It was a great 3-day event and The Mozilla Summit 2010 concluded with a great wrap-up party. The great photo above was taken in the concluding event, with a great shot by Gen Kanai.
The day still had great sessions– I attended the ones focused on community participation, communicating well with media, Firefox 4 Beta localization, and community membership models. As you can see from the sessions and discussions I’ve joined, I’ve been putting a lot of effort in learning to make a better, more involved local community and I plan to apply the thing’s I’ve learned here.
Speaking of learnings, here are some of my takeaways from the Mozilla Summit 2010:
- Stand For Something – What makes the Mozilla and Firefox brands effective is that they stand for something, particularly the Open Web. This should be the core for any community marketing activities and the rest will be supplemental pieces and activities.
- Make the Message Local – I’ve realized that I’ve been approaching the Mozilla Philippines Community from an ineffective perspective. I think there should be more effort in making the language and the message more attuned to the local community, especially the language and the flavor. Expect a lot more “Pinoy”-themed activities from the Mozilla Philippines Community in the future
- Strong + Simple = Sticky – Finally, the message to the community should be strong and simple enough to stick like super glue. Looking at the messages Mozilla has been communicating, it’s not really complex despite having deep technology underlying layers.
- The Community should feel awesome – I was thinking about the whole summit itself and it was far from the typical serious conferences. There were Rock Band and Wii Sports stations, places to relax, and areas to discuss while the sessions and keynotes were ongoing. I think these made folks more energized during the day, and not too sapped by the events closed. My point is that all these, along with the agenda items, made people feel awesome and resulted in awesome work.
As for areas for improvement, the weak points of the summit were the Buddy Quest activity, session hi-jacking (like a session that veers way off topic), and weakly organized Birds of a Feather meetings.
Over-all, the experience was great and makes me look forward to supporting Mozilla and help build the community stronger.
