Our Community - Leadership Next Steps

[mak]

Dear Mozillians,

I am sending this note today in advance of a 2-day Mozilla Bangladesh
meetup on the 5th and 6th June. We will be making significant changes to
the leadership structure and approach of our community during this meetup
so that we can have more impact for Mozilla’s mission.

This meetup will be facilitated by Brian King and Rosana Ardila from the
MoCo Participation Team, and the attendees from many different parts of our
community will together create a distributed leadership. We will involve
more and new people in our community’s leadership, without any one person
central including me. Distributed leadership will ensure that Mozilla
Bangladesh can have more people involved, move faster and have more impact.
Distributed leadership is aligned with Mozilla’s Participation Guidelines
<https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/participation/>,
and will mean that people who want to contribute in Mozilla Bangladesh will
be included and everyone will be able to reach their leadership potential.

I expand on these ideas below, showing how this new approach to leadership
is a natural evolution since the beginning of Mozilla Bangladesh.

When Mary Colvig accompanied with a team
<https://blog.mozilla.org/axel/category/fossin2007/> from Mozilla travelled
to Bangalore, India - I found Mozilla Engagement. It was 2007, we met
<https://murmuria.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/100_2540.jpg> during FOSS.in;
I have been Localizing Firefox (browser) for couple years by then. I was
trying to meet l10n boss Chriss Hoffman; I just got a glimpse of him
though, standing behind a podium. FoxyMary <https://twitter.com/foxymary>
made my FOSS journey unique by introducing me with Mozilla engagement. She
told me why don’t I inspire more People for localization as well as
promoting Firefox.

After that my world changed, started with my own way to populate the
Mozilla Mission. I was lucky enough to discover couple of more enthusiast
like me; who already have been contributing through localization of
Firefox. We organized Firefox 3.5 100% Bengali UI launch and announced,
Mozilla Bangladesh. We had started from zero, from scratch. Along with
those veteran Mozillians I tried to increase the size of the community and
focused on spreading the Mozilla Mission. After some time, we found
ourselves into something, which I can term as shared leadership.

We’ve always tried to look for new leadership, mentored potents if found
and endured weird challenges to keep the community intact. I said, we tried
- can’t judge our efforts were a success or not. But we always tried things
like - getting PR from Press and electronic media; encouraging new users;
empowering new Mozillians, attending national tech events. Global campaigns
like DownloadDay2008
<https://blog.mozilla.org/website-archive/2010/12/08/download-day-2008/>
and Spread
Firefox
<https://blog.mozilla.org/website-archive/2011/02/25/spread-firefox/>
helped us to get boost. And our small community grew to a significant size.
The moment I started contributing for Mozilla, we neither had Firefox OS
nor the Reps program. We didn’t have formal SOPs or detailed documentation
on day to day community execution. We had to think and plan centrally,
while considering many suggestions if not all. Since then changes happened;
changes I never predicted; moving towards mobile web, turning on
Televisions powered by Firefox OS, no more Desktop business only and are
entering into IoT. Along with this changes in our Product and Services -
there have been dramatic changes in Mozilla Engagement to deal with the
accelerated pace of community growth. Changes included Reps Program and FSA
and more. Reps and FSA played pivotal role in our Bangladeshi community
growth. People volunteering in these programs were awesome and outstanding.

Mozilla and our mission is more needed now than ever and so we need to
align the community in a new way to do MORE, do BETTER. The community must
become more productive and be efficient enough to address several programs
and projects of Mozilla. We can achieve this through a Distributed
Leadership. Just like parallel programming, when many brains think together
they become fast productive and efficient. Sometimes, a handful of people
certainly can make mistakes; various issues can limit them, but it’s highly
unlikely when a big group of passionate people come into action with the
power of awesomeness.

A big group of champions through distributed leadership can handle
anything, even things out of the world. So, they don’t make solo of Iron
Man, Thor or Hulk any more. Nowadays, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Captain
Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, Thor are working together.

To find our next set of superheroes we are going to arrange a 2 day Mozilla
Bangladesh Meetup on 5th and 6th June. I want thank our ED Mark Surman and
Brian King to make this happen. If you are the lucky one to attend the
meetup - we shall meet soon.

Regards
mak

[mak]

Ah! I forgot to CC my dear sister Mary. :)

[Sekender Badsha]

Hello,
I did read this really long mail 3 times and I have a question about being "lucky".
I am really glad that we are going to have a "Mozilla Bangladesh meetup" and going to have a "Distributed leadership".
Though I have joined the community and started contributing to Mozilla in June 2013, I am still new. As far as I know, we always promote openness and keep our activities open for all. As this is not going to be a business meeting with MoCo with a company rather with a "Community", why I need to be lucky to attend the meetup?
Thank you for reading my message and replying me back. Regards,Sekander Badsha
Phone: +880 1937704707

_______________________________________________
community-bangladesh mailing list
community-...@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/community-bangladesh

[Brian King]

Hi Sekander,

I believe what Mak was referring to was that there are only a limited
number of places at the meetup. We invited close to 40 people. The
community is very large now and we would have liked to invite more, but
decided to keep it that size to maintain focus for this meeting.

- Brian

On 2 June 2015 at 08:37, Sekender Badsha <badsh...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I did read this really long mail 3 times and I have a question about being
> "lucky".
>
> I am really glad that we are going to have a "Mozilla Bangladesh meetup"
> and going to have a "Distributed leadership".
>
> Though I have joined the community and started contributing to Mozilla in
> June 2013, I am still new. As far as I know, we always promote openness and
> keep our activities open for all. As this is not going to be a business

> meeting with MoCo with a company rather with a "Community", why I *need
> to be lucky* to attend the meetup?

--
Brian King
@brianking | https://mozillians.org/u/kinger
Join Us | https://www.mozilla.org/contribute/

[Sashoto Seeam]

Hello Everyone,I hope you had a great event. I am one of the "unlucky" person who was expecting to be invited on the meetup but didn't get it.
But I'm not complaining about that. The reason of writing this mail is today I have seen a etherpad named selection-criteria-MozBD-meetup [1]. If the authors give that pad's access, it will be very helpful. Because we the "unlucky" folks will get some idea, what kind of contributions reflects leadership in our community.
Regards,Sashoto Seeam

[1] https://bangladesh.etherpad.mozilla.org/selection-criteria-MozBD-meetup

[Brian King]

Hi Sashoto,

The password for the pad is meetup15.

- Brian

On 9 June 2015 at 18:00, Sashoto Seeam <sashot...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello Everyone,

> I hope you had a great event. I am one of the "unlucky" person who was
> expecting to be invited on the meetup but didn't get it.
> But I'm not complaining about that. The reason of writing this mail is

> today I have seen a etherpad named *selection-criteria-MozBD-meetup* [1].