Taking back the web, one student at a time

Taking back the web, one student at a time

Hello. I am Kinshuk Sunil, a Mozilla Representative from India, and a game designer by profession. I was also involved with setting up the Indian Mozilla community initiative: Mozilla India. This January, I was nominated to advise the Mozilla Student Reps as a Regional Student Coordinator (RSC). One of the first things that I volunteered to do was to write this first post for the Student Reps Planet blog, in which I will introduce the Student Reps program and become an active contributor with us.

The Student Reps program is a Mozilla Contributor Engagement program designed to involve and integrate students in promoting Firefox and Mozilla’s mission. Student Reps are passionate, creative, and resourceful people, who are studying in college or university and want to contribute to promoting the open web in their institutions and local communities. For full details on the Student Reps program, you should check out this site: https://studentreps.mozilla.org.

The Student Reps program is an extremely rewarding program that helps students make an impact, advance their skills and become leaders in the Mozilla community and beyond. An active Student Rep takes advantage of the tools and resources provided to get the most out of his or her experience in the program. For example, all Student Reps should particiapte in the Student Reps 101 training or watch the video. Please visit this link and sign-up for the next training.

Amongst many awesome rewards and recognition items, active Student Reps can get invited to regional and international Mozilla events, receive special Firefox gear, and may even have the opportunity to join the Mozilla Interns program. The key to demonstrating your activity as a Student is Project Reporting. While Student Reps are required to regularly submit Project Reports on their progress and learnings within the program and get feedback from the RSC and the Community Manager on initiatives, the crown belongs to the project Case Studies.

Student Reps are encouraged to analyse their projects and to present them as a Case Study (in the form of a blog post or a forum post). Case Studies become an insightful showcase of what it takes to organize a project or event, and it encourages other Student Reps to stay active.

Here’s a list of things that Student Reps should mention in their Case Studies:

  • Name, date/duration, location and type of event or project
  • About how many people took part in the event or project?
  • What planning did you and others put in to the event or project?
  • Did you set and accomplish any goals? If not, why?
  • Did you face any challenges? If so, what did you learn from them?
  • Any other feedback you would like to offer other Student Reps about this event or project?
  • For an example, check out Rishab Arora’s exciting work at gCon 2012.

Many Student Reps are doing a lot of activities in their region and this Planet blog will soon become a hub of all that activity.

Wishing them all best!

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.