Grow Mozilla

Mitchell’s closing keynote at the MozCamp in Berlin last year was an inspirational call to arms for building a vibrant community in order for Mozilla to be successful. I came across the video recently and wanted to share.

Her talk was a mix of why we need to focus on community building and how we can do that. The why was straight-forward—we’re not going to win if we don’t bring in more people to work with us on our mission.

There were a couple of quotes that really stood out for me about how we can all help with community building.

“Each one of us should be the core of another one or two or three or five or ten or a hundred people. That means each one of us needs to look at what are the things we know how to do, do well, do comfortably. Can I train somebody else to do those?”

“As you are successful, the amount of stuff that comes in should be growing and you should be starting to feel uncomfortable. Like there are too many demands, there’s too much work, I can’t get it done. Too much work coming at you is a sign of success. The way to handle it though, especially at Mozilla where we have unlimited opportunity, is to take what you really understand well enough to explain and pass it on and empower other people to do things.”

I’ve been working recently on the redesign of the Get Involved page and it has highlighted for me that we really do have an unlimited opportunity. I see dozens a people every day who say they want to get involved and help us.

Helping those people is what excites me about Mozilla and I’m glad to be part of the Contributor Engagement team that exists to help all Mozillians achieve crazy and ambitious goals by bringing in volunteers to their teams.

To make it easier for people to work with us, we’ve rolled up everything we’re doing into one simple initiative we’re calling Grow Mozilla. This brings together the tools, channels and expertise from our team and from other parts of the project into one place.

If you’d like to talk to us about how to find volunteers for your team, come to our regular real life discussion forums or join our online discussion forum. We’ll also hold a Grow Mozilla brown bag soon.