Make me a speaker – revived!

Summary: Mozilla is releasing a Evangelism Representative program and I’ll be coaching Mozillians to become public speakers.

Five years ago a few well-meaning web folk in the UK were ready to start a program called “make me a speaker”. I blogged about it and there was a Wiki at http://www.makemeaspeaker.com/ which is now defunct (Wayback machine archive here). One of the things I also published back then was a Public speaking survival kit.

As with many great ideas, makemeaspeaker.com one died quickly as people got busy with other things and of course others thought it makes more sense to offer speaking and presentation training as a service for money.

Two years later I took the idea up again and making myself a developer evangelist I published the Developer Evangelism Handbook.

Other things that happened were the Speaking out events (here, here and here) organised by Laura North.

Now I am happy to announce that a larger part of my job with the awesome that is Mozilla will be taken up doing an Evangelism Reps program. Here is what it is about:

Today the Developer Engagement Team has launched the Evangelism Reps program – a special interest group within ReMo. Each year, we get thousands of requests to send Mozilla speakers around the world to talk about HTML5, new web technologies, Mozilla’s mission, our projects, products and more. Now, we would love for you to join the effort and become a Mozilla speaker too!

This program is open to paid staff and Mozilla Reps of all skill levels and capabilities. If you are a new speaker and have always wanted to represent Mozilla at events, you can take advantage of our advanced speaker training where you can learn from people like Christian Heilmann and Robert Nyman on how to give effective presentations and get access to their best practices. People who are veteran speakers can also benefit by having the tools and resources available to host events, prepare stunning screen casts and be mentors to new Evangelism Reps.

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The Evangelism Reps program information is on the wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/SIGs/Evangelism_Reps

We anticipate our first training to be held in May so stay tuned for this exciting opportunity.

This means I will be running interviews, give reviews, run a speaker training and publish the Evangelism Reps toolkit – the latter of course being available for everybody (not only Mozilla Reps and employees) on our Wiki.

I am terribly excited about this as it means I can “crowd source” myself much more. It means of course that I will speak less at conferences myself, but that had to be done anyways. I will also sync some of this effort with Speaking Out and the Women of Mozilla programs.

Good times ahead.

Photo by Ben Dalton

Tags: makemeaspeaker, mozilla