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Personally, I was pessimistic about this event from the community’s point of view because of my previous experiences but was pleasantly surprised by the results.
Let’s make a premise. I had a chance for Mozilla Italia to have a booth at Codemotion Rome 2017, we started an internal organization in order to have stickers, banner resources and flyers with months in advance.
Unusually I will tell you some numbers about the organization and what we did as exhibitors, as well also about our speakers.
Unfortunately it has come a very long article!
Stuff Analysis
We started from the resources in terms of gadgets that we had and I request for other, thinking of having several hundred of these gadgets.
In few words:
- 250 postcards of Rust
- 250 of Aframe
- 100 copies of Vademecum
- 50 copies of flyers about Mozilla club
- 100 copies of flyers of Mozilla Campus Club
- 700 stickers of Firefox
- 300 stickers of Firefox Dev Edition
- 100 stickers of Rust
- 50 of MDN
- Various Stickers of mozilla
- 250 bracelets
With these numbers we are very well able to cover the event by distributing to 2,000 people:
- over 400 stickers of Firefox
- over 180 stickers of Firefox Dev Edition
- 60 stickers of Rust
- 50 of MDN
- 200 bracelets
The other numbers are not easy to calculate, but we mainly distributed postcards dedicated to Rust.
For flyers, the situation is different where we distributed 30 copies of the vademecum. The flyers were not recounted so it was not possible to plan their distribution, but we distributed mainly those of campus clubs.
Obviously these numbers are not very accurate but they demonstrate that our methodology to have stock inventory helps us because otherwise we would have ended some sticker very easily.
We don’t brought various pins to not have too many gadgets to distribute and make them more valuable for the next events.
Exhibition Analysis
We took care to have two vertical banners (which we created specifically) to be able to present at the best, as well as take advantage of the space available.
The exhibition space available was not much (you can see in the photos) so we attached to the wall or on the banner our flyers.
Initially we wanted to bring the animal peluches to exhibits and other things but they were bulky.
In addition to the material, we have been concerned to create a script for the stand (inspiration from Fosdem) to read from the people of the booth.
At the same time we tried to avoid promotional material (we still have) or t-shirts about Firefox OS to avoid any possible question on the subject (and we don’t got) and be able to talk about what we’re doing today.
Being in the community area: GDG, Django Girls and Microsoft Student we decided to introduce with the variety of projects we are pushing, as already mentioned, the Mozilla Club and Campus Club as well as our activities as a national community looking for new volunteers and developers. In fact, we have promoted the request for developers for our community because we also make training and mentoring for learning but also to contribute to the projects.
We also brought professional camera but we were very busy with the booth and we could not do a lot of photos.
Analysis talk
We done as community volunteers four proposals for talks but only one was accepted, Eugenio of Rust.
The wait to know what talk had been approved created problems in order to have the material for the stand, but we are able to organize without any problems.
Also we had a volunteer from Mozilla India with a talk about the VR and two talk by italian Rust world. One of them talk about Rust was by one of the organizers of the Rust meetup of Rome.
Having contacts with the meetup SPVR Rome we decided to promote their activities by talking to the booth to explain that we are an attracting community and that we are helping them, not only to find the physical promotional materials, but also with the organization of specific events in the next months.
This whole promotion there was already before the Codemotion Rome just that we wanted to emphasize that our support for greater involvement by the Romans and promote these meetups that help us in the promotion of Mozilla technologies.
This promotion means that we also help in their organization and provide support at national level as well as internationally for their needs. This enables us to extend our network of local representatives about our area of interest.
Metrics Analysis
In Mozilla it is very important to have metrics about the success of the event that are made before and check in later.
We tracked the attendance to various talk where we had Eugenio with full room and about 140 people present for example.
We had proposed to check talk relating to our areas in order to have these metrics but we were busy for talking with people at the booth so we ignored this need.
Using a very analogic technic we marked on a sheet of paper for each day a point for each person who stopped to talk to us at least 2-3 minutes, then not “I take the sticker and on.”
With a presence of 3 people at the booth with various technical or organizational knowledge about the community we talked to 208 people on the first day and 130 for the second. With a total of 338 people in my own case I lost the voice on the first day.
These numbers are very big for us because the previous events we did it reached a number around 100.
From this number we have extrapolated the people who were interested in opening a campus club by the fact that during the two days came several times. For the moment, then we assume that in other three cities will have other campus clubs but we prefer to wait before releasing the names.
We also ran out very quickly bracelets and the second day we tried to make the classic promotional tips of a selfie with us to give the latest.
We noticed many tweet but not enough so then we decided to make us photos and post them directly to be sure to have that.
To find the photo:
- https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=mozillaitalia
- https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=mozillaitalia&src=typd
Report
We used paper and pen to mark from ourselves the email contacts of people with whom we come in contact as well as many business cards to distribute (as a volunteer).
Many Roman coworking and other similar situations in Italy have asked us if we want to make the meetup and we have made available.
We get contacts with DjangoGirls and we talked to organize MozillaDjango Days considering that Mozilla uses it (mozilla.org is made with Django) and they have contacts distributed throughout Italy and do many events.
We took contact with SalernoJS and other realities as local meetups where we are considering to visit.
We got some people interested in joining the program TechSpeaker to help us in this kind of tech work and promotion in the coming months we’ll put them in a stronger way in the community.
As you can see we try to merge the various possibilities offered by Mozilla for a greater effect on the Mozilla mission to promote and help our community.
Edoardo attended the meeting of the “Team per la trasformazione digitale” about developers.italia.it representing Mozilla Italy.
They were handed out stickers with the logo of the community with our name that we liked very much and we would like to replicate them for the next event in the future.
One detail that we noticed was a very small share of foreigners, were only speakers so the fact to focus with Italian material has proven useful for our goal: promoting to Italians.
On the second day during the Codemotion we were asked if we wanted to talk to PHP User Group of Rome then two days later I attended a talk on Firefox Developer Tools.
PUG Photos: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.701573856697612&type=3
Participate in this PUG (thing that I wanted to do for some time as a listener) was helpful to have a vision of a kind of community we never got in touch and learn more about the situation of Roman meetups.
What do we need to improve
- Get almost 200 stickers for technology else they finish too fast
- Take more photos
- Be at least 4-5 people at the booth, knowledge ready about the various areas
- Motivate the people to follow us on social network, say only by the voice is not enough to have interesting datas (we got an increment on Facebook and Twitter only of 3-4 people on both)
- Think about a more tech vademecum, didn’t reached very much success probably for the audience that has already knowledge
- Made vertical banner more interesting with icons of social network as example
- Have more talk approved during the event about our topics, to get a representative that is over the booth
- Space to do more demo in specific hours of the day
- People who come to the booth have the interest to discover and not to contribute, at least as a first contact then the Aframe postcards about contribute did not work a lot. We need to motivate people to contribute after we got them interested
- Think of a public paper to be able to score a newsletter
The photos that concern us, collected among the various social networks: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mte90/sets/72157678458574554/with/33280726680/
Edoardo’s album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/edovio/sets/72157679145426983
I close with some photos that I want to comment:
Our first banner as Mozilla Italia, an achievement that I personally was expecting since years!
Our booth at one of the moments of calm, you may notice the chair used for other flyers because the space was finished. You can also notice the stickers on the t-shirt and a little with we mark data.
The end of the first day where you notice my fatigue and the many talks on VR who (maybe me) annoyed.
The talk of Eugenio about Rust with people standing to listen (seat finished).
One of the group photo of us together with Innocenzo, the community Codemotion manager who allowed all of this.
This photo deserves a moment of appreciation for the non-epic laying order Codemotion or clothing, but because it was made at the restaurant on Saturday night. Giovanni (red shirt) joined us in the evening around 20 with a trip from Benevento to meet in live Edoardo and chat about our activities of the communities. Too bad then it rained heavily and we could not talk more.
A detail not to be overlooked is that we Italians after the events we go to the restaurant and is very much chatter.
I close thanking the people who participated in this event in one way or another:
- Edoardo, for all the work we are doing together to Mozilla Italia at the organizational level in its various forms over the past year Eya! (Second from right)
- Eugenio, for the talk and for the logistical support in Rome for the various material deliveries and “scarrozzamenti” with the car (first left)
- Giovanni, for the appearance on Saturday night!
- Alessandra, which is not too bored to Codemotion helping the booth, Eya!
- Havi eand Michael, Mozilla TechSpeaker program that allowed us to have promotional material for developers
- The reps program, for funds used for banners and flyers (besides, to bring Edward)
- Innocenzo, of Codemotion for his time and our plans for the Codemotion Milan
- All people who have told us:
- You are the only that is not annoying no one to get stickers
- You are too funny
- You are too happy
- Quando farete un evento nella mia città? (non hanno detto proprio così ma noi capivamo questo)
- What does Mozilla and Mozilla Italia today? (It seems like a silly question but it is that we want to introduce ourselves to the best)
- I use Chrome/I deal with stuff that does not concern Mozilla etc. (It does not care, Mozilla makes so many things that we find something to talk about that will definitely interest to you)
- You are really open source in what you do! (Referring to the fact the names of the collaborators in the flyer and in our organization)
- By the invitation of the PUG Roma, unexpected but interesting for is public (new to us)
- The people of CLSX that they invited us back to an event, this time in Milan
- For all those who came out to greet (we knew from before):
- MilanoJS
- WordPress Roma
- RomaJS
- Few guys of GDG
- and many others that I not remember the names
See you at the next event!
