Mozilla Utah Two Year Anniversary

"If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative." - Woody Allen

We had high hopes for the Mozilla Utah Two Year Anniversary. It was to be an event to really raise awareness on our community, to show how we've grown and the cool projects our community is involved with. We really wanted to get everyone excited about making an impact!

It took a lot, and I mean A LOT of work....but we didn't get the attendance we had hoped for. I especially felt disillusioned after all of the time and effort spent to get the event off the ground and facilitate great opportunities for impact. 

We got to hear about a really awesome app that drives a car robot, we saw the beginnings of a fun 3-D game for FirefoxOS that Brad Midgley is building. His presentation was phenomenal! The presentation was so awesome that it made the event especially disappointing because of the lack of attendance. We still had about 8 localizers at the event working on Romanian and Mexican Spanish, and the rest of the attendees at the app hackathon. There were good things accomplished at this event...

However, the disappointment provided a unique opportunity for the leadership council to gather and reevaluate our approach and direction at Mozilla Utah. Why spend so much time organizing, instead of doing?! Instead of working so hard to build our own community, why not collaborate with the many other organizations out there and add to what they have already built up?

This event was a great time to redirect our efforts into more of a grassroots movement. We don't need to spend our time filing budgets and filling out reports. We can get together at coffee shops, present at other user groups like we did with Girl Develop It, which was a huge success! We can get involved with the community center and teach web literacy there. We can collaborate on our localization efforts via IRC or meet up at a local coffee shop. There's no need to have elaborate events that require lots of time to manage. 

It's time to restructure our community to eliminate the overhead and get back to what motivates us to volunteer for Mozilla - meaningful contributions and personal growth. It's time to see our own impact every single second we spend promoting an open and accessible web.

I'm excited for the new direction we are about to take. 

Mozilla Utah - Girl Develop It Webmaker Party

I love events that remind me of why I volunteer for Mozilla! This event did just that.


We had a good turnout, especially from the Girl Develop It community! It was great to work with those just starting out on the journey to become programmers. We had two sisters from Bolivia - one had graduated in Information Systems over two decades before and was ready to get back in programming. Her sister didn't have any previous experience but was anxious to start learning. :)  I loved seeing so many women excited to learn more about web development and anxious to get engaged in open source!

We started out with the most basic tool offered through Webmaker - X-ray goggles. We hacked into Forbes.com and made Charlie Sheen a gazillionaire. We passed around the laptop and let everyone tweak something on the site to see how easy it was to use. We had some good laughs! Everyone was excited to go home and show friends and family.

We moved on to Thimble and even had a make ready to use that I put together real quick. Check it out here. We went over the basics of html and css, how a website is structured and let everyone loose to remix the make. A few people worked in groups, since some didn't have laptops with them. Not everyone saved their work, but if you just do a quick search for "gdi" or "Mozilla Utah" you can see a few of the awesome makes that were created.

There were at least 7 Webmaker accounts created at the event! Everyone seemed pleased with their work. We moved on to AppMaker. Garrett did an AMAZING job explaining the basics of creating apps via AppMaker and how to use channels and connectors to make your app work properly. He explained to clearly and effectively. There were lots of questions! The group was really engaged. One of the attendees was so excited because she had tried to make apps unsuccessfully in the past and now understood how to make it all work.

Some of the comments about the event were:

"Thanks--I really enjoyed this (and great sandwiches btw). Hope there will be more events like it that introduce opensource tools, contribution, etc." - Sarah

" It was great I loved the new tech, app maker, and the web maker! Great bunch of people and lots of great questions and answers." -April

It was an all-around great event that got lots of beginners excited about the free tools available through Mozilla to practice and teach the web. We had 15 people attend and at least 5 seemed committed to contributing to Mozilla. I was so glad that we finally made this event come together. We are hoping to more actively engage with Girl Develop It and other organizations that could use the tools we have to teach beginners about the web! What a great event!

@breanajgonzales reppin' us with the Utah @mozilla two-year anniversary. pic.twitter.com/igtP5er2Vi— Coding Campus (@CodingCampus) February 20, 2015