Mozilla Campus Clubs are a unique and personal way to Teach the Web in universities. They are made up of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to keep the Internet alive and accessible, so people worldwide can be informed contributors and creators of digital world.
Mozilla Campus Clubs is an effort to make contributing to open source, easier, for Campus students. It provides various activities, teaching kits and learning materials for which the campus students can form groups and learn about open source technologies and most importantly, contribute back.
I’ve taken up a new role as the North American rep for Mozilla Campus Clubs Discourse[http://forum.learning.mozilla.org]. I would like to work on how we can encourage our universities to work in the open. From curriculum development, to the day to day student web use, it would be great to impart the skills of working in the open to the student body. They could also take these skills to their professional and personal lives.
- The concept of open source and a free and open web is censored and limited on the average American college campus.
- Current open source curriculum is limited to technical/engineering students which, excludes other students who could benefit from OS.
- Mozilla lacks a presence on North American campuses compared to it's prevalent presence in other countries.
So, the pool of open source contribution to the Mozilla orgranization becomes a constant cycle of non-North Americans. With the USA and and Canada as such a large proportion of Mozilla products users, it would be beneficial to Mozilla to invest in the talent of these countries and gain from the custmer user experience feedback (amongst many other reasons).
North American Mozilla Campus Clubs will:
- Improve visibility for Mozilla by building brand loyalty customers, name recognition, providing product testers, and more.
- Allow North American college students to build their technical skills while contributing to open source and being exposed to the Mozilla mission.
- Increase the geographic diversity of Mozilla contributors.
The goal is to build a set of inclusive workshops that can be continued annually so that a healthy cycle of open source contribution continues on various campuses.
The builder, Semirah Dolan, is a mechanical engineer/CS major undergraduate student from Boston, MA. She works on various Mozilla open source projects and side activities like; Java app & web development, hackathons, conferences (Grace Hopper, NSBE, etc.).
The development of the North American Campus Clubs is monitored by the Mozilla Campus Advisory Committee.
Semirah Dolan is an invited member of the Open Leaders Cohort of the Mozilla Science Lab who brought together open science advocates from around the world to participate in the first Working Open Workshop in Berlin in February 2016. The training exercises (which are free and easy to reuse) focus on how to build and effectively engage communities so they can work together to develop tools and resources for the greater good.
You! In whatever way you can help.
We need expertise in open source workshops for beginners (i.e Github, Reporting/Fixing bugs, etc.), campaign marketing fundraising, documentation, technical writing, project management.
We'd love your feedback along the way, and of course, we'd love you to participate or share the workshops once it exists.
Our primary goal is to increase the number of North American college students participating in Mozilla Campus Clubs activities.
If you think you can help in any of the areas listed above (and we bet you can) or in any of the many areas that we haven't yet thought of (and here we're sure you can) then please check out our contributors' guidelines.
Please note that it's very important to maintain a positive and supportive environment. Flowers grow with sunshine not shade!
If you want to report a problem or suggest an enhancement we'd love for you to open an issue at this github repository because then we can get right on it. But you can also contact on twitter.
And of course, you'll want to know our:
Thank you for taking the time to check out my project. It is always appreciated when others contribute and take interest.
Also Thank you STEMM Role Models for the github documentation inspiration.