• How we decided upon FOSS.IN

    November 16th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 2 comments »

    If you’ve been following this blog, you may have seen some posts over the past few months about Mozilla’s participation in India’s largest open source conference, FOSS.IN.  Our initial planning culminated with Mozilla’s project day proposal being accepted by the FOSS.IN planning team.  That was exciting.

    What did I learn in this process, and what, if any, valuable takeaways from this process are worth sharing?

    Here goes…

    This is one of the first major events that I helped take a lead role in planning.  Mary Colvig is our event planning manager and has been a long standing member of Mozilla’s marketing team.  (If she had a blog, I’d link to her…but no…though she’s thought about it, apparently.)  Mary’s brought some nice rigor to this process.

    Here are some things we agreed were important for this trip to succeed:

    • Create clear goals and potential outcomes if we were to participate;
    • Enlist key constituents from the Mozilla community and Mozilla Corporation to help in the decision process;
    • Host weekly, purposeful meetings to discuss updates;
    • Divide tasks among all involved in planning;
    • Carefully craft and adhere to a budget;
    • Gather approval from senior staff that we should do this.

    I had a few clear cut goals that I knew I wanted to push if we were to participate.

    1. Riding the momentum from our trip to India in late July, use FOSS.IN to grow, build, cultivate our Indian developer community;
    2. To get as many Indian localizers together so we can add a few more languages to our list of localized languages;
    3. To test Firefox in India, creating an evangelism community who can either help file bugs and/or reach out to web developers who sites might not work on Firefox;
    4. To explore and learn about other issues for Indian Web users that will help us better serve users in the region (fonts and font rendering has been an issue in the past…likely to change with Firefox 3).

    To accomplish these goals, we proposed the project day, a large undertaking by me, Mary, Chofmann and a few others.  I wrote the first draft of the proposed events, sent it around for feedback, incorporated that, and then finalized the proposal.  We were then accepted.  After a few enthusiastic meetings, we were suddenly in the midsts of many moving pieces seeming to come from different directions, all colliding at one intersection.  (random picture illustrating how we felt…)

    From one side, we had FOSS.IN asking us to prove that this would be a valuable, contributor-focused day.  The conference organizers were NOT interested in having another discussion about a product or applications of a product.  They asked us to come to the project day with some interesting projects to work on.  They wanted us to get into the code and work!

    Another side came from a set of key decision makers we asked to help think about this day.  The questions we repeatedly had to answer,

    •  ”What value will this bring to the Mozilla community?”
    •  ”Is this a good use of resources and is it a leveraged way to build and empower community members?”
    •  ”If someone is going, is it a good use of their time or would their time be better used elsewhere?”
    •  ”How will each Mozilla participant contribute to an effective project day?”
    •  ”What are the deliverables of this event?”

    Finally, we had emails from contributors, colleagues, and new friends asking how they could participate in the day and where their talents could be used.   With an approved project day and set of events, we had to figure out how to incorporate everyone and meet everyone’s objectives.

    Moving parts.

    What lesson did I reinforce?  As always, get buy-in.  Have clear goals that are both valuable to Mozilla and attainable.  Collaborate openly.  Be creative.  Communicate.  Sure, you might think these are so obvious.  They probably are.  But, tying clear goals and outcomes like these to event planning is something we are trying to do more systematically.  For FOSS.IN, it’s worked for the planning.  We’ll see how the day goes in early December.

    And, if you’re going to be in Bangalore for the conference, please do consider attending our project day.  I think it will be a huge success.