Hi,
as some of you know, before i got hired by Mozilla is was since several years Mozilla Community Member and a lot of great people helped to get started, to find the docs to get started and answered my questions in the beginning and helped me to find my way in the “Mozilla Universe”.
I have also now as Mozilla Employee a lot of contact to the Community as example on IRC, Conferences like Cebit/MAOW and i always get a lot of Questions about Mozilla and how to get involved – people are very interested to be part of the fantastic Community!
I was invited to join one of the regular OpenOffice Meetup in Munich (thanks again Florian!) and i found it very impressive, about 12 OpenOffice Community Member got together to discuss and talk about OpenOffice in a very informal atmosphere (no sessions, no agenda, just getting together).
And i was thinking that this would be a great thing to have such meetups also for the Mozilla Community. And so i developed the Idea of the “MozillaMeetups” (if someone has a more creative naming, send me a mail 🙂 – A get together open for everyone – for people who are interested to contribute to Mozilla (Hack/Test/Spread the word/etc) and also is open to people who have questions about Mozilla.
The Idea of this Meetups is to connect Mozilla Community Members in local areas (like the Munich Area where i live). And i think this meetups can be organized all over the world. The Mozilla Community and Firefox Fans and even Mozilla Employee’s are spread over the world, so if you are interested in organizing such a Meetup in your local area, feel free!
So how does a typical meetup look like:
* They can happening during the week, as example on Wednesday
* The Location is a restaurant or other location where you can put tables together
* Starting as example a 6pm and plan to be there 3-4 hours
* People can join/leave whenever they want and everyone pay his own bill
* As this meetups happen in restaurants, people can eat&drink during the meetup
* People chat on the table about various topics, new features, how to get involved, how to start with Mozilla….there is no agenda, everyone can chat on the topic they want
So its very simple to organize such a Meetup ! We plan to do such a Meetup (the “prototype” 🙂 in Munich/Germany in May and i hope there will be a lot more everywhere ! 🙂
I have created a Project on Spreadfirefox.com – and if you have feedback, feel free to comment in the Spreadfirefox Group or send me an email: tomcat@mozilla.com !
Also in addition to the Mozilla Meetups i work together with Florian Effenberger from the OpenOffice Project on something that we call “OpenSourceMeetups” (we are working on a more creative name 🙂 Idea is to bring OpenSource Projects together in a local region like as example the greater Munich Area and to Connect People that are interested in getting involved into OpenSource.
It should be a way to connect OpenSource Projects, to exchange knowledge and to maybe work together on local events.
As Prototype and best-practice showcase we plan the event in the Munich Area (for those who are not familiar with Germany, Munich is the High-Tech Area of Germany).
We have so far we have no set date or location for this OpenSourceMeetups, but i will blog here and you can also find more information -> here
Feedback and suggestions are welcome 🙂 !
– Tomcat
