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.
Within Mozilla community we’ve been talking for the last months about engaging users, growing the circle of participation and creating a movement for the (Open) Web. I know that similar discussions are going on in other open/free/libre culture and software movements as well. It is a common need – keep users, engage them, empower them, and educate the newcoming ones. I think it’s actually something that Free Software movement has been missing for a long time – writing for the user and include them in the community circle.
During our first session at GlobalMelt, a question from one of the participants got my attention: “Why Open and Free culture is still considered a subculture?”.
Which are the barriers that still keep us from being a worldwide movement, from being louder about the principles, values and critical importance of community driven initiatives? When starting to think about GlobalMelt, a few months ago, I nurtured in my mind the things I’ve been challenging myself when working with various free/open technology communities:
Be (more) like the Web.
The Web was built in open, was build to be hacked, decentralized and allow people to build things, free the imagination. How could we replicate the DNA of the web and use its “hackability” propriety when building communities and event formats? But how about increasing the level of complexity on the way? Communities often start with complex things and involuntarily place barriers between them and the audience. The same happens with events. The web and the overall Internet culture teaches us those things.
From the “Internet memes” we could learn how easy is to replicate (and modify) the message, the information we want to send, but also how different it is perceived among various publics (and as more hackable is the message, the easier is arriving to a larger and diverse audience). We need only to know how to pack that message in order to be replicated.
Common knowledge base! The more you share, the more you receive.
Sharing knowledge and put ideas together has always helped to spur innovation. Wikipedia itself is one of the proofs of what the crowd can build.
We are living in the collaborative age, where the valuable and things are created by mixing ideas together. Can we mix our ideas, knowledge, crowd brainstorm in order to create new event frameworks, put together “tips&tricks” and “how-tos”?
Thought leadership and leadership as a behaviour.
Growing the circle of leaders is always a challenge. It is a continuous issue that sometimes generates conflicts in our communities, makes people quit and newbies stay away. At GlobalMelt, participants at Brain Drain – why we leave communities, offered something worth to reflex on: “leadership behavior that can be adopted and not permanently occupied. Leadership behavior not coupled to person but to actions. Conversely, empowered to participate, to exit”.
Growing the circle of participation. Towards decentralized communities through events.
We need more people! There is a huge need to grow the base of contributors, of people who participate and build, even in a simple way. Anyone should have something to say. That is one aspect that also many open technology communities are focused on right now. For the last few years we’ve seen a decrease in the number of contributors and participants in different projects (eg. Wikipedia editors, Mozilla and other free software projects).
We have noticed how some communities are becoming more and more centralized, how most of the events were mainly focused on tech contributors and, indirectly, how unusual suspects have been progressively excluded. But can a revival of collaborative, small, face to face events act as a catalyst and make communities become more decentralized and action-oriented?
We went to GlobalMelt, with a common goal – learning more about peer-driven movements and what we could do and share in terms of best practices in in-person events organizing. And that started since the first day with a series of questions. Through discussions and collaborative sessions, we tried to find answers, come up with creative solutions and simple ways for making our events more participative, funny, interesting, hackable and so, keep the community healthy.
For me, it was an amazing experience to sit-down in a room with ~ 30 folks who share the same interest and love for technology, art, community and events and also, made me realize that we need to meet and do events often, keep the energy going on.
So, what’s next for GlobalMelt?
I see this kind of workshop as an amazing party where anyone participates with ideas and takes the outcomes. It is like the web, nobody owns it, we only have to make it grow and make sure it could be replicated, improved and then explore more complex issues.
Approaching events was indeed the best for this first workshop! But in the future, I see as topics: incentives and badges online, creative engagement campaigns, tips on how to spread a message etc. . I was even thinking that workshops such as GlobalMelt could be a good opportunity to incentivise event organizers and community builders.
But, it is better to keep walking with small steps.
First of all, we need to keep growing the existent documentation. It is a valuable information/tips&tricks/how to for events that can be improved and then used by anyone.
Experiment some of those tips at your own events and share with everyone how it went.
Replicate the GlobalMelt locally and document it. It would be really interesting seeing xMelt in the next couple of months (where x is a city, region etc.). There are some preparations for a Catalan/BarcelonaMelt 
.
Revive the subculture! When thinking to do an event, take in consideration audiences that you normally don’t think at. There may be plenty of groups considering themselves a subculture. Can we, the open and free subculture, change the future?
In the end, I want to send some kudos to Michelle Thorne, who help making possible this event and wrote an awesome follow-up, Allen Gunn (for helping us facilitate the entire event! I always, always learn something new from him!Thanks Gunner!), Alek and Joanna (for the logo and t-shirts), Solana (for hosting the party), SJ , Mark Surman and Mozilla Foundation, Studio70. And, last but least, to all participants!
Last week, Mark Surman wrote a couple of articles about Join Mozilla initiative. I was not very surprised as probably other fellows, since I knew about this from Whistler Summit.
We talked during engagement sessions about different ways to make Mozilla more visible as a movement for the (open) Web and for the commons.
Indeed, this is something that Mozilla needs now, critical for the Web and for a healthy community of contributors and users. .
Bogo wrote in his last post wondering about the role of people who will join Mozilla and how they will connect with the community, how they will become advocates for the open web.
LUGs were an example of movements created around users and a software platform, which built a strong base of evangelists and open source advocates some time ago, including myself.
I was 16 when I first attended a first Linux Install Fest and started running the first Linux Users Group in my city with some friends, just for fun. I had no idea about free software, Commons, open source, etc. and I was able to only write 2 or 3 commands in the terminal.
LUGs were engaging, easy to join, and nobody asked you about your experience. City-based groups helped to arrange monthly or bi-weekly meet-ups. The main aim was getting people to use the operating system and helping beginners to fix their problems and offer support.
InstallFest-like events, with non-fixed agenda, no slides or presentations, helped to set up the dynamics, and make both experienced and unexperienced users to attend.
During the years, I organized myself a couple of InstallFests/Hackfests and other low or 0 budget events, connected with other users and LUGs across the country, revitalized the group from my faculty and extended it all around city, in hacking camps, workshops and open source conferences around the country, unified the forces faculty’s web group and start organizing more diverse events, wrote articles in community and school magazines.
Community centers, co-working spaces, Students house, laboratories, libraries and coffees or empty spaces in the underground Faculty’s building usually served for hosting the meet-ups and local events.
In a few years this movement brought new users, from power users to advocates of the platform and, indeed, influenced a lot its adoption on servers and embedded devices. But also, it formed advocates for other free software projects and kept the hacker culture alive.
LUGs offered you the freedom to choose, to stay as a simple user or go further. It also created this affinity between communities and people sharing the same principles, so connecting to people from outside your country became far easier.
I never became an active contributor in a Linux distribution, a localizer or package maintainer, because I wasn’t too comfortable with writing code, but that didn’t made me to not feel part of the movement or name myself a Linux Users group member.
So users are never “death souls” in the community, as far as they are engaged and empowered.
Hopefully, Join Mozilla! will offer all the support and material to turn Firefox users into platform advocates and a strong voice for the (open) Web. It is a chance for current Mozilla communities to build the user engagement efforts and start facilitating and supporting in a creative and participatory way Firefox users in all cities.
As LUG how-to says: “Computer user groups are not new. In fact, they were central to the personal computer’s history: Microcomputers arose in large part to satisfy demand for affordable, personal access to computing resources from electronics, ham radio, and other hobbyist user groups. Giants like IBM eventually discovered the PC to be a good and profitable thing, but initial impetus came from the grassroots.”
PS: Happy to see this open, so all Mozillians from community can contribute to build the program through Mozilla community marketing calls (and on #marketing IRC channel): http://wiki.mozilla.org/JoinMozilla .
