About my Mozilla Open Leaders program experience and why you should join it
About my project👨🏼💻, mentor💯, facilitator👩🏻🔬, & the community🌎
In 2016, I was randomly checking out the Mozilla GitHub repo and read about this interesting project:https://github.com/mozilla/leadership-training. Leadership is an amazing skill. If I’m asked to list out the things that the Mozilla community has taught me, leadership would definitely be on the top #3.
I used to crash Lainie Decoursy’s mailbox(not literally) with a lot of questions every now and then. She’s been kind enough to read and answer every single one of them. So what’s the first thing I do when I see that repo? Yup. You guessed it right!
So last time when the applications were open, I had no second thoughts about applying. This was also the time when I joined the Mozilla Learning Discourse team as a volunteer moderator for managing the Mozilla Clubs category (shameless promotion- if you’re interested in #teachtheweb and want to connect with a global community, you should join us!).
About the project
My project was about “Improving participation and collaboration on the Mozilla Clubs Discourse community”. As someone who manages tech communities for a living, I’ve been fascinated by online communities and the behaviour of people on these communities. So this project was a great opportunity for me to grow professionally, while benefiting the larger Mozilla community. But this was all possible because of the trust that the Mozilla Learning team has placed on me.
Here’s the report that I had prepared during post the training. If you have any comments, please feel free to drop me a note.
Link:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Jy6hCfnBh2JqtB8RnpM5LtpFDHCn--izzcCSHqb3E5k/edit?usp=sharing
My mentor
My mentor for this project was the amazing Julia Vallera. Guess who got accepted into the program while on vacation? ME! And guess who was super flexible to do the calls whenever I was available to give updates? My mentor!
I felt that it was really easy for me because me and Julia had worked together before. This makes a lot of difference because you know the person well and can work in sync. Julia also gave me a lot of inputs on the direction of the project itself. So much that over the first week, the theme of the project itself had evolved to look at the bigger picture.
Our facilitator
We had the wonderful Abigail Cabunoc Mayes as our facilitator. All the group sessions were very well structured with a great mix of sessions as well as activities.
The privilege walk was really eye opening:https://peacelearner.org/2016/03/14/privilege-walk-lesson-plan/
I also really liked the Harvard Implicit Association Test. We had an open house at HasGeek house on Tech spaces and gender.
The facilitator was doing the implicit association test as an activity and I felt really smart because I knew about it and had already taken it.
Feedback
I felt that some of the calls that had the demos went over time because we had so many people on the calls (despite dividing it into 2 calls). By the time everyone had finished, some people had to leave the calls. Instead, it would be a little better if the common sessions were either recorded, or facilitated by the mentors. We could also group a couple of mentors and their mentees on calls so that we could get and give inputs on each others projects. Mentors could also do the same.
The community
If you’ve participated in #MozSprint, you probably have an idea of the community. But in case you haven’t, it was an amazing time where we got a lot of contributors to our projects and also got the opportunity to work on some exciting projects from all over the world.
The applications for the next edition will close on the 1st of August. You can read more about the program and apply here.
PS: There’s also a possibility that I might be mentoring some projects this year.
This blog is a part of my “One Blog Per Week” resolution, but I haven’t been able to keep up to this this time because of a dead laptop and a series of conferences. Here’s a beautiful picture of our awesome crew and volunteers at the conference yesterday.
Contains random rambling, learning and experience. If you have any inputs/thoughts, shout out to me at @dun3buggi3.
