TechSpeakers

(draft warning)

Overview

Description: Increase developer awareness and adoption of Mozilla products and the Open Web as a platform through a strong community-driven technical speaker development program.

• Status: Program design, pilot development
• Contact: Havi Hoffman
• Core Team: Rosana Ardila, Dietrich Ayala, Soumya Deb, Emma Irwin, Janet Swisher

Mission & Purpose

Increase developer awareness and adoption of Mozilla products and the Open Web as a platform by:

• Growing a base of high-quality volunteer speakers...
• Supporting their efforts with training for both speaking and content generation...
• In order to present timely, relevant technical material at regional developer events.

Outcomes

• Volunteer speakers have improved speaking skills and high quality technical content when representing Mozilla at influential, top-tier developer events, and at relevant regional, educational, and community-run events.
• Mozilla has a global team of trained speakers to send to conferences, to host workshops, and represent the project in other technical contexts.
• Speaker materials and assets become easily discoverable and accessible (content and templates).
• Graduates replicate the program in their regional communities.

How It Works

Tech Speakers is a six week program that we're building. Currently, our pilots of the program are by invitation only. The sessions combines group speaking practice and technical content development.

Each participant:

• Picks a topic at the beginning of the program
• Develops a talk on that topic during the program
• Submits their talk to a conference CFP by the end of the program

Each week:

• Participants speak for two minutes on a predefined topic
• The group provides feedback to the speaker
• Guest speakers will join, to teach their area of expertise

Materials

• TechSpeakers Curriculum
• Speaking Tips

How To Join

• We are currently running the third iteration of the pilot program, and we continue to test and tweak the format and curriculum as each session passes.

• To extend the reach of Tech Speaker training, we've begun to enlist the help of Tech Speakers who've been through the six-week program and have given some talks and workshops, to develop and offer speaker training sessions at community meetups, classrooms, co-working or hacker spaces.

• We are working closely with the Participation team to make this available to more Leaders, since speaking and presenting are key tools for engaging communities.

• After the pilot phase has completed, we’ll continue to share our learnings and develop the next steps for extending the program and making it available to all Mozillians.

Project Meta

Resources for Speakers

• CFPs or How to find a conference to speak at
  • How to write a good CFP:
  • Subscribe to Technically Speaking
• Presentation Basics
  • Posture and presence
• Creating great technical content

Mozilla Tech Speakers

• Andre Garzia (Brazil)
• Rizky Ariestiyansyah (Indonesia)
• Rabimba Karanjai (India/USA)
• Andrzej Mazur (Poland)
• Sumanth Damarla (India)

Timeline

Pilot #3 - Q1 2016, FEB

Pilot #2 - COMPLETE

• Q3/Q4 - High-level Schedule
  • Determine schedule and general structure
  • Candidate selection process
  • Invite candidates
  • Select and invite guest speakers
  • Pre-program introductions
  • Program begins
  • Program completes

Pilot #1 - COMPLETE

The first pilot completed successfully.

• Q1 February
  • Program design solidified
  • Program mission and goals socialized
  • Pilot design completed
  • Pilot participant list drawn up
• Q1 March
  • Program design published on wiki
  • Workflow with Reps, MDN decided
  • Pilot participants selected and communicated with
  • Achievement criteria defined and published
• Q2 April
  • Pilot is ongoing
  • Participants are working through the curriculum
  • Regular meetings for ongoing assessment
• Q2 May
  • Pilot concludes
  • Post-mortem to identify improvements and impact
  • Program refinements from pilot results are implemented and communicated

Pilot Program

• Description
  • Work with Mozilla Reps to select five participants
  • The selected participants help work out the kinks - refine criteria, identify mentorship needs
• Outcomes
  • Set of program refinements required to be implemented prior to official launch

Communication

• General
  • Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mozilla-tech-speakers
  • Discourse Channel: https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/speaking
  • IRC Channel: #techspeakers (for now)
  • Telegram: techspeakers

• Announcements
  • Lists: devrel, mdn, mozillians, reps
  • Hacks - blog post (Havi/Mar 30)
  • Social: TBD