On 23rd and 24th of January 2016, the third gathering part of the ‘Participation leaders initiative’, the most awaited cohort of every Mozillian, aimed at developing 130 participation leaders in various tracks, ‘The Leadership summit’ has given a boost to the skill set and leadership qualities of every attendee. The 2-day of sessions filled with fun and energy, mentored by fantastic leaders had 2 major tracks of participation, as listed below. This has marked a real milestone by enabling every core contributor community to dig deeply in to the critical and important projects :
- Campus campaign – The strategic initiative to spread the word about various topics on a campus.
- Connected devices – A glimpse on the penetration of Firefox OS in to the next generation devices to make the world simple and easy.
The cross community collaboration summing up with cross platform conferences has tremendously contributed to enhance the organizational abilities of every Mozillian invited to be part of ‘The Leadership Summit’.
The event started off with talks by Mark Surman, George Roter and Rosana on the near invasion of the digital world by tech giants, the possibility of digital monopoly and the need to stop this potential threat to the web by making it open. : ‘To Take back the web’. Yes we are in need to protect ours and others’ privacy.
India being second largest country in terms of the number of users on Facebook and 91% of Indian smartphone users are using android, this abnormal market share is a potential threat to the privacy of the users, their actions both online and offline are tracked using various other snooping techniques which aren’t good for end users.
As Mark Surman said in his opening talk, “this is a critical time for the web and for Mozilla. We need to simultaneously figure out what technologies and products will bring our values into the future and we need to show the public and governments just how important those values are. We can only succeed by getting better at working together — and by growing our community around the world”, its a critical time to fight for the open web.
The sessions on personal leadership and personal story telling had warmed up the atmosphere of the hall with inspiring stories of our peer Mozillians on how they have started and came this far while contributing to Mozilla and its projects.
The big YEAH moment
Then the tracks on Campus campaign and Connected devices started off with energy and the choice was open for all the Mozillians to join either of these tracks based on their interest. Commencement of these tracks has given big picture of community goals for the coming year.
The session on ‘strategies to adopt while on different stages of an event’ namely:
- Before the event
- leaving for the event
- At the event
- After event follow-up, would make every organizer to leverage the best outcome of an event to create considerable impact on people engaged in it. This made me realise the things that I was missing out while making most out of my previous events.
The diverse set of communities working on common goals would give you mentees to assist, Assistance from mentors when needed, collaboration in ideology, efficient brain storming, and the most optimal resolution for a problem statement. 130 Mozillians from various sub continents with diversity in every possible aspect has made this event the most impact full among all the other cohorts that I have attended so far in my life.
The selfie obsession
Leadership summit has also provided me with the opportunity to meet my friends in the community after a very long time. The geographical barriers has never been a problem for all of us to work on the Mission of Mozilla but getting together has given more insights about behaviour and growth of various other volunteer communities spread across the globe.
At the end of event, these 2 days have definitely enhanced my knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to grow the impact of participation across Mozilla in 2016. I promise that I would take every conversation, track, session, talk , love and swag from leadership summit to my local community to make them aware and bring them on board to be part of the evolution of Mozilla projects. I am sure that all the attendees of leadership summit are aligned with and have contributed to Mozilla’s vision and strategy, and would champion the web with Mozillians and others in the coming years.
These 2 days of cohort have created specific plans for growing the impact of participation and contributing to Mozilla in 2016, aligned with the organization’s goals and priorities rigidly structured and consciously committed to ‘Take Back the web’.
Not to miss the fun that we had with every other person at The Leadership Summit during all those coffee breaks, lunch breaks, dinners, photo shoots and informal conversations.
Harsha Vardhan, Mozilla Rep, Hyderabad, India. Signing off for now to shape next big things out to happen.
Harsha Vardhan's Blog 