MozForce Community of Young Devs in India
By Esther Mwema | A spotlight on a Sprint for Internet Health project
Saloni Garg started the project MozForce during Mozilla Open Leaders Program 2019. She is the winner of International Women In Open Source Award by Red Hat, and a recipient of Google Venkat Scholarship 2018. Academically, she is an undergraduate studying Computer Science and is in her final year at The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur. Find her on Twitter, LinkedIn and Medium
I interviewed Saloni Garg to learn more about MozForce and how you can contribute to their work.
What is MozForce?
MozForce is an inclusive community for developers and Open Source contributors on the campus (LNMIIT, Jaipur, India).
Why did you start MozForce?
We started MozForce to bring together like-minded devs on campus, for knowledge exchange, meetings and discussing with other devs who are working in the same field which fosters sharing and gaining knowledge.
Which open community does MozForce respond to?
MozForce grew as a project in the Mozilla Open Leaders program. It is actually an independent group, that was started by me and Tushar. As more and more people are joining us, we’re growing larger. We plan to expand the group on our campus first, and then expand to upper levels gradually.
What challenges have you faced working on this project?
The major challenge was to find and bring people together and to make them understand the benefits of joining our community. Since this was our first attempt with such an initiative, we had to figure out ways to make this information reach people on campus and to actually have them join us.
What kind of skills do I need to contribute to your project?
There are no rules on who can join our project. You just need to be a developer ready to gain and share knowledge. We just want the members to be collaborative and supportive to the notion of ‘Openness’.
How can others contribute your project?
We will host meetups and group discussions on our campus. To contribute effectively to our project, you can join us in one or more of our meetups and help us grow a healthy community. We’d be very happy if you have good command over any technology aspect and are willing to share it during the meetup. Fill out this form for expressing your interest in joining us- https://forms.gle/f68buzCGGQnYfM8s6
How has the Open Leaders program helped you with your project?
We were very fortunate to have a mentor like Renata Aquino who helped us learn about Community Building. Moreover, cohort calls and breakout sessions also help us gain different perspectives on the culture of ‘Openness’. Also, we invited experts over calls, which was really helpful for our growth.
What meme or gif best represents your project?
I really love this one, and feel that this appropriately represents us. “We rise by lifting others” is our motto.
Join us wherever you are during the month of May at Mozilla’s Sprint for Internet Health to work on many amazing open projects! Join a diverse network of scientists, educators, artists, engineers and others in person and online to hack and build projects for a health Internet.
This post by Esther Mwema is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
