Sep 23

All Hands

Category: Uncategorized

Last week was the Mozilla Corporation All Hands meeting. This means the entirety of Mozilla (or, at least our employees would could make it) packed into the convention center in San Jose for a week of fun activities and meetings with coworkers from around the globe. We saw neat demos of new technologies and got to apply pressure to people who owed us reviews.

Sitting in the convention center for the first keynote, I couldn’t help thinking back to the first All Hands that I attended. I think it was the second Mozilla Foundation (not yet Corporation) All Hands, the first having been held before I got my internship. I found this snippet from an e-mail about the event:

Date: June 21, 2005
Subject: All Hands Meeting Information – tomorrow at 12 Noon, 650 Castro Street


At 1:00 PM we will start the meeting. Right now there is no formal agenda, but Mitchell will talk and there will be some updates from various members of the organization.

Note that 650 Castro Street didn’t mean the 3rd floor of the building as it does now. Instead, some company had rented us a single room on the ground floor that was being used to hold board meetings. The 25 or so of us sat around in the room to listen to people such as Mitchell talk about the direction of Firefox and the Foundation. Beyond that, I don’t really remember what was discussed in too much detail, but it was a fun time. After the meeting, we all went go karting in Menlo Park (a race that Josh won) before returning to the office the next day to get back to work.

It’s funny to me that the logistics e-mail I found was sent out a day before the event and there was no real set schedule other than, We’re going to talk for a bit. In fact, there weren’t even enough of us that we had to get buses, instead we simply piled into various coworkers cars.

The All Hands meeting last week saw nearly 600 people come in from all around the world. The first planning e-mails went out months in advance and we filled an entire hotel for a full week. Furthermore, the entire first day was filled with keynotes and speakers had a fixed amount of time in which to deliver their messages. Every evening had an activity associated with it, including shuttles to transport everybody to and from the events.

What a change it’s been. I can’t wait to see what next year’s events will hold.

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