Dietrich was kind enough to describe the Mozilla Tech Speakers program he created and ran, where the people around the world already promoting Mozilla/ Firefox / etc got support to give talks.
Calling it Ecosystem Activity Uplift Program here:
This would need funding to run such a thing, although we could maybe prototype parts of it with the Community Fund.
As input, one of the things we need is lists of events next year. I think I’ll start by making a wiki page here to get things started so we have somewhere to put things.
One of things that I committed to coming out of EuroSky was pulling together resources for a developer audience, which is another thing needed for this sort of thing too.
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The Tech Speakers Program was super awesome! I ran AV for some of those events and it was pretty cool. There was a very large variety of topics - from low level developer topics to larger scale community events. It’s a good model, the program was mobilizing a lot of people and getting word out to many disparate communities. Sometimes the experience is that you’d go to a tech speaker talk and have the reaction “I didn’t even know people were working on that. Cool that I’m getting to see the talk from the people who invested time/worked on it!”
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Awesome, this is great feedback to hear from on the ground.
Oh, hello! I ran the TechSpeakers program for the last year of it’s life over at Mozilla and was so proud of the team and volunteers. So happy to help with any info/questions//other things if it’s helpful!
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Hey Jess, welcome, thanks for dropping in!
Wanna run it again for the entire atproto community worldwide?!?!?!?!?!?!
This obvs needs some funding, but it would be amazing to run this playbook again.
It was my dream job and I’m so proud of the amazing impact the program had for our volunteers, org goals and the wider developer community!
TechSpeakers was such an incredibly talented and driven volunteer community and it was an honour to work supporting them. I would love to chat to see if there might be a way to get it going again. I’ll pop you a message now.
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just thinking about this in relation to some of the recent discussion over on Who decides what private data looks like? (protocol changes)
What I indirectly heard/felt there was a need to establish a more tangible “presence” (that may not be the right word?) of the atproto community, being inclusive of but much broader than Bluesky PBC.
Boris - is that valid, and if so, is what you’re gesturing towards in this discussion thread a step in that direction?
It’s “just” a way to support a bottoms up growing of advocates and educators around the world, rather than the corporate model of flying dev rel employees around the world to speak at conferences.
Funded companies can of course do that, this is a pathway to get passionate, multi-lingual, global advocates into the mix, who in turn might get hired in the future.
Not really connected to the other thread, which summarizing is “how do we collaborate to evolve the protocol outside of / before formal standards bodies like the IETF and what is the governance model”
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right, apologies for the cross-thread pollution.
Not a problem, I’m trying to summarize a couple of different things here.
There isn’t really a roadmap for emerging ecosystem governance and initiatives.
People will ask “who is in charge” and the answer is both no one, and also the people who do things, who SHOULD be doing things in an open and collaborative way.
If this ecosystem tech speakers project goes forward — it’s going to need a program lead (not me!) and some funding (I can probably help raise), and both paid and volunteer help (the community).