Getting Involved With Getting Involved

On the new Get Involved page we’re encouraging people to let us know what areas of the community they’d like to contribute to. So far a handful of people each day have been using it, but then we added a link to the Firefox Start page yesterday…

When I woke up this morning more than 50 inquiries were waiting asking about all areas of the project. Right now the contribute group has people from QA, Support and L10n helping to respond, but we’re looking to bring in more people to help respond to questions about security, UI design, documentation and more.

Let me know if you’d like to get involved with the get involved page. Taking part in the contribute group would require some of your time, but it will put you in contact with people who want to help out with your project. (If only Shelley Levene had access to this, he might have won those steak knives.)

Sex, Drugs and Bunnies with Antlers

I just finished reading Dean Wareham’s Black Postcards*. The sex and drugs parts weren’t surprising, but it is amazing how little money a band as popular as Luna made—they weren’t as big as the Beatles but they had a loyal following and several solid albums. The power law in action…

It was interesting finding out more about the band and the stories behind some of the songs but the best part was learning about Wolpertingers, bunnies with antlers that live in Germany. I grew up in San Antonio and we are very proud of our jackalopes (there are a couple of them at the great Hall of Horns) and I had no idea about other antlered bunnies.

Central Texas was settled by Germans, so maybe they brought this idea over with them and it got picked up as a local custom? Wikipedia says the idea of a jackalope came from a couple of brothers in Wyoming who had studied taxidermy. I still like my idea about German settlers though, so I should go update the Wikipedia page to make it official…

Up next, a couple more gardening books.

* It was probably unrealistic to expect Dean to mention the time we saw them getting coffee at Jo’s the morning after seeing them in Austin. He did mention their last shows at the Bowery Ballroom but forgot to mention seeing me there too.

One Mozilla

The word Mozilla has been used many different ways* over time and that’s understandable—the community is big and diverse and is doing a lot of different things. There are distinctions within the community that are important to make, but I think it’s helpful to also focus on the connections that hold everything together.

It’s interesting to see how other big, distributed groups handle this. For instance, Greenpeace is composed of over 20 regional autonomous offices around the world and everything is referred to collectively as one thing. This makes it easier to understand its mission since new people don’t get bogged down in technical details that are less important than what Greenpeace does.

I’d like to see our community do a similar thing and develop a One Mozilla message. This would mean phasing out references to specifics, such as the many different Mozilla legal organizations, in favor of talking about just Mozilla.

This is already happening** and I wanted to point it out and encourage us to think through what else we could change to make our story clearer. I’ve set up a One Mozilla List of Tweaks wiki page with a few ideas and you’re welcome to add to that or leave suggestions on this post.

* I can’t resist the floor wax and dessert topping reference again…

** The Firefox 3.0.12 release mentions ‘As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process‘ and the Firefox 3.0.13 release says ‘As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process‘.

Featured Mozilla-Based Applications for November

People and organizations are doing a lot of interesting things with Mozilla technologies. Here are two of the many Mozilla-based applications available. If you would like to suggest other applications to feature, please leave a comment.

Trustedbird is an open source project managed by the French Ministry of Defence that is focused on integrating new enterprise features and extensions to the Thunderbird email client.

ZoomCreator lets you create full resolution photo albums that have the same impact as flipping through a magazine. Build them on your computer and publish them on the Internet in one click.

Which One Is Which?

Which picture is John Lennon from the cover of Let It Be and which is a picture of me yawning today?

A Pleasant Surprise

When I was checking mail today I saw that Jamey Boje had sent me a cool new header for my blog. Always nice to get a pleasant surprise. Thanks, Jamey.

A New Getting Involved Page

The new Get Involved page was posted on mozilla.org last week and we’ve had a good response so far. The page encourages people to contact us* about what they’d like to do and we’ve had:

• 7 people contact us about QA
• 2 people contact us about localization
• 2 people contact us about webdev
• 1 person contact us about coding
• 1 person contact us about stats analysis

There’s nothing to compare these numbers with, but having over a dozen people in a week express interest in contributing to Mozilla seems like a good thing. (Thanks to Tomcat for responding to most of those emails).

As I mentioned before, getting the new page up is only the beginning for what we could be doing. How do we get more people to this page? What’s the best way to help people get started when they express interest? Would having mentors for different community areas be useful?

If you’re interested in these questions, please come by our next contribute group call:

• Meeting time: Thursday, October 29 at 10:00 pacific
• Dial-in information: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 7600

* We’re also trying out volunteer referral sites such as VolunteerMatch and Volunteer Toronto as a way to bring people into the community.

Finding A New Path For Mozdev

mozdev needs your help! Please read below and let us know if you want to help find a new path for the site.

The mozdev.org site has been around since the early days of the Mozilla project (it just turned 9 years old) and is home to hundreds of active projects. It started out as a personal project and grew into a non-profit (the Mozdev Community Organization) that employs a small development team.

At one time, the site was the main place to go for Mozilla extensions and it served as an incubator for many of Firefox’s popular features and add-ons. The community has evolved though and hosting is no longer a big problem and AMO and Labs have taken over the distribution and incubation roles.

Even with these changes, there is a dedicated community that uses mozdev. The current board feels that we can serve these users best with a new approach and new faces. If you are interested in becoming a part of a new community council, please let us know.

A Better Internet

We just added a page to mozilla.org that describes what we mean when we talk about building a better Internet. This is a mix of recent discussions on blogs, some illustrations (including an illustrated moustache) and links to a few ways people can get more involved.

Boiling down the different blog posts about a better Internet and the open web seemed like a good way to provide an introduction to people about this concept, but also a good way to help us work through how we talk about things.

I’d be surprised if this page doesn’t evolve over the next few months as we rethink how we define the characteristics we believe are most important for a healthy Internet and how we concisely describe each.

If there’s something on this page that you think should be tweaked, added to, rewritten or removed, let us know.

More Mozilla-Based Application Logos

It’s time for a periodic update of the image of logos of Mozilla-based applications. This new image includes current apps, former apps and nods to the existence of unknown apps.

These dark matter apps include internal projects, projects under development or projects we don’t know about. We have hints that these are out there though. For instance, there’s a recent post about a XUL developer position for a lab management project that’s not released yet*.

* There’s a bug open about creating a better consultants page and this could make it easier to match Mozilla developers with people looking to build Mozilla-based apps. If anyone is interested in helping with this, let me know.