Club Moz, FSOSS, and things to come

Well, it has been a while. I am still trying to settle into a groove here back in Canada. I am finding it to be increasingly difficult, however I am pushing on.

Over the last month, I have been working hard to get Club Moz started back up again. I am happy to say that Club Moz now has a member board organized, a dedicated computer lab and a pretty solid action plan. Here are some of the basics of that action plan:

- meetings every tuesday from 330-6pm
- every meeting to include a "Seneca Testday" or "Seneca Bugday" designed to both mirror and supplement the Mozilla test/bug days, as well as give students an introduction to the tools commonly used by QA. The first test day will be a general Minefield test day so students can wet their palette a little before diving deep into a certain feature. Thanks Tomcat for helping us out with this.
- workshops to introduce students to the tools of the trade. The first workshop will be an intro to IRC.
- provide students with the support and guidance they need to become involved in Mozilla projects
- provide students in the Open Source course at Seneca with a couple hours a week where they can get help and work on their projects
- show students that Mozilla is not just Firefox and help them pursue other "Mozilla-based" projects if interested (Songbird, Thunderbird, Flock, Joost, Miro, etc)
- show students that Mozilla is not just coding for Firefox (QA, Webdev, documentation, extensions/themes, etc)

This list is a work in progress. We will have a better idea, more specifically, of what we are actually going to be doing once we get started.

As far as promoting Club Moz and Mozilla at the school, the QA Flyer has finally been posted around the school. This was put up late last week and we are now preparing a presentation to be given at one of the theatre rooms at Seneca.

Here are some of the highlights of the presentation:
- My Mozilla Journey
- Cesar's Mozilla Journey
- What is Club Moz and what do we do?
- How can you help?
- Other Mozilla project demos (Thunderbird, Songbird, Flock, Joost, Miro)
- Networking, Experience, Academic opportunities of becoming involved
- Testdays, Bugdays, Hackdays

Since we submitted to the Seneca Student Federation (SSF) for official club status, I am hoping that we can get some free pizza for the presentation. I also have some swag available for handing out to people that show up.

It should be stated, that while I am targeting this presentation toward students and perspective members of Club Moz, I will be welcoming faculty members to come out to see the presentation so they can see what we are doing.

The Club Moz board is having a meeting tomorrow evening to finalize on the details of the presentation and start a couple day promotion plan. This will most likely include passing word around to faculty of Seneca to pass onto their students as well as posting announcements on the school's website.

I am really looking forward to getting this started up. All of the Club Moz board members have put in a lot of planning, personal time and effort to get to where we are today. This should be less taxing on us once we get the ball rolling.

I hope to see some of you folks at FSOSS this year. It takes place on Oct 25th and 26th at Seneca College and I will be volunteering, so I hope to see some of you there!

As far as the future, I will be using this blog for Club Moz updates, so stay tuned. If any Mozillans want to stop by for one of our sessions to see what we are doing or to lend a helping hand, I would be very interested in talking more about this. Just ping me on irc (ashughes).

Anyway, I have neglected my homework for far too long tonight.

Cheers!