Last April, the Open Labs Hackerspace Community got the chance to organize the very first Mozilla Tech Speaker Training, offering new and existing contributors to get in touch with Technical Resources, Public Speaking material, but most importantly, a community where you can hang out and learn things together, face to face.

With Kristi Progri joining the Albanian Tech Speakers and 2 more Mozillians (Boris Budini and Redon Skikuli) being trained among our ranks, we have cultivated a solid and growing community, which is active not only on the local level, but also regional and international level, having impact on Mozilla projects in an upstream manner. We were happy to share our experiences with fellow speakers and those who strive to become one.

We started organizing our 2nd training, inviting fellow Mozillians, Hacktivists and Speakers from the local communities to learn a thing or two during a very intensive workshop day made out of technical presentations, debates, speed-speaking (the public speaking equivalent of speed-dating), and prizes for those speaking at the last session.

We were happy to also welcome Giannis Konstantinidis, a fellow Mozilla Tech Speaker from Greece who spontaneously was able to come to Tirana to help with the event. Giannis gave a Firefox Dev tools lightning talk and the audience had the unique chance to give him feedback on how he did, which we steadily improved throughout the various presentations during the training.

It seems that people loved it too! We were able to exchange with new attendees and explain potential contribution pathways. It was noticeable that the training was sparking a bigger movement, with new people being interested in our activities, something which I always love seeing. I look forward to our next training!

Check out also the Event Report in Albanian by Redon Skikuli

Photos by Andis Rado under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.