Engagement/Developer Engagement/Event request guidelines

This page is for people seeking speakers or sponsorship for developer-oriented events. If you're a Mozillian who will be attending an event sponsored by Mozilla, we'd like to get your feedback about the event.

Developer Event Request Guidelines

Mozilla Developer Relations community seeks to help developers use open Web technologies. One way that we do this is by supporting technical conferences, hackathons, and meetups that bring developers together and share knowledge about open Web technologies. By support, the Dev Rel group includes financial sponsorship, help with securing Mozilla speakers, and Mozilla branded promotional items at the event.

What kind of support does Mozilla provide for events?

Please use the Developer Events Request Form to request support for third-party developer-oriented events, in the form of Mozilla speakers, panelists, workshops, sponsorship, booths/tables.

If you are a Mozilla Rep organizing a Mozilla-oriented event, please contact a Mozilla Rep in your geographic area, for help with hosting your event, including submitting a budget request from the Reps budget.

If you are a Mozilla Community member organizing an event, please review the How To Guideline .

If you are looking for sponsorship support for any other non-Developer focused events, please contact the events@mozilla.com

How can I request Mozilla support for my event?

If you are looking for support from Mozilla for your developer-oriented event, please submit a request using our Developer Event Request Form. This form gathers all the information we need to properly understand your event and evaluate your request, and taking the time to complete this form thoroughly now will save lots of time and lots of emails asking for more information.

We ask that all requests are submitted at least 6 weeks prior to your event's date, so we have sufficient time to review the request, confirm a speaker/schedule their travel plans, fulfill sponsorship tasks, etc. If you have a question about events that is not covered by the request form, please email dev-events (at) mozilla (dot) com.

Who reviews my request?

Requests are reviewed weekly (unless holidays and scheduling conflicts arise) by the Developer Events Team. This team is made up of representatives from Mozilla's Developer Relations, Developer Tools, Participation, MDN, and Events teams.

How will my request be reviewed?

We have established this set of criteria by which we evaluate all event support requests:

• Alignment to Mozilla goals and strategy: It helps if you can show a relationship between your event and achieving [DevRel|Developer Relations] goals. We have a set amount of funding every year, and we need to make sure that our dollars are spent on events that are supporting the goals we have set for the year.

• Submission at least 6 weeks prior to event date: It takes time to review the requests. Please be considerate and respectful regarding this time frame to allow sufficient time for consideration.

• Mozilla participation: Money alone doesn't represent Mozilla very well, so we only sponsor events where members of the Mozilla community (volunteers or staff) are participating. They could be attending, speaking, organizing, or participating in some other way, as long as they are at the event in person. A sponsorship needs to have one or more Mozillians at the event to engage with attendees about why Mozilla is supporting this event, how we can work together, what cool new things is Mozilla offering, etc. Note: If you have no Mozillians involved in your event, we are happy to help find someone to speak, attend, sit on a panel, etc., but this does NOT guarantee a sponsorship. Finding Mozilla participants is judged independently of sponsorship opportunities.

• No pay-to-speak: While having a Mozillian participate in your event is necessary for getting sponsorship, at the same time, we don't pay for sponsored speaking slots, or accept speaking slots that are contingent on sponsorship. We prefer that Mozilla speakers be invited or accepted on the quality of their presentations and the interest the attendees have in what they have to say, not because Mozilla has paid to put someone in front of an audience. We believe this policy:
  • is equitable to conference organizers seeking Mozilla speakers
  • is fair to other speakers who don't have the means to pay for a speaking opportunity
  • helps us gauge interest in the topics and products we might propose to speak about
  • maintains the credibility of Mozilla speakers with audiences

• Budget consideration: This sponsorship request process is specifically from the Dev Rel team. We are limited in resources and usually do not consider supporting requests that require significant sponsorship (in general, above $5,000 USD). However, we are happy to review the event and its purpose to help direct the request to another Mozilla division.

• Code of conduct: In keeping with Mozilla's culture of inclusiveness, we strongly encourage event organizers seeking sponsorship or speaker to create, publish, and enforce a code of conduct for their event participants. The bigger your event, the stricter we will be about this requirement. However, small events can also benefit from explicit guidelines for respectful behavior. You can find examples and guidance for writing a code of conduct on the Geek feminism wiki. We unfortunately have had a few of our speakers mistreated at past events, and even worse, the organizers did not intervene. Our Mozillians are awesome, and they all deserve to be treated with respect.

Sponsorship Follow-up

Here's the general timeline (subject to change and exceptions): We review requests that are three months out from current date (for example, if it's currently January 2016, we are generally reviewing requests Feb, Mar, April of 2016. The DevRel Events team meets on a weekly basis to review requests submitted through the events bugs form. Email requests will be redirected to the form, and all communications will be followed up on the form. Sometimes, the team takes additional time to re-direct the request to the appropriate team, or to wait for replies that are dependent to the request submitted.

If Mozilla sponsors your event, please be aware that we will ask you for follow-up information after the event, such as number of attendees and social media reach. The purpose of this follow-up is to help us track the effectiveness of our sponsorships and make decisions for the future. You're probably collecting this information anyway.