I started working at Mozilla Corporation as a platform evangelist and was able to get up to speed fairly quickly, in a large part because of help from various community members. In my evangelism role, I really enjoyed getting to travel around and talk about Mozilla technology to anybody who wanted to listen. The Developer Day meet-ups were especially fun. I’m on the Mozilla Mobile team now, but still like to do evangelism work when I can.
One problem we had with Developer Days was trying to figure out where “concentrations” of Mozilla developers, or people interested in Mozilla development, were located. It made it hard to plan locations for Developer Day events. Recently, someone on IRC asked about Mozilla User Groups and if there was anyone located near him (Rayleigh/Durham area in this case). I couldn’t give him any definitive answer, but it did get us talking about how we could start collection information about where Mozilla developers are located and if they meet periodically. The only such group I know of is the NorthWestMozDev group.
What other groups are out there? Perhaps using Meetup might be a good way to can track of various Mozilla groups. There are already Mozilla and XUL categories on Meetup. Hopefully, this could help other interested developers meet people and get involved with Mozilla. It can also help Mozilla find great locations to have Developer Day events.
You don’t need to be a hard core Mozilla developer. Developer Days are focused on anybody with an interest in Mozilla projects, products or technologies.
How about using upcoming ? It does nice integration with a number of calendars out there ….
FWIW Germany, Austria, Switzerland developers are here:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Contributors/Germany_Austria_Switzerland
localizer groups also seem to meet up regularly and a lot happens in those. i am thinking about the polish team, for instance. not only are they focusing on localizing, they are also writing translation tools, creating a database of polish extensions, testing, doing marketing events, and more i am sure. they meet regularly and i have a feeling that a lot of the teams are doing this. might be another place to start.
I like the idea of having regional Mozilla events, especially as we try to build out our QA community. Once we get the QMO portal launched I hoped to be able to track where folks are located so we can think about having events in their region that are more informal. I liked the old school Dev Days where there wasn’t a formal agenda – everyone just came, we ate pizza and people did demos and stuff.
I’ve been wondering for a while if we could have some event in Vienna, but I don’t even know anyone from the community who’d be around here. We had a pretty nice Mozilla 1.0 party back in the old days, but since then there’s been nothing – not even a single Firefox party!
I largely assume this is because us people here don’t even know each other, I’m pretty sure there are actually Mozilla people somewhere in Austria…