Below is a guest post by our fantastic Outreach Program for Women (OPW) community building intern, Jennie Rose Halperin (Mozillians profile | personal website)…
Before my GNOME Outreach for Women internship, I probably couldn’t have defined the word Mozillian, let alone Mozillarian. I started with a big idea back in November: I would find new contribution opportunities for Information Professionals.
Through a structured focus group, contributor research, and lots of talking and writing, I began to understand the issues that face librarianship in terms of volunteering, professional development, the open web, and our shared digital future.
Personally, my contribution to Mozilla is more than just my own development: It will eventually assist new contributors in every discipline to find their own pathways to meaningful contribution at Mozilla. Librarians are fellow crusaders for the open web, though we face many barriers to entry and access. Information professionals and Mozillians share the goal of open information that serves our users; finding shared affinities can help us become more effective as leaders in our fields.
Last week at code4lib, Sumana Harihareswara gave an amazing talk about tech and libraries that focused on our need to come together, to be hospitable and kind and emphasize empathy as primary to our fields.. My work with Mozilla, though still at its genesis, continues to inspire and delight me. We try to make every contribution and every person feel welcome, and for that, I am proud to call myself a Mozillian.
My talk, below, focuses more deeply on my projects over the past few months. My work has been varied, exciting, and endlessly iterative. I am happy to share my findings with my community and to recognize the power of inclusion, recognition, and kindness in our shared goals.
Thank you again to Mitchell Baker and the GNOME foundation for making this internship possible. I am excited for future contribution opportunities and pleased to continue helping Mozilla in making the web better for us all.