JSFoo 2014

Educate the audience about the benefits of participating in open source communities, as well as challenges and tips for successfully managing and contributing.

Outline

The Mozilla Developer Network is an open-source documentation wiki for web developers, which is maintained by really passionate, smart, and inspiring people. Most are not paid employees of Mozilla. All of them are helping make the web a better place by writing, editing, and reviewing articles as well as contributing code to the wiki platform. What inspires people to contribute to open source projects, and why? How do you support a diverse community, acknowledge many different voices and perspectives, be open and inclusive, and still get things done (especially when you can’t force anyone to do anything)? In this session, I’ll share what I’ve learned (and keep learning) by working with, in, and for volunteer communities; including the value to participants, how I broadly share ownership and create opportunity, and tips for being open, inclusive, and transparent.

Speaker bio

Ali Spivak is a developer relations manager at Mozilla and spends her time making the Mozilla Developer Network more awesome. A large part of that is supporting the amazing volunteer community that contributes code and content to the site. Ali got started in tech doing software QA and built her first web site in 1997. She spent the following years working on lots of web sites, including Edmunds.com and 10 years at Cisco, before joining Mozilla in 2012. Ali is passionate about maintaining a free and open web, and building and participating in volunteer communities. She is also an artist, glassblower, gardener, food and travel enthusiast.

Twitter: @alispivak

Links

• http://www.slideshare.net/alispivak/mozilla-fx-os
• http://www.slideshare.net/alispivak/open-source-everythingincluding-documentation