Strengthening our Education Community at Mozilla

TL;DR: If you are a contributor to one or more educational initiatives at Mozilla, and are interested in building a strong teaching & learning community at Mozilla, please attend one of our planning calls this Wednesday.

Note: one call is actually Thursday in some timezones, see link for details.

Examples areas of contribution that support ‘Education at Mozilla’

  • Writing workshops/teaching kits/curriculum or documents for learning (including MDN)
  • Teaching or running workshops.
  • Providing feedback on educational content, or resources .Leading a community team that involves teaching others (ie: Tech Speakers, Mozilla Clubs, MDN).
  • Contributing code to learning platforms, or learning areas.Advising on instructional design
  • Providing feedback in Github issues or related to education & trainingCommunity leadership training (running local events).
  • Helping projects at Mozilla find education contributors.

Back story:

The design community recently created their own community repository, for asset requests from community (things like logos, website designs etc). They were successful in their original goal and quickly saw staff/project requests for help as well. Even cooler - as of this week, this group is now central to the new brand strategy at Mozilla !

The Potential:

This got me thinking about the strong, but dispersed group of people contributing to ‘education at Mozilla’ and the people we lose because it’s challenging to navigate multiple projects for participation opportunities. What if we had a single place to collaborate, share, to take requestsfrom community and projects, and to create our own initiatives? What could that look like - would people want to be involved? What impact could we have on Mozilla’s mission collectively if we collaborated across projects more often?

I then ran a series of interviews with some of our core contributors in education, and with staff leading projects like MLN, Open Science, and Mozilla Clubs to see how we could best launch an
’Education at Mozilla’ community. You can see a summary of results here, which includes this proposal :

Run a call to:

  • Brainstorm a light weight community design for launch that feels right for education contributors based on the feedback so far.
  • Identify two experiments we can run for outreach, based on a workshop ‘Building
    Bridges to Mozilla’ to bring in opportunity and people.
  • Launch experiments and community design in the next heartbeat

I will run two calls on Wednesday to help move this forward. I hope you can make one!

Note: one of these is actually ‘Thursday’ in some timezones - see links for details.

I want to be clear that this is intended to be a
community-led/curated/loved project, and I am here to help make it happen/unblocking/supporting and helping build. I hope that feels exciting . If you have any specific
questions/concerns or topics you want to ensure we cover as part of these next steps, please reach out I would be happy to have 1:1 conversations, or help you step up to lead those topics. If you can’t make it, I will share notes and updates on this Discourse topic.

I also wrote a bit more about the model we’re playing with if you’re interested in thoughts behind it.

Looking forward to making exploring some great ideas for strengthening our education community at Mozilla.

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