Note: this is a guest post from Iacopo Benesperi, a fellow Mozillian from the Italian community.
This week-end took place in Mozilla’s Paris office the Summit 2013 planning assembly: a gathering of about 65 people from all around the world and representing all areas of the Mozilla project, with both paid staff and volunteers, aimed to plan and shape the next Summit, that will take place the first week-end of October in Bruxelles, Toronto and Santa Clara.
TL;DR: it’s been a great assembly. If we manage to accomplish at the next Summit half of the things we’ve discussed in this week-end, it will have been the best Mozilla event ever.
The aim of the assembly was not to define a schedule for the event and fix everything but to talk about which are the important topics that animate the Mozilla project these days, start to discuss them and shape them in a way so that we can come out with a good format for the Summit to address them and try to give and propose solutions for them. To do this, all the planning committee has taken interviews to fellow Mozillians in the last month to have a wider view of which is the temperature of the project in these days and act as a representative for the comments expressed.
I went to Paris without a clear idea of what we would have accomplished there, but I’m impressed with the result we had.
First of all, this assembly was facilitated by people of unconference.net, who proposed a peculiar way to proceed with it. I was a bit skeptic with the method proposed, but it turned out that some of their methods are really great (like unpanel) and we will definitely adopt them for the next Summit, while some others still look like rubbish (I may still be proved wrong).
The second important fact is that we talked little about technology and a lot about Mozilla, its community, its communication (internal and external) and the interactions between its components and people. On one hand, as Gandalf pointed out, this is a sign that we trust implicitly our technology and the fact that it will be discussed at the Summit, because this is a big portion of what Mozilla is about. On the other hand, it’s a sign that there’s a general awareness, not only among community members but also (finally) among employees and paid staff and board of directors that we have communication problems between the different parts of the projects and especially between paid staff and volunteers, and the time is now mature to address and try to solve them. What I’m talking about is not only communication to get things done but also communication related to the decision-making process.
So, it will be interesting to experiment discussions around different time-zones and locations. I will probably post more about the assembly and the planning for the Summit in the next days, when ideas and thoughts will have settled down a bit and I’ll have had the time to read all the ideas and documentation we produced during this two days. What I felt important to communicate immediately is the fact that the next Summit will be a wonderful occasion to talk not only about our technologies but also about who we are, what we want to do and where we want to go. It will be an occasion for the community to teach and mentor the newest community members and more importantly all the new employees to let them understand and feel the power and importance of our community and it will be, in general, an occasion to have our voice finally be heard and taken into consideration not only in the tasks at hand, but in building the new policies and guidelines that will drive all the project in the future.
I’m sure we’ll try, in the next months, to provide some initial information and documentation about what have been discussed and decided so far so that you can arrive at the Summit prepared to give your contribution to the conversation, so that we can take the most out of the Summit and make it really matter in our future.
As I said at the beginning: if we manage to discuss and propose solutions to half of the problems and concerns raised during this two days, we will have had the best Mozilla event ever; one that will have strengthened and made our project more mature.
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