What?

In Q4 2015 the Participation team started a local experiment to build a community in Berlin and recruit volunteer leaders to come on board and start building out plans for 2016.

Why?

Mozilla and Firefox brand building efforts in Germany boosted by larger and stronger community. Specifically:

• Recruit 10 new community leaders/organizers.

New community leaders/organizers have...

• identified interest in particular roles that involve recruiting more people into the community + organizing activities
• committed to attending a leader onboarding/meetup

Who?

• Mario Behling
• Brian King

Next Steps

Next steps are to formulate a clearer roadmap and plans for the upcoming months of what we can do with the community in Berlin.

Join and Follow

Information on how to join the community and follow along on social and communication channels.

• Berlin Mailing List: Berlin Community
• IRC: irc.mozilla.org #mozilla.de
• Website: mozilla.berlin
• Twitter: @MozillaBerlin

Onboarding Meetings

On 25 November and 2 December 2015 there were onboarding events to hear more from new participation leaders and start planning for 2016.

Whiteboard Notes

In order to get an idea of what people are doing and how their goals are aligned with Mozilla we put up two questions on the board and asked participants to add their notes and ideas.

Question 1: What cool things are you doing in Berlin.

• Teach kids OpenScad
• Helping Hardware Startups to grow
• Organize Hackathons
• IT Cafe OpenTechSchool
• Compliance and Public Policy
• Animal protection through computer vision and machine learning
• Run Mozilla Meetups every month in Berlin
• Junge Tüftler, inspire kids to explore technology, coding and electronics in a playful way and empower mentors to do the same and scale the concept nationwide
• Hacking old toys and connect it to the Internet
• Teach/Learn soft skills for Open projects, communication, design
• Working with Berlin community and web based Firefox environment, make it easy to contribute
• Teaching UX and Design Ethnography
• RKWard Usability for statistical computing
• Maker education, makerspace at school as on device factory to make school equipment
• Interactive subtitles for learning languages with Popcorn
• Teaching kids programming
• Image and video processing app
• micro waste burning oven for Africa combined with a self organized waste collecting network (Open source hardware)
• participating in kids events
• documentation standards, tools to document, maker projects
• BCIs to enable people to use their brains in the optimal way
• bridge the gap between tech people involved in education and educators involved in tech - connect both often separately active groups to benefit from synergies
• Coderdojo Potsdam
• Connect Mozilla with startups in Berlin

Question 2: What would you like to see from Mozilla in Berlin?

We also wanted to get a sense of what participants would like to see from Mozilla in future.

• Have this great community space
• Engage more in politics
• Get more hackers on board
• “Light side Bakery” as opposed to “dark side bakery” of Microsoft
• Expert help with Mozilla tech
• More activities of Mozilla in Industry and Manufacturing
• getting a real anonymous browser
• teaching kids programming
• All tech is local
• More Germans in Mozilla
• FirefoxOS web developer
• “I want help from the Berlin community to leverage Mozillas resources to spread web literacy.”
• FirefoxOS new human interfaces (support of gesture control, sensors..)
• FirefoxOS phones - should be a privacy centric phone
• DSP Encryption
• Digital Signal Processing
• Support Open Source in Berlin and join associations
• More German speaking people in the office in Berlin to support the community
• Privacy and Protection online
• How to reach out? Who is the contact in Berlin?
• More Meetups for Open Source projects
• Participate in Community Events
• Mozilla as a platform: Collect questions of users and work on answers.
• Offer Open Infrastructures for collaboration, mailing lists, secure etherpads, owncloud for libre projects
• Point of contact at Mozilla: How to connect to the German hacker and maker community?
• Mozilla Campus Tour
• Mozilla and Hardware Startups in Berlin
• Open Source project support, knowledge sharing of leadership team, financing, funding
• Provide a platform which educates people about data protection and the use of new technologies.
• Mozilla Hacking Box for schools and projects, that can be borrowed
• Universities meet Mozilla
• Mozilla introduces Open Source project, which are doing good in the field of data protection and pushing technology forward
• Award for projects that are working on the Open Web
• localize Mozilla’s teaching/education resources and get more involved with German/Berlin schools.
• host coding clubs in schools and youth centers
• provide an Open Space for Coderdojos
• Offer a faster mobile browser
• a faster browser launch on desktop
• more “hacking boxes” for Berlin events
• Invite people to speak/give workshops about Open Source and business
• use the intelligence of the crowd and develop “anonymous” databases
• Mozilla @Congresses like CCC
• More community building: Organize a forum for privacy topics
• Offer tools to know and control my data
• Connecting Open - Science/Education/Design
• Usability Education
• Mozilla Tiles for featured startups and Open Source projects
• Expert knowledge in schools / Open Source schools
• Workshops for teachers with Open Source materials
• Stop “Bad net neutrality”
• Get Mozillians from around the world to visit universities in Germany