I held a meeting on Novembre 21rst, 2014. I had the assistance of my reps mentor, William Reynolds, as well as of David Weir and Hagen Halbach. Two more people people showed up, including Janet Swisher-a Web Developer. She helped me with the topics of web development as it pertained to contributing, as well as issues with conflict resolution, plus info to add to the meeting etherpad about to whom to report when having conflicts and autocracy issues. The other person who showed in the meeting brought up about autocracy and it's problems he says he noticed others have had in the past that were to the point where other contributors actually quit because of te autocracy they felt had happened. I spoke with him about this, and I let him know what can be done in situations such as those situations. And since Janet was still on IRC, after having gone out of the room we were using of Vidyo at that time, I contacted her on IRC and asked for her knowledge about this. I feel that her information was very insightful and logical of information.
I have noticed that not many people showed up at this meeting. I am working on figuring out ways to get people interested in attending the meetings I hold, espexially since I am holding meetings truly FOR contributors of Mozilla. I really want contributors to not only feel they are heard by Mozilla, but that they also can come to meetings I hold to get answers to any questions related to contributing that they have. I also hope they can find my meetings intestersting, especially my newer meeting I plan to hold on January 9th that will entail teaching code-not through WebMaker, but through showing of using a server, showing of actual code coded in web pages, and of code implemented though servers. I plan to do so because I have had a couple of people (including one contributor who teaches Web Maker) come up to me to tell me how nice it would be to actually have regular code showed through regular ways and for it to not always be done through WebMaker. They mirrorored what I had already been thinking. So, I want to step up to do it their recommended way FOR them to hook them because some of them want to next step in the process to go further in the coding or Web development process. WebMaker events, they've said-don't do that of teaching the next or even the whole-process of web development. While I have ben told in the mering I held of that Mozilla is not in the process of teaching from very basic coding on up, my teaching would NOT be doing teaching of basic code on up, but of th next steps past WebMaker use on up. I have found it a pattern of reps always doing WebMaker events/parties. I remember having used WebMaker early on to play around with it to have fun and to test it out. But, I also remember thinking after two times of using it of that it doesn't really teach you code... you learn code by using what code you already know or by being taught code by the instructors if they choose to teach you code, to then put in Thimble of WebMaker. So, I then attended a session, short lived, though it had to be due to severe exhaustion that day. But, I didn't get to see code being taught. just people using what they already of it to create awesome Firefox supportive messages in awesome web pages they created. When I think of WebMaker and remember of how I felt when I first wanted to contribute and then tried WebMaker, I felt that maybe there culd have been a better way-at least for those who come to WebMaker not knowing any code or very little code, but who want to know the whole process. I am hoping that I can do this with my next meeting by giving code, examples of code, giving brief but concise information about how web pages in websites work on servers and databases, not just how to start web pages or do WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) type/ways of doing web pages. "HOW can contributors contribute to Mozilla?" one new contributor asked me. And when i gave the links he thanked me, but then he asked me something I didn't expect him to ask me... he asked me, "Okay, but HOW can I contribute? I mean to say how to learn code if I only do Java or certain kinds of code? Where do I start? All peoplke teach is WebMaker events projects. There is documentation, but why not different examples like teaching to us?" The person wanted someone to show them by example as he or she coded something. Being a visual learner, myself, I can understand. So, I want to do just that. I wt to put together a meeting where where they can be taught some aspects of web development and of how contributing in this way for Mozilla can work well, as well as show some of the process of how to do Web Development. I expect that this cannot all be done in just a one hour meetings, but it can be broken down into increments of maybe a few meetings per month.
