3 different types of participation - TW Mozillians in HKOSCon from 2014-2016

Last month in 6/24-26, several MozTW community members flied to Hong Kong visited HKOSCon, Hong Kong Open Source Conference. This is our 3rd time joining the event, and we had tried 3 different forms of participation, here I would like to share a bit about it.

HKOSCon

Hong Kong Open Source Conference is annual open source conference in Hong Kong, co-hosted by 3 communities, HKCOTA, HKLUG and Open Source Hong Kong.

One of the event's characteristic is that HKOSCon is formed by volunteers and students, not by for-profit company (which is pretty similar to COSCUP, another open source conference in Taiwan).

Actually, according to one of the funder (and Mozilla Rep) Sammy Fung said, we can think it as a smaller (around 500 ppls) and more internationalized (English-based) version of COSCUP, which have around 2k participants and use Chinese as main language.

According to my observation, participants in HKOSCon is a combination of local (Hong Kong) enginners and students, speakers and students from Taiwan, and foreign speakers.

2014 - Chinese Mozillians Unite

Booth and Forum Session

2014 (March 29) is our first time to participating in HKOSCon. We tried to gather 8 Reps from Hong Kong (2), Taiwan (3) and China (3) together in the conference. We host a typical Mozilla community booth, a forum (“Mozilla communities in Chinese-speaking regions”) and a private meetup to discuss various topics about building Mozilla communities in the region.

Hong Kong is a special place that is 1) accessable by people from both Taiwan and China, without many political problems and limitations, 2) use both Chinese / English as primary language, and 3) close to all major east-Asian cities, so it's pretty pratical to be choosen as the place that we all gathered. I also experience that Wikimania 2013 (took place in Hong Kong Polytechnic University) also take the advantage to gathered many China / Taiwan contributors. Singapore has similar advantages but it just 4 times far away for us.

What worked and what didn't?

The idea of unite the Mozillians from different places really works, and I believed that we need to do it more (re-engage MozCamp perhaps?) But next time if we want to take HKOSCon as a chance, we may need to plan a whole dedicated day for Mozillian meetup, to work longer besides participating inside confernece, to get into more detailed discussion. (which may look similar to Leadership Summit and MozCamp beta in India?)

Here is my debrief about our participation in HKOSCon 2014,

• Mozillians in Hong Kong Open Source Conference (HKOSC)

2015 - Involved more Taiwanese Mozillians

Booth and Workshop

In 2015 (June 26-27), we take a different approach that bring more Taiwanese Mozillian to get involved to HKOSCon. Total 7 Mozillians (5 Reps) joined. This year we also focus our most effort on the booth, and I personally host a Webmaker workshop.

The theme of the booth is FoxYeah campaign, we asked people to take selfie photos with 5 FoxYeah banners and received stickers. Most participants already know Firefox and was our user, so we would like to recall their attention back to the core value of Firefox.

For the Webmaker workshop, due to the design of the room and session length, it's not really work out well. Also I feel that Webmaker is not really suitable for this developer-focus conference participants that it just too simple.

What worked and what didn't?

Designing a more interactive booth event worked really good, we had interacting with many graceful people at the booth, and got more then 40 “FoxYeah photos”.

Webmaker workshop which focus on education and entering level of contributors not work. The main participants of HKOSCon are more engineer based (far more then COSCUP) and we need our workshop to be more technical for them.

Here is my debrief about our participation in HKOSCon 2015, you can also find the link of articles from other participants inside.

• Mozillians in Hong Kong Open Source Conference (HKOSC)

2016 - Just focus on session

This year, due to overwhelmed workload after London Allhands, I didn't pay as much planning effot as previous 2 years that can involved many participants together. Instead, I try just to focus on session, and keep it simple that only 3 TW Mozillians joined and gave 2 sessions, debrief my journey of contributing in Mozilla and yajs.vim, JavaScript syntax highlight for VIM by Othree, another speaker from TW community*.

Besides sessions from the community volunteer, there are another 2 from Mozilla paid-staff - Mozilla Eir, connecting device topic by Kevin Hu and Fuzzing testing by Gary Kwong.

• Othree’s blog about HKOSCon 2016 (Chinese) - HKOSCON 2016 : O3noBLOG

What worked and what didn't?

Because that we didn't set a booth, it's hard to evaluate how many attendees is interesting in participating Mozilla this time (compare to the previous 2 years that we had contributing forms at our booth).

But the Fuzzing and Othree's HTML5-related sessions, as well as my session did attach many people and I can feel overall better response then last year's workshop. Another reason of the better atmosphere at sessions may due to several OSS participating-related sessions had been organized next each other in schedule, and thus attached the right audiences.

And suggestion for the future...

From our previous experiences, here I come up with some suggestions for next year,

1. Bring in more foreign technical speakers

   There are more developers in HKOSCon that is interesting in technical topics, engineering speaker can have better interaction in HKOSCon, things like “how we use Rust” or “How do we do Firefox release engineering” should do well there.

2. Booth is necessery

   With only session, it's hard for us to interaction with all partcipants, booth does that well. Besides giving out stickers and demonstrating hardware / flyers, plan a simple event such as FoxYeah photo campaign in 2015 will please everyone.

3. 7~10 Mozillians is good numbers for participation

   We had around 10 Mozillians (excludes local HK Mozillians which are all dedicated to run HKOSCon) in both 2014 and 2015 HKOSCon, 5~7 of them are volunteers. It's enough to both manage a booth and give 3 to 5 sessions with this numbers, and the rate of Mozillians to all participants would be around 2%.