Adding Some What and Why to the Mozilla Foundation Site

Mitchell’s recent posts about aspirations for Mozilla in 2008 have some really useful information about why the community is doing certain things. I thought it would be a good idea to move some of this content from her blog to the mozilla.org site where the information will be available to a wider audience.

Moving some of these aspirations will also help round out the content that is available about the Mozilla Foundation. The current main page for the Foundation provides a lot of details, but it feels much more like an About page than a home page (in fact, the page is called ‘About the Foundation’).

Below is a mockup that shows what a different home page for the Foundation might look like. The content deals with what the Foundation is doing and why we feel this is important. The details about how the Foundation is structured will still be available, but would be on an About page.

If anyone has any thoughts, comments or suggestions about this, please feel free to let me know.

Bender’s Bookshelf

I finished reading World War Z a few weeks ago, but haven’t had time to write anything about it (with a week and a half trip to Texas and a few days in New Jersey for Thanksgiving it’s been a busy November). And now I’ve just finished The World Without Us, so I might as well write about both of these books at the same time.

These books do share a theme, so it makes sense to write about them together. One is a fictional account of a global pandemic that nearly wipes out humanity (or to be more precise the pandemic almost eats humanity since the disease turns people into zombies). The other is a non-fiction account of what would happen on Earth if humanity were wiped out (for example, almost everything (except nuclear waste) humans have ever created won’t last that long).

Besides the obvious theme of humanity being wiped out, I think the thing that these books have in common is that they would both probably be found on Bender’s bookshelf. For those who haven’t watched all of the episodes of Futurama before, Bender is the robot who dreams of killing all humans one day. He’s funny though, so he’s OK.

Next up: A Demon of Our Own Design.

Mozdev As Incubator

When mozdev.org was started several years ago, there was no big vision for the site—it was created because a few people wanted a place to work on their Mozilla-related projects and there was a thought that other people might also find this useful. This is a pretty typical open source type of story in the sense that some people had an itch that they scratched and then things went from there.

Another thing that happened with mozdev that also typically happens with open source projects is that it became whatever the community of people interacting with the site made it. Looking back at how the site has been used by the community, it seems that one of mozdev’s functions has been to act as an incubator for new ideas for applications, extensions and features.

As an example, Camino started out as a mozdev project called Chimera. The project soon moved off of the site since it got very popular, but hopefully mozdev helped get this project to the point where it was big enough that it needed more than we could offer. This same thing has happened with extensions such as Greasemonkey and Firefox features such as session restore (I don’t think the Total Recall project directly contributed to this feature, but it was an early working implementation of the idea).

There have been several other extensions and applications that started on mozdev that then matured and left the site. I think it would be interesting to get a list together of these projects, so I’ve created a wiki page where we can start working on this. If you know of other examples of projects that have started out and then moved on from mozdev, feel free to edit the wiki or add a comment on the page.

Status Update 2007-11-23

I spent most of my time last week making sure the new directed giving program was running smoothly. I haven’t heard any reports of problems, so that’s good news (if you are having a problem donating, please send email to donations at mozilla dot org).

We also posted a new page about the Mozilla Foundation’s current activities. Although the Foundation employees regularly blog about what they are working on, it would be difficult to go through each of those reports to get a feel for all of the things we are doing. This page should provide one place to go to find out about what the Foundation is working on now.

Status Update 2007-11-16

Last week I helped get the Mozilla Foundation’s new directed giving program ready to go live. Donors can still make a contribution to support the Foundation’s current activities, but they can now also request that their donation go to support the Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey or Mozilla Accessibility projects. Hopefully this new program will help these different projects grow and will give people another way to get involved with the community.

PS. I didn’t post an update last week since I was on vacation. Now that I’m back, I’ll return to posting weekly reports.