Last week we hit an important milestone. On 14th of April 2013 we hit the 1,000 mark.  One thousand events that Mozilla Reps organized or have participated in more than 80 countries.

 

The increasing amount of Firefox OS related events organized by Reps in recent months  reflects the incredible momentum that the project is gaining. Reps are ready to play a critical role in our launch markets later this year, actively raising awareness about the project and inspiring new contributors to get involved.

Some “damned lies” for all the statistic lovers out there:

Total events: 1154

Rate of events so far: 1.93 events per day

Rate of events last 3 months: 3.18 events per day

Total Reps: 407

Special thanks to the previous and current council members for all their hard day to day work on the program, and their visionary inputs for the ways forward.

Onwards we go, Jedis!

photo credits: ashish0105, bobreyes, deimidis

Vouched mozillians login
In true spirit of pioneering the integration between Mozilla services,
you now have the ability to login into our portal if you are a vouched
Mozillian (with persona) even if you are not a Rep! You can then
customize a dashboard based on the interest areas of Mozilla you want
to track, and get activities and metrics from Reps that are working on
those areas.

This new functionality raises the awareness around the countless
activities that Reps are driving across all functional areas and
delivers easy discoverability of Reps working on those areas, so that
you can communicate with them. As always we already have in the
pipeline the enhancement of functionalities around this new feature,
like email abilities, unification of dashboards between Mozillians and
Reps and other cool new dashboard functionalities.

and many more features…
..including the ability to email all participants of an event via a
mail modal in event pages, ability to extract people info and emails
if logged in the site in /people page, ability to search in events
based on date range and enhancing the email notification
functionalities.

As those lines are written our web developers together with our webdev
volunteers are working on a Voting system and new commenting system
and categories for events. You can find all about what is in the works
in our current dev sprint.

Special thanks to our devs Tasos and Nemo, our code reviewer Giorgos,
our production manager Ben and all the Reps for the countless
countinous feedback and improvement pointers.

I would like to take this opportunity and welcome our two new webdevs Tasos Katsoulas and Yiannis “Nemo”Giannelos both django-ninjas at day and beer lovers at night! An obvious fit to our team they worked tirelessly on imporving the functionality of the portal and adding new features. In particular:

Mailing enhancements

• Implementing a new ‘Settings’ page for opting in and out mailing features (bug 818036)
• Send an email to the owner of a report after each comment (bug 758603)
• Enhancements in “mail my mentees” form (bug 763490)
• Send email to mentor when a mentee files a new report (bug 762418)
• Monthly reminder for new reps to mentors list (bug 774247)

The new mailing features will enable Reps to communicate more efficiently among their activities and streamline the reporting procedure more. Over the past 1.5 years Mozilla Reps have filled over 3000 reports! Feel free to browse through reps and check out their reports and activities!

Other features included:

• Custom planning pad urls for events (bug 794008)
• iCalendar export for single event (bug 761544)
• Show rep of the month on their profile page (bug 784281)

And also some regular Bugfixes:

• CSV export is now working fully(bug 815766)
• Date reset when event save fails is fixed(bug 778865)
• Fix duplicate results in API queries on “People” page (bug 824892)
• General housekeeping and many minor improvements.

For our next 3 week sprint we will be working on adding cool new features on our portal with a focus on discoverability and vizualization! Timeline vizualization of the events, communication to event attendees, ability to login to our portal given a vouched mozillians.org account, are just some of the
things to come.

As always you can leave feedback in our etherpad, or subscribe to our reps-webdev list to help us out!

Special thanks to our tireless web productions manager Ben Sternthal and our new QA person, Ioana Chiorean (our well known Romanian Reps Mentor)

Onwards we go!

Mozilla Reps have already organized over 700 events around the world and the current rate is 2.1 events per day (!). We need better ways to capture the momentum analyze it and evaluate the huge impact those events have.

One of the main focuses of Mozilla Reps is to get new contributors in Mozilla. The central way to do that is to get people to signup in http://mozilla.org/contribute/ page (which is now localizable!). So we needed a way to tell how many signups happened as a direct result of an event.

Giorgos Logiotatids (our webdev) worked closely with the awesome Bedrock team to deliver a Signup Counter for each event. This is how it works:

- Once a Rep is in an event, she logs in to our portal and goes to the event page.
- By clicking on the “Get Involved” button bottom right she gets a unique URL (per event) for the “Get Involved” page.
- She uses this page (or the link to it) to get people to sign up for
contributor opportunities in Mozilla.
- Once someone signs up, the counter next to the button will increase by one!
- By the end of the event we can see how many sign ups the event had

Moving forward we have plans to integrate more metrics around the signups like: How many people actually ended up being contributors, signups per region or functional area, total signups per Rep, signups Frequency (per type of events) etc..

Finally, special thanks to David Boswell and all the functional owners of the “Get Involved” page, for their fantastic long time effort to engage with new contributors and get them involved daily.

ps. We are working on a way for all Mozillians to log in our portal and have access to those metrics. Stay tuned! In the meantime check all our upcoming events

The story so far

Over the past two months we developed from scratch and deployed the version 0.1 of Mozilla Reps portal.

We have been planning for this since the start of the program 10 months ago, but we finally got the resources and momentum to build it starting in January, when Giorgos joined the team

Version 0.1 codenamed Solkar was a ground-laying version with its scope limited in implementing a profile system so we can manage the Reps profiles better. We knew we had hundreds of Reps but visualization is a game-changer:

People page in Solkar

Version 0.2 codenamed Skon is bringing cool new features New looks, reports, enhancements on profiling and cool discovery features.

Skon new looks

Dashboard in Skon

But in order for us to build the best website for Reps, we need your help testing it and suggesting new features!

Come test with us!

Tomorrow we are doing a test day on our yet-to-be-realeased 0.2. We will be in IRC, in #remo-dev channel (irc.mozilla.org) testing various scenarios with the help of our awesome QA team!

Join us for 24 hours of testing on our new portal!

You don’t have to be a master in documentation, devote 3 full days or even be a Rep to join us.

We will be coordinating our efforts in #remo IRC channel and in this EtherPad
Finishing and polishing some SOPs will be our primary focus (more info on the EtherPad). We will make sure to have people on IRC all the time to coordinate efforts and we are expected to hold some calls and IRC chats.

If you plan on joining us, please write your name on the Etherpad and drop by IRC to discuss on what we should focus those 3 days!
We will shortly announce a kick-off 3 hours long call/meeting for Friday (afternoon for GMT)

Let’s write and shine!

"OMG! Let's document!"

ps. We will have gifts for all participants

“Which is the place in the world with biggest Firefox share?”

Antarctica!

Antarctica has consistently Firefox share of 80+ % for years now! (Based on all stat/market share agencies that I could dig into). This could come as a surprise to some people, but think about it! It is totally logical. Antarctica is packed with scientists/pioneers/engineers/brilliant minds that can settle for nothing less that bleeding edge technology, and this is Firefox!

Now how about leveraging this power and recognizing this fact? How about a Mozilla Antarctica Community?

Let’s kick this off! Over the next weeks David Boswell, Robert Nyman, Anthony Ricaud and me will reach out to those people, establishing a community where no browser has gone before.

]]> http://pierros.papadeas.gr/?feed=rss2&p=273 8 http://pierros.papadeas.gr/?p=269 http://pierros.papadeas.gr/?p=269#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:23:45 +0000 Pierros Papadeas http://pierros.papadeas.gr/?p=269 The usual suspect, a brown van arrived once again in my doorstep. This time the package was kinda lightweight. But I should not judge by the weight.

I quickly opened the white wrapping and I had a mysterious grey bag in front of me.

Looking a bit closer, on the tag, my heart jumped “Mozilla ReMo Pack – XLarge”

Finally, it was party time! I cannot remember the moments between the grey bag and having all those super-uber-cool goodies laying on my desk

The bag includes:

• 10x – Firefox standard-issue buttons
• 2x – Firefox old-time-classics lanyards
• 2x – Mozilla Reps the-little-awesome buttons (white)
• 2x – Mozilla Reps the-little-awesome buttons (black)
• 5x – Mozilla the-proud-ones transparent stickers (white)
• 5x – Mozilla the-proud-ones transparent stickers (black)
• 2x – Mozilla Reps flagship transparent stickers (white)
• 2x – Mozilla Reps flagship transparent stickers (black)
• 1x – Mozilla Reps awesome-ready polo shirt
• 1x – A6 bonus welcome note

When we kickstarted Mozilla Reps back in June, we wanted to make sure that every single Mozilla Rep will be equipped with the finest set of swag to be identified and spread the love. Now we are able to provide it!

Rep mentors will be contacting their mentorees for delivery of those cant-wait-to-have packs

More info can be found in the Swag wiki page and you can find more pictures on this album.

Two weeks ago, I was more than lucky to be able to join Arabic Community for their first Inter-Community Meetup. The hosting community was Mozilla Jordan and we were happy to have Majda and Moncef from Algeria, Melek and Sahar from Tunisia, Haitham Sinar and Ahmed from Egypt, Firas and Hatem from Palestine.

Arriving on Thursday, it was pretty obvious that this was going to be a fantastic meetup. The hosts have done excellent job on arranging travels, accommodation and meeting place. Thanks Rami, Rami, and Jordanian team! (Issa, Addy, Abdulrahman e.a). By Friday everyone has arrived and the advantage of no-language barrier (everyone was speaking Arabic) was quickly noticeable. Socializing between the team and sharing best practices started even before the official start of the event.

The First day (after a long breakfast with Egyptian team raiding the place) we focused on presenting the teams and making sure that everyone knows each other. We were lucky enough and more than happy to have Mitchell Baker with us (Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation), who was touring Middle East visiting the local communities.

Eman from Mozilla Jordan

After a long reality check session, were we identified Pros, Cons and Ideas for the Community we broke for lunch, and returned having a session on grouping and discussing about individual items that were raised in Reality Check. As night approached, everyone was so engaged in discussions around Mozilla’s presence in Arabic region, that we almost forgot the Amman-by-night walk we have arranged.

Amman is a city of 7 hills, inhabited by several civilizations over the past several thousand years. The multicultural spirit can be seen all around this wonderful city, and was the perfect setting for a Mozilla Arabic meetup!

Second day started with a goal setting session, and task management over specific goals. Cool ideas were examined and are on track (Country wide tours, parallel events within Arab region, common portal expansion and aggregation of Arabic content). Also we did a series of mini presentations about Mozilla projects (REMO, AMO, SUMO etc)

Haitham, Soliman and Mitchell

As promised Sunday afternoon, we had a much-needed hands-on hacking session, were we examined specific projects of Mozilla and ways to contribute on them. Bugzilla introduction, Firefox hacking and add-ons 101 were in the schedule and unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to expand on other aspects of Mozilla. Next time more hacking time! (promise!)

Sunday night was the time for out public event. We arrived in the university right on time (speeding through Amman’s heavy traffic) and although the attendance was not as high as expected, the viewers of the live stream picked at 400 people J Egyptian and Tunisian team did their magic, using social media channels and the event was covered fantastically. Mitchell gave a talk on Mozilla in general, Ahmed fascinated us about Arabic Fonts and Content and their challenges on the web and Melek with Majda gave an excellent introduction to the Open Web in Arabic (and partially French)

Firas, Sahar, Melek and Hatem in the public Event

The impact of the event was huge. Here are some of the posts about the event and some quotes from social media:

• Tunisia Team (post 1, post 2)
• Local Media (post1, post 2, post 3)
  
• Majda’s post
• Haitham’s Recap
• Ahmed’s intro to Open Web
• Sinar’s Recap
• Rami’s Post

Interviews were recoreded during the project (courtesy of Egyptian team):

Interview with Mitchell Baker, also interviews with Issa Mahasna, Rami Khader, Melek Jebnoun and myslef
More pictures from the event can be found in Ahmed’s Flickr Set
and in uStream you can find recorded the Public Event

Finally you can find all the notes, goals, minutes of the meeting in this Etherpad

Huge thanks to all the arabic team that made this event possible! Exciting times ahead of us

Until next time : Halas and Masalam!

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We all arrived in Friday, and we used most of the day to get ourselves set up in the huge (yet old) Moskva Hotel in Sofia. I was traveling together with the Greek community representatives Kostas Antonakoglou and Fredy Damkalis (our rookie!) We spend most of Friday in catching up with the rest of the team and learning the new faces

Saturday was a community working day. We had great presentations by L10n team (Chofmann, Pike, Matjaz, Milos and Vito) and then we had a community working session around what has been good and bad on Balkans community lately.

The day ended with the Firefox 4 party of Sofia with many local people attending and having a long Q&A session with us all.

Sunday was kinda a wrap up day, as we sat down to our laptops and tried to fixed loose ends of the Balkans Community. Regional websites, L10n caveats, Sumo pushes and community health were covered as we worked throughout all day.

A week after the meeting we asked everyone to fill out their Individual Feedback on the Aftermath page.

Interesting quotes from that page:

• everyone made it safely to the meetup and safely back home (yeap.. with taxi drivers of Sofia, that’s an accomplishment)
• we need to have 2 full days of work so we have enough time to have presentations, discussions and hacking (+1 for me! 3 days event would be a better option from now on)
• no wifi (the epical fail) (that was indeed kinda disturbing but Kostas hosted an adhoc network and we were fine)
• The instructions Bogo prepared for printing were perfect, should be used as a template for future events. (Indeed pretty helpful handbook!)
• Have an MC / responsible for every unit on the schedule and make sure he knows his rights & his responsibilities. (Important aspect of organization that should be taken care next time)

Next stop: Athens! (we still need to finalize it, but Greek team is getting pretty excited about that!)