TL;DR Mozilla India has launched an Evangelism Task Force that will consist of speakers who represent the Mozilla community at public events. The Events Task Force will use this pool of speakers to send to conferences for which it receives speaker requests. The members of this task force can be from any functional area across Mozilla, including Webmaker and Localization. They are the best advocates of their functional areas in front of new contributors.
India is full of hidden treasures. You need that ever-observing eye to discover them. Look at the Mozilla India community. Now, who dare say there is a lack of good developers in India? What’s more, we have a good chunk of people who are passionate about sharing their knowledge and help newcomers onboard the wagon.
Over the years, Mozilla India has seen a set of brilliant and tireless speakers who hop from event to event speaking about technology. So far, these people have been shying away from the limelight. They won’t any more. They have joined hands (and presentations) in forming the first-of-its-kind Evangelism Task Force, which was formally announced at the recent Mozilla India Community Meetup 2014 at Hyderabad.
The Evangelism Task Force is inspired from the Evangelism Reps SIG. This task force will be the team of Evangelism Reps (and non-Reps) for Mozilla in India.
Why a “Task Force”?
To (roughly) quote Soumya Deb:
The reason we have created a task force is that we have a specific set of tasks that we will be doing regularly. This is not just a special interest group (SIG) where people sign-up based on their interests. This a group where people execute those interests. In that sense, a task force is a subset of a SIG which performs the tasks that fall under the interests of SIGs.
So, this is all about action and getting things done.
What will they do?
The Evangelism Task Force aims to be a team of technical evangelists who can travel to events and speak there. They will be the face of Mozilla at those events. As such, the responsibilities of all members of this task force will include the responsibilities of an Evangelism Rep.
The Events Task Force can use this pool of speakers to send to events for which it receives speaker requests. This will solve a long-standing problem of hunting for speakers for Mozilla events across the country.
The face of the community
The task force team members can be from any functional areas in Mozilla. They can be members of any other task force within Mozilla India and still be a part of the Evangelism Task Force. They do not need to be the best contributors in their functional areas, but someone with sufficient knowledge of their core functional area to be able to inspire new and enthusiastic contributors. Simply put, these people need to be able to represent their functional areas to the world outside. That is the reason why the Evangelism Task Force includes members from Webmaker, Localization and Documentation projects.
This will often involve a good amount of travel and requires a dedicated time commitment from each member. But we have been doing that anyway. This initiative simply formalises it.
Let others know
They will not just go and speak at events, but also write about their experiences at those events. When we say writing about experiences, we do not mean blog posts which are just captions to a thousand pictures. We want to see more meaningful insights into what went on at the event, what were the key takeaways, what were the mistakes and what learning those speakers had at the event.
These members will also be a source of truth for metrics of an event within India. Given that these guys will have experience in conducting/attending multiple events, they will know how to identify key metrics for an event and provide a proper feedback to the Events Task Force.
Help others grow
These evangelists can, in turn, train wannabe speakers and help them improve their presentation skills. These trainings will be geared toward cultivating the enthusiasm in the attendees to go out and speak in front of an audience. These trainings will also serve as ice-breakers for those who have been shying away from public speaking because they are afraid of the stage. Who else can train them better than those who have already gone ahead and been on the stage themselves?
Apart from one-on-one trainings, the task force members will also help create sustainable training resources for other functional areas. These will include articles, screencasts, videos, presentations, templates and anything else that different projects in Mozilla may need to onboard new contributors and enhance the knowledge of existing contributors.
Be lean. Move fast.
This task force is all about quality. It is not about onboarding new contributors, but helping those bright individuals bubble up who would eventually represent the Mozilla India community. This may sound exclusionary. But in essence it is a meritocracy, where the merit is determined by the demonstrated capacity and willingness of an individual to meet the aims of the task force mentioned above.
I want to join this task force. Let me in.
As I’ve already said, this is about quality. We’ve put together a few basic requirements to be a member of this task force. They are:
- Basic communication skills, including excellent written and verbal grip of English and a good command of your mother tongue.
- Crossed the barriers in starting off as a speaker.
- Presented at some conferences/events in the past. This does not have to be a Mozilla event or the topic does not need to be related to Mozilla.
- Created some training materials, which may include how-tos, articles, blog posts, videos, screencasts or presentations.
We realize that there are contributors who have good technical command of their contribution areas but have not cleared these requirements. The training programmes will be designed keeping these people in mind. So, any such individual, including FSAs, who want to to be a part of this task force, can apply for one of the training programmes.
There is no direct application procedure for this task force. New members will be invited to the task force by existing members.
**Protip:** These training programmes will be scarce resources and we will once again have to choose who will be invited to these training events. Please don’t file a bug for that.
Who are in it, anyway?
The current members include Soumya Deb, Saurabh Anand, Sayak Sarkar, Sudheesh Singanamalla, Jaipradeesh, Priyanka Nag, Ankit Gadgil, Shahid Farooqui and Akshat Kedia. Leading this pack, is yours sincerely: Me.
Those who made it possible
The idea originally stemmed after numerous rounds of discussions between me and Soumya. We have been able to give some shape to those crazy ideas. Even then, it would not have been possible without the support we received from the entire Indian Mozilla community (thanks for those honest feedback, guys), specially, Vineel. A big thanks to Gen Kanai, Brian King and Madalina Ana who listened patiently to our long presentation at the Community India meet up.
Finally, it would not have been possible without the inspiration from Christian Heilmann and the entire Evangelism Reps team. You guys deserve cupcakes!