Startup Weekend Mahajanga

We dit it!

It wasn't easy but we finally did it. One of my most anticipated event for our team as we prepared it for a very long time.

The event

We were coach for the 3 days event in Mahajanga; our talk was about Ethics in Data Collection. All the participants were divided in 11 teams which had their own startup projects. As coach, we helped them by giving advices according our respective expertise area.

The talk

We had the chance to visit each one of the teams during our coaching. But we had a surprise! We expected a classic talk to every team at the same time but instead, we had to talk to the teams one after another. Also, since it's not a lecture, we had to adapt our talk for each team according to their project and questions. It was a new experience for us but very fulfilling as well.

We had way more participants than we expected and they were more receptive than we thought! It was great and it was very fun for. We also had the pleasure to learn a lot from the other coaches and the participants.
Participants also showed interest in our community and asked many questions about our mission and objectives. Some signed up to join but less that we predicted.

In conclusion, it was a great event for us and we are planning to do another one in Fianarantsoa as well.

The coaches

Mahajanga MozTalk

We did it!

On April 23rd, 2016 we did our very first MozTalk in Mahajanga :)
The event was organized at the IUGM School, University of Mahajanga.

It was such a new experience of all of us as it was the first time that we organized an event in the city of Mahajanga. Our goal was to recruit community members in this city and extend the Mozilla reach to the north of Madagascar.
For this MozTalk, we had four speakers: Franckis (who had the idea for the event), Tino (our very own genius), Alberto (the organization master) and myself.
I talked about Mozilla, its missions and the contribution opportunities.
Franckis explained all about Privacy and online life.
Tino teached about the Web and how can you participate in it.
You can download the event slide here

It was an amazing experience but I must admit we had some issues with the organizations :(
First, we leaned too much on the school board who gave us the opportunity for this event. Thus, we couldn't do anything when they decided to change the date at the last moment.
And second, we were too optimistic about our predictions. Since we planned to hold the event on a school day, we were expecting more than 150 students attending. But we only got 32 because because the day changed...

But overall, we recruited many many new Community members in this school and we hope that they would become great contributors!

Tino distributed some forms to the attendees after the event to learn what interested them. We learned that advocacy and tech speaking where their top choices so we are going to orient them that way.

We also learned that a factor that prevents them to contribute to Mozilla was the language. A lot of Mozilla docs are in English and many students have problems with that language.

So to wrap up, the event was great in the way that we recruited  more contributors but next time, we will have to work on our organization skills.

I'd like to thank our speakers: Tino, Franckis and Alberto who were the true heroes of this event!
And also the IUGM school that gave us this amazing opportunity to share the Mozilla missions.

Keep on rocking the Web!!