Hi! I'm Alina. I live in Barcelona. I'm a geek, I love the web and working with open communities. Here you can read about my thoughts and exploration in the space of civic engagement, distributed communities, open technology and the web.
I like those kind of events and situations – experimental, unusual and with mixed audience, flexible agenda and hackable spaces. Because they are inspiring, you meet new people, get new ideas and most important, makes me reach the “aha!” moment.
This year I was at the Festival as a participant, volunteer and ReMo – so I had the opportunity to help facilitate and participate in the same time which was fantastic. I had conversations about opening everything and learning and met inspiring people and projects such as Cash Music (a WebFwd fellows – non-profit, social enterprise helping musicians to create on the web).
When I arrived on the first day, I had the opportunity to meet and talk to various projects at Hive London Pop-up, a group of organizations from New York and London who are working at the intersection of learning, digital technology and media, offering after-school programs for youth. And if you are curious to see what the young web makers attending the Festival, learned from this experience, here is a blogpost and here, the work did by a 10 years old participant.
The next two days were a bit chaotic for me: I jumped in a Hackasaurus session, a fireside talk about the Web literate planet, then in a session on P2PU and badges and hanging around with other ReMos, facilitators and volunteers.
But, now I want to talk a bit about my “aha” moments at the Festival:
On the first day, I was part of the Hackasaurus Innovation challenge, where we worked on some ideas around curriculum and games to engage the youth into the art of web making.
Hacking Battle
This was a exploration on how to make a “website remixing” activity more engaging. The main concept is: After learners remix a website – they can submit their hack into the Hack battle where website visitors vote on the best hacked version of whatever website the learner started from (see interactive prototype here).
This already opens the way to more creativity and ideas around how we can engage the young webmakers, how to inspire to them the culture of collaboration, sharing, openness? I spent some time thinking and having conversations about those community spaces (both physical and online) that can become kind of playground and place for learning and creating (but more on this in a next blogpost…).
This is an ongoing work that needs experimentation. But the most important is that at Festival we got already the concept, a set of ideas, even a working prototype so we can start iterating on top of it in Barcelona.
“Messing Characters” (badges, stories and fueling intrinsic motivation in open communities)
I jumped in a session facilitated by folks at P2PU and Open Badges project. This was a like a challenge. I received a set of two cards, having written on them two words (in my case, messing and characters) which in this case where part of the “mechanics of a P2PU course).
So I gave the example of a course (the first one!) that I proposed months ago: Open Governance (how open communities as Mozilla, P2PU or others can get things done and govern themselves to become more effective). And yes, designing the course is as complex as the title suggests.
Having to imagine the “messing characters”, a mechanics for this course, was another “aha” moment. The concept is simple: imagine the various open source communities facing w/ different challenges, as growing, diversifying their reach, increasing participation, opening their way to working, collaborating, delegate responsibilities etc.
The characters are community members that sometimes feel like stuck inside of a box (no ideas, plans, answers). Messing characters can be a process of putting together people from different communities, with different skills and even creating situations that we are not feeling comfortable with. How does it work? I don’t know…it may be a series of challenges built inside the course, it may be a series of face to face or online events. There are plenty of possibilities.
Still, the most important bit was introducing the concept of badges in all this. Badges are the element that could make the mixing characters possible. It could be a good way to make visible a character’s story, skills, vision.
This is also an example of how a simple session at the Festival spurred the thinking, imagination and gave me (and others) the building blocks for what we are going to do next.
Learning and discovering new horizons…
Another thing that really keeps me excited about the things we are building at Mozilla is that it offers you the possibility to learn new things every day. As many other Mozillians, I have to say that I never thought that, for example, I’ll see myself in the journalism and media communities.
That was until I had the opportunity to meet, work and talk to people from the Mozilla News Innovation Community at MoJo Hackfest in Berlin.
And the Festival almost filled this imaginary gap. Journalists as well as educators are very important part of the our community and of the Web in general.
What was different from the first Festival in Barcelona? Was it better or not?
This is a question a received from various people during the last weeks.
Well, Barcelona Festival was awesome, was special, was different.
This year was better from the point of view of program and the sessions, which were much flexible, and thus easily inviting people to participate. On the other hand the ways you could participate were much more diversified: learning labs, innovation challenges, fireside conversation and hacking spaces. And I loved that the London Hive Pop-up (kids event) was open to the public for one day.
And this year we already have some building blocks and concrete things to play with: Hackasaurus, Popcorn, P2PU platform and open badges, which actually emerged from the Festival in Barcelona.
If I were to describe the difference from Barcelona, I can say that this year in London I saw a more mature, better organized (in terms of content and diversified participation) and much more focused. And that’s the way to go.
Oh, and the coffee, was probably the best I ever had at an event, not to mention the dedication and love the awesome baristas put on preparing it (IMO, that should be replicated in all Mozilla events 
).
But in the end… I missed the party on the roof.
I have only a few days to accept the invitation I received for attending the Mozilla European Contributors meeting in Berlin, November 12 – 13. I’m still asking myself about what I can get from there or which is the value I can add to the event.
Given that the event is scheduled in a relatively busy week (right after the Mozilla Festival and another Digital Humanities event in Barcelona), I was thinking seriously – what would be worth my time to attend? .
I’ve been participating to a number of Mozilla Contributor events (from European, Balkans Mozcamps; to Summit and Fossdem(s)). It’s fantastic to (re)meet the other people in the project, talk and see what they do in their locale. But, at the same time, there is a high risk to transform all those contributor meet-ups in a pleasant routine, which is the opposite of the “extremely fast changing process” that the web, the organization and even the community is facing.
I remember that 2 years ago, in Prague, I started a discussion about “remixing the Mozilla Manifesto” and I attended some thoughtful sessions around open web and back then, the early idea of Drumbeat. It was an incredible experience to be in those groups, taking a lot with me after the event.
And since the last MozCamp, both my focus and vision on Mozilla as a project have changed a bit. In those 2 years I’ve seen a few new communities rising up, met dozens of new Mozillians and I’m continuously meeting new people that share the same values as us and need to find their place in the Mozilla community.
Mozilla Eu contributors (and the Project in general) have a tremendous opportunity to meet face to face, once a year (an opportunity that many open source / free culture projects do not always have). For this, I think that Mozillians should take seriously the emphasis on “generated value” (for both participants and organization as a whole) .
Following, I’ll try to summarize in 3 points my expectations from the next MozCamp event:
Collaboratively making of the agenda
And no, by collaboratively, I don’t mean that volunteers can apply to give presentations or organize a session.
Doing the event collaboratively means to be allowed to participate from the point 0 – from identifying the *problem*, why we get together there, what do people expect / want to add, which is the aim, giving the critical moment in the community.
Collaboratively also means that anyone can have his/her say, that the event can be hacked depends on how things evolves and/or use tools Etherpad/a special mailing lists to add feedback/suggestions during the preparation process.
More open spaces – and make sure that if a participant wants to host his own brainstorming/hacking/prototyping session he or she will have a space. It often happens to get ideas on site (the result of being in the same place with so many people).
Community-based
The last events tend to have the most of the presentations/sessions led by community members with an employee status (that could indirectly create a top-down/formal ambient that kills potential community innovation, great ideas or slow-down the community enthusiasm). Even though I’m in favor of not differentiating between volunteers/employees/collaborators (all are community peers) I think that a balance is necessary.
Listen and give mentorship when needed. Just that! It’s much more in the community spirit than trainings (although would be fantastic to have event facilitators trainings).
There are mostly European core contributors and maybe some new ones - Inspire trust and discuss in open.
Focus on the essential
I know that 2 years since the last MozCamp is much and exists the tendency to cover everything in Mozilla (Firefox) project but, at the same time, trying to do everything is not the most effective solution. We currently experience some deep problems in the community, such as:
*** centralized l10n model and leak of outside participation in the process;
*** people leaving the community (which is normal after a few years of contribution) and “the problem” of finding replacement or creating space for others to contribute/lead;
*** a still unclear image of Mozilla’s Culture / community member motivation.
Although I see the Community and Development track interesting, there are still things that don’t convince me (such as a more elaborated page w/ what peers from community would love to see in there).
As a one concrete thing, I would be mostly interested in MozSpaces, because I believe that this could be an important component in nurturing a community learning/development path. And not only the “official” MozSpaces, but open and coworking spaces in general – and how we could interact/engage w/ other communities in there and spread the Mozilla’s culture, how to design activities and events and build new spaces for other people (and new Mozillians) to participate.
The topic for this year is “Many voices, one Mozilla” – I really hope to see this a productive and solution design oriented meet-up. And as a fellow Mozillian says: “Stop Yammering and Start Hammering!”.
