Mozilla Summit - Summit Assembly Planning Event

About 10 days ago a group of around 70 Mozillians met in the Mozilla Paris office for two full days of brainstorming, planning, and discussions. The purpose of the event was to generate ideas, topics and hot issues that should drive different themes and tracks at the upcoming Mozilla summit.

The planning event was organized as an "unconference". There were many merits to the open nature of this approach. It surfaced important issues and gave flexibility for the day to focus on important issues on people's minds. However, I would encourage those that are leading an unconference event to set a bit of high level context. Free flowing structure is great, but a little bit of overall goal setting is also a good complimentary item.

During the event I led two micro sessions on topics that were important to me. The first sessions was "Building a Framework for Decision Making at Mozilla". This micro session was merged with another related topic suggested by Jishnu titled "The Nature of Dissent". The micro session was well attended with a lot of great ideas. More to come on this over the coming weeks. I'm planning to work with the team to flush out the framework and present at brown bags leading up to the summit.

The second microsession was centered around understanding the end user when designing security and privacy features. A strong point that was raised during this micro session was the idea of identifying the user types, their desires for greater security controls, and the types of trade offs they may be interested in making (if any) for these additional features. The main point was that an understanding of the target audience is required when building additional features and security & privacy features are no different here. We have more work to do on this topic, but there's a lot of valuable information that can come from this.

The next steps after the summit assembly are to continue working with group leads to flush out the various summit tracks. Much more information to come. But based on the energy and enthusiasm at the assembly planning event I think we're going to have a fantastic Summit in just a few months.



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mcoates 
mozillian