Reps Mobilizers Experiment for WebVR in India

Hello Mozilla India (in general) and WebVR India (in particular !

As most of you might already be aware, I’m a WebVR and A-Frame VR enthusiast, after I was inspired by @ram’s session at the Mozilla India Pune meetup last year. Due to this interest, in the past couple of months, I’ve given a lot of talks (both national and international) as a Tech Speaker and I’ve also conducted (as well as helped conduct) full day/night workshops on the same topic. I currently have 3 more talks lined up, but I will not be able to make it for the two of them due to budget constraints - Unlike a lot of people assume, the Tech Speakers program does not send you to every other conference in the world where your CFP (call for paper) gets accepted :slight_smile:

Last month, I was asked by the Open Innovation team, if I was interested in participating in a Reps Mobilizers Experiment where I would represent the WebVR India community. I agreed ! This experiment consists of a staff representative along with 4 other volunteers who represent different emerging technology communities from their local area. The aim of this experiment is to analyse how we, as a community, function and how to solve even the most minute concerns that it’s members might have.

In this regard, during the last couple of weeks, I did my research by speaking personally with people of different age groups, different educational backgrounds, different gender and different geographical areas of the country ! The key concern from people was that people thought there was no place to go with their technical questions. Reasons?

  1. If asked in the WebVR India Telegram group, the questions soon get lost because the members work asynchronously (obviously)
  2. They don’t prefer to go to the global slack channel, since they feel intimidated with the high level of ongoing technical discussions which take place, there !
  3. They don’t prefer StackOverflow because they feel their questions are very basic in nature and the solutions (if provided) would be hard to understand.

Most of the above concerns are pertaining to beginners who are just starting off with the technology and would require some person to look forward to, for his/her queries.

Depending on the findings of this research, I (along with a few more members of WebVR India) would like to try out the following in the course of the next three weeks and see how it affects the community:

There’ll be 5+ members from the WebVR India community (I will release the names shortly), who will be responsible to take care of the member’s questions. That is, they will either answer a question themselves or get it answered on behalf of the members.

The members who have some questions to ask, shall do so on StackOverflow but tag them with “webvr-in” in addition to “webvr”. This way, the above mentioned 5 people as well as others, can see the questions and try solving those concerns.

Our broad goal by the end of these three weeks would be:

  1. 50+ questions asked on StackOverflow with this new tag “webvr-in”.
  2. More than 90% of these questions are solved.

At the end of this experiment, I shall meet with the Open Innovation team and the 4 other volunteers who are working on a similar experiment and we would hopefully come out with some kind of “Best Practices” for a technology community.

A picture of WebVR India’s github organisation showcasing some of the awesome things we have been upto !

I understand that this plan for the next 3 weeks may not be very clear, so feel free to comment on this or PM me directly @Srushtika on Telegram. Of course, I will keep you updated about this experiment :smiley:
Best !

2 Likes