Serbian community – the revival
Serbian community was founded back in 2009 and during these years it didn’t made much of a progress. Actually most of the time the project was stalled.
Miloš made a great job by founding Serbian Mozilla community, but due to his lack of time (his job) he didn’t had time to be involved with the community.
Two years ago, I joined Serbian community by following the code: think local, act global.
In the first year, nothing happened but in last nine moths things started to change.
At start, our community was consisted of few people, but by the time we started to grow due to event we held. After those events, people started to contact us in order to volunteer for Mozilla.
Two months ago we were a community of 6 people, but now that number is ~20. So we formed a team that split into groups: localization, marketing on social media, design, event planning etc.
Our work
Have you heard about Android Community Campaign Challenge? If you haven’t here is what it is about:
This is a new program that is intended to fund marketing campaigns to promote Firefox for Android locally in your region, country or area. If you have wanted to promote the Android Firefox locally, but have not had the resources to do so, this is your chance. The process is simple. Develop your campaign idea, propose a reasonable budget, and consider how to measure the success of your campaign.
Our community started to work on this, and we did it in two ways:
Posters:
Flyers:
From previous post:
Open vs closed
Open spaces are cool, everyone can see it but there are few risks. People may rip up posters, or weather can ruin it (even on covered bus stop stations) humidity may damage them.
Closed spaces have less risk, actually only risk is that someone can rip them up.
But in closed spaces you have (probably) WiFi access so people who want to download Firefox don’t have to spend their megabytes.
Tracking QR codes
Every location has unique QR code that is being tracked. We shortened urls via Google Url Shortener which made QR codes easier to scan due to low density of image. This will help us understand and learn from which locations people mostly scan QR codes, and based on that next time we will decide where is worth to put posters and where not.
What to do?
Thinking about putting these posters or flyers in your country/city? – awesome!
You should contact local caffee bars, universities or any other places you have in mind to get their approval for posting them like we did.
Post pictures on social media networks and promote those places in order to thank them.
Improve/redesign/localize these posters and flyers:
What’s next?
As I said, we have formed into groups, and what we plan to do next is complete localization of SUMO because if we want to be active local community, we have to have a good support to average Joe, plus Firefox OS is coming to Serbian market this year, and we expect to have a lot of average Joe users who will buy Firefox OS phone, so we want to localize all articles on SUMO site that will help users in need.
We’re also planning Firefox OS App Days with people from Telenor, and beside those App Days, we plan to spread Firefox OS by doing some other events and marketing campaigns.
Our website is getting finished, and our presence on social media network is about to get serious. 🙂
This couldn’t be done and wont be done if there were no amazing contributors who are making our community better and larger everyday and richer with ideas that will push Mozilla project further in Serbia.
This year is going to be exciting and probably (hopefully) a successful year for Serbian Mozilla community as we tend to build local presence and spread the word (mission) of Mozilla.
Oskar's blog 