What’s cooking in ‘WebVR India’ community!

Hi Mozillians!

WebVR India Community, which was initially called as Grow WebVR Focus Group, was formed as part of community restructuring during Mozilla India Pune meetup in August month of last year. After 8 months since its birth, lets see what’s the status report from this community!

How do we function as a community?

After various iterations of brainstorming and improvements in the process, this is how we function as a community –

Recognition of contributors:

• We have setup a github organization, which has a repository especially for the volunteer recognition system.
• All the members are asked to report their contributions on the issues which are created monthly for this purpose.
• Currently the contributors are mostly involved in creating A-Frame VR experiences/website, conducting A-Frame events, writing blogposts about the technology or personal experience (related to learning, teaching or exploration) and contributing to fixing bugs in a-frame library, website & A-Frame inspector.
• At the end of each month, we document all these contributions on the wiki page of the community.
• We also feature them as WebVR India Superstars and add them to a special Superstars telegram group. This group manages and carries out all operations of the community.

Decision making:

• To ensure ensure openness and decentralization, we are doing all our discussions & decision making openly via github issues, during monthly hangout calls (which are publicly accessible by all the members of the community) or on the WebVR India Telegram group.
• We have a separate telegram group for WebVR India Superstars where all the early discussions happens, which is then taken to wider audience using ways mentioned above. The process of adding contributors to the Superstars group is complete transparent as mentioned in the previous section.

Contests & Activities:

To ensures continuous involvement of the community members and expansion of the community, we host various contests and activities on a regular basis. Listing few of them below-

• Monthly hangouts call: Every month we meet online to share updates and knowledge, to discuss ideas and plans, and to clarify doubts (of newbies specially)
• Online learning calls: We conducted learning calls initially where experienced contributors used to teach A-Frame concepts.
• VR Scene of the month: Contest conducted to attract many developers initially where VR devices were given away to the winners.
• Community Events: Many events by our community were featured on “A week of A-Frame” blogposts on aframe.io website. Read Ram’s post on mozvr.com blog to read about recently concluded Hack Night event.
• Miscellaneous tasks: We also work on misc ideas we get during brainstorming during meetings etc, like we designed the cool A-Frame cheat sheet which is being used worldwide today!

Celebrating with @MozillaIN‘s WebVR India Community for kicking off #WebVR Hack Nights! Thank you, team #WebVRIndia! https://t.co/54bFShfuKj pic.twitter.com/5JIrytx34t

— Mozilla VR (@mozillavr) May 5, 2017

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Celebrating with @MozillaIN's WebVR India Community for kicking off #WebVR Hack Nights! Thank you, team #WebVRIndia! https://t.co/54bFShfuKj pic.twitter.com/5JIrytx34t

— Mozilla VR (@mozillavr) May 5, 2017

Self-check takeaways:

Self-checks are indeed an important factor in maintaining the health of a community & its growth. We drew an initial roadmap and set goals for the first 6 months during the Pune meetup and we did our first self-check on them during monthly call in November. The second self-check was done during recently concluded Hack Night which was conducted for all the experienced contributors and following are the key takeaways from this.

This community has been very successful in meeting it’s immediate short term goals, which were proposed during the Pune meetup, and going well on-track for the long term goals.

The current functioning of this group is aligned with Mozilla India community structure proposed in Pune meetup.

What went well, few stats:

• 3 repositories and 70+ issues on github used for open discussion and tracking tasks
• Active telegram group with 200+ members
• 20 awesome superstars who are mentoring and managing this group
• 10 monthly online meetings conducted, meeting notes & recording links available on github.
• 15+ events conducted by the community
• 25 blogposts written by community members

What are we working upon next!

• More superstars – Because out of 200+ members on telegram group, we have only 20 core contributors as of now
• More woman contributors – Out of 20 superstars, only 2 are women contributors; as per Mozilla’s Diversity & Inclusion goal, this number needs to be improved
• More impact-full contribution – Need more contributors picking up next level of contributions like fixing github issues & contributing to A-Frame component registry
• Sharing community updates – Not many people outside WebVR India knew about the awesome work this community has been doing

Upcoming activities

• Super Hacker’s Contest coming soon! Gear up to fix A-Frame bugs and you could be the one of winners to grab few Sony phones & WebVR India Superstar t-shirts.
• WebVR India website development under progress. Fully enriched site will be live soon.
• Monthly newsletter with updates about WebVR India will be shared on discourse and Mozilla India mailing list.

Join us

If you did not know about this group before, feel free to join us now on WebVR India Telegram group.

Connect with us

If you have any suggestions/inputs/question for us, kindly feel free to open a new issue on our github repo. You can also quickly post feedback/discussion on the WebVR India discourse topic.