Ask MDN connects experts with developer community

Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) has announced Ask MDN. For an hour each week, Ask MDN will gather a team of experts on Twitter to answer questions on a particular topic related to web technologies. The first Ask MDN will occur during the week beginning July 25 and be announced on the @AskMDN feed. The topic will be HTML5 gaming and creative JavaScript, and the panel will include renowned HTML5, JavaScript and Flash developers and authors.

Rob Hawkes, serial experimenter and Mozilla technical evangelist, told .net that Ask MDN came out of the Developer Engagement team’s remit to further engage with the developer community at large. “One of the ways that the team is looking to improve in this area is with social media—and Twitter in particular,” he says. “Ask MDN is our delightfully powerful, yet simple way to achieve this. The idea is a mix of my own experience surrounding the analysis of data on Twitter and Mozilla's stellar work with the Army of Awesome Firefox project, coupled with inspiration from the immensely successful Design Community Twitter Hours”.

The team has two main aims with Ask MDN: to directly connect experts with other developers, in order to expedite the learning process, and to help the developer community as a whole. “It’s our job to promote new web technologies and get people using them. Twitter is open and barely anything is private, so having all the questions and answers in the public can only benefit everyone,” says Hawkes, noting that each session will be archived, enabling you to later peruse the questions and answers. “We hope that it will become a valuable resource, just like the MDN is for documentation,” he adds.

Further information about Ask MDN can be found on the Mozilla Hacks blog and @AskMDN is already calling for developers to start asking their questions about this week’s topic and also to request topics for future sessions.