Mozilla gets a visit from some Slovenian students

This past Wednesday, about 15 students from the Information Science Students Association (associated with University of Ljubljana) came to Mozilla to learn more about the project and what we do.  The students are in the U.S. for two weeks doing a tour of software companies in Silicon Valley and we were the first stop on their trip.  It was good for us to learn up front that many of these students use Firefox, but are not open source enthusiasts.  The beginning of our conversation was educating the students on our open source community and software development process.  Many of them knew our Slovenian localizer, but had not taken the plunge into the world of Mozilla.  We finished a brief presentation and then opened it up for comments and questions.

Frankly, the Q&A started a bit slow and the students seemed a bit shy.  Perhaps they were feeling some nervousness about their first visit or sitting inside Mozilla’s Mountain View office.  Nearly all of them were avid Firefox users and the few who weren’t greatly admired the project.  At this point, we did our best to engage the students.  It felt very much like grassroots campaigning or organizing.  We were surrounded by knowledgeable users of our software, but none had taken up the call to get involved.  That’s not to say the students were not engaged, but it became pretty clear that they may not have known how.  Fortunately, Mary had prepared a slide with several ways to get involved and we went right to that during the Q&A.  We began to brainstorm what this group could do to and what would be fun for them.

What’s fun for a college student?  Partying, of course.

The group decided that they would host a launch party at their campus for the upcoming release of Firefox 3.  That party might also serve as a starting point for their campus reps program.  After about an hour of visiting and touring about the office, the students left for Google seemingly enthused about helping Mozilla.

Why was this visit important and what did I learn? 

For one, Slovenia has the second highest market share of the Firefox browser, just behind Finland.  Both of these countries are over 40%.  (see the Xiti monitor study) According to this study, Firefox has 44.6% market share in Slovenia.  We’re always excited to welcome visitors to Mountain View, and we were thrilled to have students visiting from a country where Firefox has so much popularity.

Also, I was reminded about the importance understanding the audience to whom we were presenting.   We had to start at step one with these students, explaining the nuts and bolts of open source software development and what Mozilla has been able to achieve.  After we established that foothold, we were able to adjust our message and present a way to participate.  I think we did that and the result is that we have a group of enthusiastic students who will hopefully bring the Mozilla message back to their campus.

A final takeaway:  always have some good SWAG to hand out.  Yep…Stuff We All Get.  It can mean a lot to a visitor to Mozilla, if nothing more, it’s a nice souvenir for a tech student who visited one of the “big” companies in Silicon Valley.

With most every blog post, I like to end with a call to action.  If others have similar stories of community building, perhaps messages or presentation styles that were successful or anecdotes about trying to organize others, please do share them with us.

Tags: community building, marketing, planet | Categories: Uncategorized