We should plan a marketing campaign before the next event to let everyone know it's happening so they could watch the stream and presentations. Just a few blog posts before this event, as opposed to the promotion for Mozilla Balkans in Skopje
• No way for participants to give feedback in real time. We should set up a wiki page, or private google doc for that(for things like: we didn't like the juice, WiFi connection was bad, chairs were not comfortable)
• Not much AMAZING stuff, like Demo Wizard's demos