Being a Mozilla Rep

Dated: September 06, 2012

I have been contributing to Mozilla for about over a year now in different ways. I have not been doing much evangelism outsite my college because I love coding and that is how I have been contributing so far. Yes, I have organized some events in my college which, unfortunately, I did not publicise enough in the community either prior or post events. But these events were really successful. With the help of some other volunteers in my college, I was able to really convert a couple of guys into code contributors. The output of these events was amazing. One day, I just applied to become a Mozilla Rep. And guess what, I became one. My mentor is FuzzyFox. I look forward to learning a lot from him! :)

Coincidentally, the Mozilla Delhi/NCR community was meeting up soon after I became the Rep. Kinshuk Sunil, another Rep from the Delhi/NCR region (and my unofficial Mozilla mentor), announced it in the community group on Facebook. I’d like to thank everyone again who wished me. When I attended the meetup, I somehow felt, though slightly, that people started treating me a little differently… as if I had achieved something or I became a leader or something. As I see myself as a Mozilla Rep, I am still a volunteer, though my scope of duties as a volunteer has increased from being just a Mozilla volunteer and loyalist to helping others support the Mozilla Mission and get involved with Mozilla. I hope I will still be treated as a fellow volunteer as I always used to.

Anyways, the community met up to gather feedback on the Summer Code Party events across Delhi/NCR and what to do further. Some colleges successfully organized Summer Code Party and received a considerable participation whereas some were not able to participate and organize events at all. That’s alright! However, we did not have enough Summer Code Party events in Delhi/NCR to host a massive Hack Jam as decided previously. Therefore, in this meeting we decided to scrap the idea of Hack Jam and convert it into a MozCamp. MozCamp Delhi will be happen in the format of an Unconference and is now scheduled to happen on September 22 & 23 at Jamia Milia Islamia University campus. The Delhi/NCR community cannot be thankful enough to the university and our fellow contributors there for helping us organize this. We are planning to cover a multitide of topics/areas related to the web.

Right after the meetup, I had to treat everybody for becoming a Rep. And the treat turned out to be an unconventional one. We ended up having some mouth watering Litti Chokha on a road side stall. That was fun!

As a Mozilla Rep

It is rare to find non-engineers getting involved with FOSS projects like Mozilla here in India i.e. majority of the volunteers and contributors are either engineering students or people from the tech community. Rarely you will find people with a non-engineering/non-scientific background getting involved with FOSS projects. Since we have such a huge number of engineers and engineers-in-the-making involved, we should at least have a considerable amount of code contribution to these FOSS projects. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I have noticed this (at least here in Delhi/NCR) that the community is always busy in evangelism. Evangelism is important but most of the times the audience at the receiving end is technical. So why not try to help them become code contributors along with supporters of Mozilla Mission.

As a Mozilla Rep, this is what I would like to focus on and build here in Delhi/NCR — a developer community which contributes code to different Mozilla projects as well.

If you are in Delhi/NCR (or anywhere else) and want to get involved with Mozilla to support the Mozilla Mission by volunteering and contributing in any way, do get in touch with me or Kinshuk Sunil and we will do our best to help you out.

Originally published at vaidik.in.