Community space program in half of 2017

TL;DR
Community spaces program has been running for quite sometimes. Now in the half of 2017, we’d like to capture the activities and appreciate what we’ve been doing so far:

• 223 events in total from January to June 2017 with 45% are developer-focused events.
• 2619 visitors so far and 67% of them are returning visitors.
• The closure of Manila community space.

Background

In the previous blog post, Brian explicitly explained how the Community Spaces program has been started. And in early June this year, Head of Core Contributor and Participation - George Roter was trying to emphasize the goals of the program through his visit to Jakarta and Taipei community space and have meeting with the space volunteers. In his visit, George established the goals that our communities need to accomplish this year:

• Engage with the local developer communities and introduce Mozilla technology to them by using the spaces as a hub.
• Emphasize Mozilla as a technology & open culture leader.
• Bring contributors to Firefox and emerging technology projects.

What we’ve accomplished

Last year we have successfully organized 351 events in 9 months and got 4832 visitors in total from the 3 community spaces. That’s 39 events and 536 visitors per month in average.

Only on the first half of 2017 we’ve been accomplished some of the things below:

• 223 events in total from January - June 2017. That means, 37 events per month from the 2 community spaces with 45% are developer-focused events.
• 2619 visitors so far. Meaning that it’s 436 visitors per month from the 2 community spaces with 67% of them are returning visitors.

From 223 events we have from January to June this year, Taipei community space still lead the statistic. But it’s also important to note that Jakarta Space has been inactive for almost 2 months during the moving process from April to May 2017.

With the goal to engage the local developer community, developer focused events become very crucial. In this 6 months alone, we’ve been hosted 100 developer-focused events (which means 45% of the total event). That can’t be happened without tremendous effort from the community to connect and engage with the local technology communities.

The attendees itself are resulting on 2619 people within 223 events that we’ve organized. And please note that this statistic doesn’t include the casual visitors that were coming to co-work and connect with the community (not to attend event). But with this data alone, we’ve been successfully attract more than 436 people in average to come in each month. That’s a lot of people that we can introduce to the various Mozilla project.

What interesting is that 67% of them are returning attendees, which means that people tend to come again after the first visit. Although it’s understandable that Jakarta community space has more new attendees since it’s still quite new.

Jakarta Community Space

Jakarta has its peak of activity in the end of February. However in the end of March, the Jakarta community space needed to move to a new place because we couldn’t renew the contract with the previous landlord. During April and May we stopped any activity to focus on the moving and renovation of the new place. On June 2nd, George Roter come to Jakarta to officially launch the new space. The next day after the launching, George and the Keyholders also had a meeting to discuss about the direction of the space program.

The community is happy with the new place since it’s bigger and we have more control compared to the previous place. And now our focus is to reach out to more developer communities and collaborate with them to host more developer-focused event in the community space. So far, we’ve built new relationships with Wikimedia, Wordpress, Linux, Phython, and some more communities. Not to mentioned that we have organized some WebVR workshops and also collaborated with Techspeaker.

Taipei Community Space

Taipei Community Space has turned 3 years old in last June. With 12 Keyholders contribution (Wildsky had joined this half year, we have hosted 196 events and greet more than 2100 visitors in 6 months. We also welcome 3 new Keyholders from Open Culture Foundation (our new formal organization partner) to join our force, to better utilize the space during the daytime, and to help us grow connections with global open government / open data communities.

There are many highlights in 2017 H1, but we want to honor BobChao first - as a long long time Mozilla contributor and one of TPE space foundering Keyholders. He had started a new A-frame/WebVR workshop twice a month from April, and try building a new community around it.

Another highlight happened in late April, Mozillians from various South East Asia countries visit the space during the night before L10n workshop including many Mozillians from Manila & Jakarta space. We had said hello many times over the internet on multiple inter-connecting events, and finally had the chance to gather offline together.

Besides community meeting and technology events, Mozilla Space can also plays a significant role in policy advocacy. On February, we and other advocators co-hosted a public discussion of local Draft Convergence Bills, more than 30 people joined including the author of the bill, students, volunteers from civil society and non-profit, telecom company staff and government officers. We had discussed important policies like Net Neutrality, Zero-Rating, Multi-stakeholder Governance, Transparent Report and Manila Principles. With this kind of event, we hope to enforce those ideas into the final law. We will keep working on this in next half year. Read and see more photos on discourse.

Manila Community Space Closure

The Manila space was the first Community Space of this experimental program, now coordinated between Open Innovation and Developer Marketing. This space helped to prove that community can have impact in their region. At the beginning of the year, both teams reviewed the whole situation for all our three spaces, and decided that unfortunately the Manila space will not continue receiving support. This decision wasn’t easy at all, but we trust that the Philippines community continue being a reference in the Tech-environment in Manila.. This community space has become a hub for Mozillians to host events and collaborate with other communities, and we hope that they can still thrive in their own way with the closure of the space.

Long way ahead

The first half of 2017 has been a challenge for us. We move, experiment new things, getting more allies, have fun, and get things done. But our work is far from finished. As we go along, we found that the existence of community and a hub to collaborate is much more needed than before.

Mozilla is bringing technology to the next level through projects like WebAssembly, Rust, A-frame, and Common Voice. But it would be nothing if Mozilla is the only one taking advantage of it. With the community space and the community in general, we can introduce our technology to more potential adopters and contributors.

Last but not least, I can’t also thank the community enough for their time and effort that they put into this program. As I involved in the day to day operation in Jakarta community space myself, I realize we can not accomplished anything without tenacity to run the space from the community through all this time.

Full statistic report can be seen here