Creating a Mozilla Brochure

The Mozilla Foundation has been working on creating a brochure that provides information about Mozilla that can be handed out at events or given to other people who are interested in learning more about the community. We now have a draft (PDF warning) that is complete enough for review, so I wanted to post it here to get people’s thoughts about it.

It’s been an interesting challenge to condense the many different aspects of Mozilla and its ten year history onto the front and back of a single sheet of paper. Doing this has involved selecting the information we feel is most useful and interesting to people who are just starting to learn about Mozilla and organizing it in a coherent way. Because of the limited space, I’m particularly interested in hearing if we left anything important out or summarized something too much.

There’s one note about the design that I want to point out. The front page uses some images of community members from Flickr. There’s some white space right in the middle of the page that will be filled as soon as we finish getting permission to use one more photo.

Working Together to Grow the Extension Developer Community

At mozdev.org we are currently hosting extensions, themes and other add-ons for over 15 different Mozilla-based applications. We are interested in working together with the organizations making these applications to help us with our mission of establishing Mozilla as a viable development platform, helping proliferate Mozilla technologies and increasing the user base of Mozilla-based applications.

We would like to give organizations that are using Mozilla technologies an opportunity to sponsor extensions for their applications that are hosted on mozdev and to find ways to work together to grow their extension developer communities. A few ideas we’ve had about possible ways to integrate the mozdev community with an application’s add-on developer community include:

• Promoting an application’s extensions on the mozdev.org home page
• Creating a branded and customized extensions portal (see the just launched Songbird portal for an example of what’s possible)
• Subscribing team members to a sponsors group where they can talk to other people working on Mozilla-based applications

Every organization will have their own unique needs, so we are open to any other ideas about how we can help grow the extension developer community around a particular Mozilla-based application. If sponsoring extensions on mozdev is something you’d like to talk more about, please feel free to post here or contact us.

What’s Happening With The www.mozilla.org Site

I’ve been periodically posting updates on changes being made to www.mozilla.org, but I haven’t provided much information about our overall plans and goals for the site. We just finished a planning meeting that covered a lot of relevant information, so it seemed like now was a good time to talk about what’s happening.

What is the purpose of the site?

When www.mozilla.org was launched in 1998 all activity occurred on the site. The community has obviously grown over the years and there are now many different sites that focus on different parts of the project. To reflect these changes, we feel that the purpose of www.mozilla.org needs to evolve to become a portal to the community and to be a place to host official content and policies.

In practice this new vision means that the site will go from being a home for over ten thousand pages that deal with documentation, news, advocacy and a range of other topics to a site with perhaps fewer than a hundred pages that mainly provides links and references to content hosted in other places. This transition was started a while ago (for example, by moving documentation over to the Mozilla Developer Center) but we’ll focus on completing this in the near future.

What changes are we making?

Getting from the old version of the site to a new version is a big chunk of work and we’ve decided that it’s best to gradually make changes instead of trying to update everything at once. Here are a list of several of the things we’re doing right now:

• Updating pages: We’ve been steadily making updates to sections (such as the About and Community pages) of the site to make sure things are up to date.
• Reorganizing structure: To reflect the site’s new purpose we’re going to change the top-level navigation of the site from Products, Support, Store, Developers, About to Projects, Developers, Community, Contribute, Foundation, About.
• Refreshing the design: We don’t want to redesign the site, but we think that getting some design help on the home page and the site templates could make the site easier to use and could make it feel more like the entry point for the Mozilla community.
• Reducing content: As mentioned earlier, there is a lot of content now on the site that should be moved somewhere else. We are planning on migrating some of this content to other sites and then archiving other pages.
• Selecting owners: In order to make these changes we’re finding people to take on all of these tasks. If you’re interested in working with us, you are certainly welcome to join in (just keep an eye on mozilla.dev.mozilla-org for discussions about the site and for information about upcoming planning meetings).

For more information about these plans, take a look at our planning page. I’ll also continue to post news and updates about the site as we make more progress. If you have any thoughts or comments about any of this, feel free to post here.

Locavore Life

I just finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and have gotten so excited about growing some food that I just bought a sixth fruit tree for our new orchard (although my wife has suggested I calm down a bit since we don’t yet own a house that has a yard where we can plant these trees). Our orchard now includes: an avocado tree, an apple tree with three varieties grafted on to it, a blueberry bush, and lemon, lime and oranges trees in the citrus section. I suspect I’ll get at least a couple more soon — I’ll get a kiwi tree (do kiwis grown on trees?) if I can find one (they are apparently local since there were kiwis at the farmer’s market) and maybe an apricot or cherry tree too.

So the book was good and is definitely worth reading to help give you a good persceptive on our food culture and explain why eating locally, even a little, can be beneficial. There’s too much to summarize here, but I did want to point out one funny Calvin Coolidge related sexual anecdote (go read about it on Wikipedia) and one complaint I had (go read about it in the next paragraph).

The book talks about the horrible conditions of factory-farmed cows and chickens, but then ignores the fact that the condition of factory-farmed fish isn’t very pleasant (or healthy) either. The book also talks about raising heritage turkeys to help keep these breeds from going extinct, but then the author talks about how see misses wild-caught alaskan salmon and tuna without mentioning that fish populations are plummeting around the world. It’s interesting that she would have this blind spot, since one theme of the book is that being distant from the source of your food makes it difficult to understand what you are eating and how your food choices effect your health and the health of the environment. That certainly seems to be the case here — she may be living on a farm with turkeys and asparagus, but she’s still physically removed from where the fish live (I also think the fact that fish are anatomically more removed from us relative to most farm animals can help explain this blind spot and can explain why some people who say they are vegetarians eat fish but not chicken or beef).

Up next, a switch to fiction with Landscape Painted with Tea.