Mozilla London All-Hands 2016 – Report

What is loud, intensive and full of Mozillians? No, not (only) beer parties, it’s the Mozilla All-Hands! With June approaching, all Mozilla had the pleasure to meet again in a single place for their bi-annual All-Hands (former Work Week) to GyShiDo within a couple of days. This All-Hands was held in London (funnily right before the Brexit referendum) with more than 1300 Mozillians attending (over 100 from them were volunteers). I am privileged to be invited again this time, with Mozlando being the first All-Hands I attended last year. Unlike last year, I was invited by the Marketing Team though (Participation invited me last year) as part of the Open Design initiative. I am proud to represent the Mozilla Albania community at Open Labs and I hope other local contributors to join in the next All-Hands. The merits are not my own only after all.

However, this time, we were slightly more Mozillians, divided into 3 different hotels and venues. Parallel sessions and ad hoc meetings were on every day’s schedule.  A great touch was the fact that we could get lunch in any hotel (which we ended up anyway, as a lot of teams had meetings during lunch). Walking from one hotel to the other was a bit of repetitive though, but we got used to it (7-20min walk from one to the other).

Tuesday started with a Plenary in Dr. Who style. Mark Surman got on stage with the help of the Tardis and opened the plenary with some great talks followed by Chris Beard and Mitchell Baker.

Everything became quite intensive after that. Many meetings at the same time to attend, Birds of a Feather sessions, people to meet, it was chaotic and I loved it. It also felt quite weird as most of my Mozillian friends expected me to be part of the Participation sessions, unaware that I was part of the Marketing team this time (and I’m really happy to see more volunteers invited by Marketing this time!).

It was funny to also see how lower the T=Shirt quota was in the marketing team compared to Participation. Loved the diversity between teams here. We had a fireside chat with Chris Beard as well, who took the time to hang out with contributors after the session as well. You could expect from the CEO rushing from one session to the other, but I loved the way Chris sets some time aside for everyone. Not many executives do that.

On Wednesday we had the Open Design exhibition where the Creative Team showcased the process behind Mozilla-s rebranding where every attendee could chime in as well. You can check out my blogpost regarding Community Design (now Open Design) at Mozilla related to this. The press has also covered this quite well.

We introduced the new Brand Guidelines for all projects across Mozilla and are working with teams to get their visual identity aligned accordingly. It was great to meet with the Creative Team in person and work on the future plans regarding Open Design in the near future.

Further, meeting with fellow TechSpeakers was another highlight for me. If Mozilla is an extended family, TechSpeakers would be one of my favourite cousins. We had various meetings and drinks together and prepared for the coming plans of the next TechSpeakers pilot and Meetup in Berlin in September. Havi and me facilitated a Public Speaking as a Service session as well, which went splendid with a small, but very interested group of people joining!

Public Speaking As A Service: @freshelectrons & devrel team talks about the #MozTechSpeakers program at #mozlondon pic.twitter.com/ugIn4S0AJ6

— Mozilla Hacks (@mozhacks) June 16, 2016

Meanwhile I’m preparing for a few other conferences I will speak as a TechSpeaker in the coming months as well.

Wrap Up

Getting through all this procedure with my UK visa was worth it at the end of the day. MozLondon had a unique atmosphere and while we Europeans could have our revenge on the Americans getting some jetlag finally, it was a great productive week which boosted the moral to keep doing what we are doing.

Bonus: You can find the photos from the whole week on Flickr, including the fantastic Steampunk party.

In the following are the event reports of fellow Mozillians, as reporting on the whole event centrally is impossible:

Andrzej Mazur
Anjana Sofia Vakil
Daniele Scasciafratte
Indonesia Community
Rabimba Karanjai