Building or Believing?

As several people have mentioned recently, talking about Mozilla in a comprehensive way is hard. In the new design for www.mozilla.org we’re introducing people to Mozilla in just a few words and it is particularly difficult to do this in a small space.

Our current approach is to say that We believe that the internet should be public, open and accessible. In earlier comments, there were concerns that this was coming across as a religious message that could be off-putting and that this also didn’t convey any of the actions the community is taking.

Concerns about putting people off are valid, but it’s worth looking into this to find out what is making people uncomfortable since there’s no actual religious content in that message.

One of the definitions of belief is “a body of tenets held by a group” and this seems like an accurate description of Mozilla’s principles. The word itself seems neutral, but it comes loaded with a set of associations. I wonder if the problem then is a worry of having our passion (which is good and which the community has lots of) be confused for zeal (which can definitely be off-putting)? The dictionary lists those as synonyms, so I suppose there’s a fine line.

This concern also applies to other parts of our story. For instance, a manifesto is defined as “a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer” but how many people assume only radical ideas are published in a manifesto? Calling our publicly declared principles a manifesto is correct, but could it be off-putting for people new to Mozilla?

One way to address this is to change the introduction. Maybe “We are building a public, open and accessible internet” is better? It is certainly true—we’re not a think tank but rather a community of people who do things. On the other hand, this misses some of the poetry of our story. We are doing things, but why?

My feeling is that our passion is a major plus (who wants to get involved with a group of people who aren’t excited about anything?) but we have to be aware of how we are perceived by people who are new to Mozilla. Maybe we keep the passion a click away, so people can find it but it isn’t the first thing they see?

We probably won’t know what’s right until we try some things out. This spot on the home page could rotate and feature several introductions and we’ll see what works best (there are bound to be some interesting optimization tests we could run).

I’m certainly open to ideas about any of this, so please post comments, thoughts or suggestions for better introductions.

Hypersonic Paper Airplanes

The recent mission to Hubble was certainly exciting, but I’m looking forward to Endeavour’s flight in June. The Shuttle will be taking up around 30 paper airplanes that are going to be dropped from the space station. Would be fun to find one of these in our backyard one day.

Crowdsourcing My Next Beard Style

I’m not sure what to do next with my beard, so I figured I’d consult the wisdom of crowds* for help. Post beard style suggestions here and if there’s not a clear winner I’ll do a poll and we’ll vote on the top choices**.

If you would like some inspiration, Wikipedia has information about beard style options (I found out that I’ve been wearing Friendly Mutton Chops lately). Maybe you’ll want to suggest a Hollywoodian, Reed or a Donegal?

* The Mozilla community is a particularly good crowd to consult since facial hair innovation is a collective core competency.

** I’ll shave the winning style as long as it is not a neck beard.

Meditating On The Future Of The Mozilla Store

I’ve been spending some time helping with the Mozilla Store. It has been rewarding to work on making a wider range of community items available, but I’ve noticed that there are some issues with the store that go beyond adding one new shirt or other item.

Clint, Nicole and David thinking deep thoughts about the store. Photo by David Rolnitzky

I’m interested in getting feedback about what we could be doing to make the store better and to find out what people like or don’t like about the current store. If you have thoughts, please comment (be honest—we know there’s room for improvement).

There are concrete things we can do to make the existing store better but it is worth thinking about some blue sky options too. For example, can we look at the vibrant community around Threadless and learn lessons that could build on how we’re engaging people on the Mozilla Community Store?

Note: Although I’m referring to the Mozilla store, there are three stores—one in the United States, one in the UK and a community store that features art posted by community members. One thing we could do to improve things is to clarify the roles of these different stores and make them feel more connected.

WILCO (the post)

I listened to the new Wilco album yesterday and the 70’s era George Harrison-y bits stood out to me (that’s not a bad thing since All Things Must Pass is the best former Beatle album ever).

It seemed like a solid set of songs, but I’ll need to listen to it a few more times to get a better feel for things—it’s hard to tell what’s going to stay with you the first time you hear something. A Ghost Is Born didn’t do much for me at first, but it’s my favorite Wilco album now.

Although I didn’t want the physical CD (I stopped buying CDs since I was just sticking them in a box in my basement) I pre-ordered it to support them. If they’re already giving away their music for free, I’d like to option to donate to them instead of having to buy something I don’t really need or want.

BTW, have I mentioned I’m sick that I’m going to miss their show in Berkeley in June? Speaking of supporting the band, I’ll buy a new t-shirt I don’t really need if they come back here again later this year.

Viewing the New Mozilla.org Design On Small and Large Devices

One goal for the new www.mozilla.org design is to have it look good across a range of devices. We’re working on tweaks for small and large screens and we can use your help. Please send us screenshots from your phone, netbook or ginormous monitor (or from any other device you think is relevant).

New www.mozilla.org design in Fennec

For small devices we’ve been testing on the iPhone and the desktop version of Fennec, but we realize that there are other devices we need to take into consideration. If you are interested in helping, please post screenshots online and link to it in the comments or attach them to bug 492609.

New www.mozilla.org design on iPhone

We plan to use media queries to allow us to make changes targeted to a specific range of devices and screen sizes. This is functionality that will be included in Firefox 3.5 and we’re excited to be able to use it to make our new design even better.

Featured Mozilla-Based Applications for May

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.

Boxee plays media from your computer and other devices in your home network, as well as connect you to various Internet sources that allow you to stream or download movies, tv shows, music and photos.

Scenari is an open source application suite for creating professional standard multimedia documents using a publishing chain process to reduce costs and ensure quality control.

I’ve been updating the Projects page each month with a new set of featured applications. People probably aren’t going there regularly to look for updates though, so I’ll also blog each time I update the page.

Personality Brought Back

The www.mozilla.org redesign project started three months ago with the goal of bringing personality back to the site. I think that’s exactly what has happened and I wanted to thank everyone who gave us feedback during the process and Happy Cog for refining their design ideas based on the community’s input.

Round 1 design

The responses we’ve received about the third round of designs have shown that some tweaking is still needed, but overall people are saying that the look of the site is right for our community. I definitely agree—the new design feels like Mozilla to me.

Round 2 design

Considering this, we’re wrapping up the design phase and are now working on updating the site with the new look. If you have experience with HTML, CSS, PHP or general web site stuff, we’d love your help (post here if you’d like to help and I’ll get in touch).

Final design

Looking back, it’s really validating to see how well the open design process worked. Getting ongoing feedback from people who care about and use the site resulted in a better design than a more traditional process would have. I’m very curious to watch other sites outside of the Mozilla community be designed in this way to see how this works in other situations.

Talking about Mozilla’s public benefit activities

When the new www.mozilla.org design gets added to the site, we’re also planning on adding a set of pages that talk about Mozilla’s public benefit activities.

I’ve made a basic mockup of a new page as an example of what this could look like. The design and text are not final and we welcome any feedback or suggestions people have about this.

If you’d like to share your thoughts, feel free to comment on this post or:

• Come by or watch this week’s design lunch on Thursday at 12 pacific
• Edit or comment on the draft text on the wiki

Applications That Used To Use Mozilla Technology

I recently looked up information about the Raptr client because I had read that it used XULRunner. When I went to download it though, the app was clearly marked as being built with Adobe AIR. I talked to someone at Raptr and it turns out they had used XULRunner but switched because it wasn’t meeting their needs.

This got me thinking about other applications that used to use Mozilla technologies so I set up a list to help track things. If you know of anything that’s missing, feel free to edit the wiki page or post here.

It could be interesting to contact people involved with these applications (as well as current users of Mozilla technologies) to get their thoughts and suggestions about how we might improve things.