What are people interested in getting involved with at Mozilla?

The Metrics team is creating a dashboard of information from the Get Involved page. The only metrics we’ve had were the total number of inquiries and that has limited what we’ve been able to learn about how to help more people get involved.

The dashboard is still being worked on, but already there are interesting things to see. For instance, I can see which areas people are most interested in (Support, Coding and Webdev are the top three). You can check this out for now on this screenshot and the dashboard will be available soon.

This is useful information. Based on this, maybe we don’t show every possible contribution option on the Get Involved page because some aren’t a fit for potential contributors’ interests or skills?

For instance, Lukas and I tried an experiment where we put Build Automation contribution information on Get Involved, but it didn’t lead to more contributors coming in. That makes sense because it requires a certain familiarity with Mozilla that people new to Mozilla wouldn’t have.

Maybe the better way to bring in a new contributor for the Build Automation team is to work with the Support, Coding and Webdev teams to look for volunteers who started there and are looking for the next challenge?

I’d be interested in hearing other ideas about what we could learn from better metrics around the Get Involved pages, so feel free to share your thoughts.

Contribute Group meeting this Thursday

“I’m a stay at home mom with not a whole lot of time on my hands, but if there’s a fairly painless way I can help – sign me up.” — from message posted on Get Involved page

Are you interested in helping people get involved with Mozilla, like this person who wants to help but doesn’t have much free time? Then join us for this week’s Contribute Group meeting.

• Meeting time: Thursday, January 19 at 10:00 AM Pacfic / 18:00 GMT
• Audio: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 634
• Room: PB&J in MV
• Back channel: irc.mozilla.org#mozillians

If you have a question you’d like to ask the group, please feel free to edit the agenda on the wiki.

Mozilla Antarctica: from easter egg to reality

A few months ago I was working on creating a set of maps that showed where local Mozilla communities are around the world.

Each page lets you click a direction and go to another region. If you click south from Europe, you’ll see a map of Mozilla communities in Africa. What happens if you click south from there though?

I love putting easter eggs in projects, so this was a perfect excuse. We created two extra regional maps for the South Pole and North Pole.

Those two pages just had some made up content though—until Pierros, Robert Nyman, Anthony Ricaud and I met at the MozCamp in Berlin. We got talking and decided to try to help get a real Mozilla Antarctica community going.

We started talking to people and found all sorts of connections between Antarctica and Mozilla and a community has begun growing.

And then today it all came together. Justin Miller just posted a picture of himself holding a Firefox logo and the Mozilla Antarctica logo next to the sign for the McMurdo Station.

It’s all very exciting to see this coming together. Join us on our Mozilla Antarctica Facebook page to help us grow the community even more.

What are people doing with Mozilla code?

I’m interested to see what people are doing with Mozilla’s code and I used to post often about this.

I hadn’t been thinking of this recently though, but someone building a private and secure browser on a USB key using Mozilla code just got in touch about using the Powered by Mozilla logo.

This logo was created several years ago as a way to demonstrate how broadly Mozilla’s technologies are being adopted and to help build a community among people doing interesting things with our code.

I never did as much with getting the logo out there and building a community as I had wanted. If people are interested in taking this over, I’d be happy to help get you started.

One thing I did do was promote some of the cool things that were being built. I’ve updated a graphic that shows logos of different Mozilla-based products that I posted about more than a year ago and wanted to share.

This image shows:

• Logos for applications that currently make use of at least one Mozilla technology
• Question marks to show that there are likely applications out there we don’t know anything about
• Logos for projects that are no longer active or no longer use Mozilla code.

Note that this covers all Mozilla technologies and not just Gecko and XULRunner. Some applications (for example, Chrome and OpenOffice.org that use NSS) aren’t normally thought of as using any Mozilla code but I wanted to include them to show the range of ways our platform is used.

If you know of anything missing from this list or from the more complete list, let me know.

Contribute Group meeting this Thursday

“I am a postgraduate law student based in London. I am writing to enquire whether there are any legal volunteering opportunities available.” — from message posted on Get Involved page

Are you interested in helping people get involved with Mozilla, like this person who wants to get involved with our legal projects? Then join us for this week’s Contribute Group meeting.

• Meeting time: Thursday, January 5 at 10:00 AM Pacfic / 18:00 GMT
• Audio: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 634
• Room: PB&J in MV
• Back channel: irc.mozilla.org#mozillians

If you have a question you’d like to ask the group, please feel free to edit the agenda on the wiki.

Mission Accomplished

The Creative Team recently posted an early stage design for a new www.mozilla.org home page. Check it out and share your thoughts.

I’m excited because I can say a project I started in 2007 is now completed—and it only took 4 years!

When I was hired, I was asked to do something with www.mozilla.org. The site was basically not being used and it wasn’t clear what to do with it.

When Mozilla began, www.mozilla.org was the home for everything. Over time, sections expanded and moved to their own dedicated sites. For instance, there was a Support section on the site but now there is a whole support site.

I worked with the community to figure out what to do with the site. We decided that www.mozilla.org should be a hub that tied together everything going on in Mozilla.

There were three big parts to this:

• Redesigning the site as a hub
• Creating a policy for all Mozilla sites to work on the mozilla.org domain
• Merging the www.mozilla.org, www.mozilla.com, www.mozillamessaging.com and www.mozilla-europe.org sites

These steps moved us from a situation where Mozilla’s story was divided across sites that were based on different legal organizations to one where we had one place to talk about everything the project was doing.

The last piece of this is redesigning www.mozilla.org again to have the four merged sites work together as one. The design process is underway, so this whole project is wrapping up.

Many Mozilla volunteers and employees worked to make this happen and it has been a great experience for me to have been involved with this project.

So take a look at the new design ideas and help make the new hub of the Mozilla universe great.

Contribute Group meeting this Thursday

“If you need any help with mobile app development, I would be happy to help.” — from message posted on Get Involved page

Are you interested in helping people get involved with Mozilla, like this person who wants to get involved with our new app efforts? Then join us for this week’s Contribute Group meeting.

• Meeting time: Thursday, December 8 at 10:00 AM Pacfic / 18:00 GMT
• Audio: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 634
• Room: PB&J in MV and SFO-7B in SF
• Back channel: irc.mozilla.org#mozillians

If you have a question you’d like to ask the group, please feel free to edit the agenda on the wiki.

Getting More Contributors Involved with Mozilla brown bag video

There is a video available of the recent “Getting More Contributors Involved with Mozilla” brown bag that covered how to increase involvement and impact of the Mozilla community.

If you missed the brown bag and want to talk with others about how to bring more people into Mozilla’s projects, watch the video and join the conversation on the Mozillians mailing list.

Even More Books…

So I managed to read a bunch more books without writing anything about them, although they were all interesting. I’ll need to figure out about getting more time somewhere.

Here’s what I’ve read lately.

• The Pale King
• Strokes of Genius: Federer, Nadal, and the Greatest Match Ever Played
• ‘What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?’ Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise,’ and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country
• Packing for Mars
• The Art of Non-Conformity
• Oblivion

Where do you find Aurora?

Where do you find auroras? In the part of the world with the highest Firefox market share, of course! Antartica!

Let’s create a new local Mozilla community with the dedicated Firefox users living in the research stations there and spread the word about Firefox Aurora under the lights of the real aurora.

Who’s in?

(Photo credit Euclid vanderKroew)