What Does The Mozilla Community Look Like?

I came across MIT Media’s data portrait project over the weekend. After playing around with it using my name* and some friend’s names, I tried putting in ‘Mozilla Community’.

The results are interesting (why are ’sports’, ‘accident’ and ‘genealogy’ in there?) but this doesn’t seem too useful as it is. What if something like this had different labels (such as Mozilla sub-communities—l10n, QA, marketing, etc.) that linked to specific information about whatever someone wanted to check out?

Creating some sort of interactive visual representation of the community is a big interest for me. The current Community content on www.mozilla.org seems particularly unhelpful (a set of static links arranged in just one particular way seems to capture very little about Mozilla) and should be rethought.

Does this visualization seem like a good starting point to work with? If not, what do you think works better? I know other people are also interested in this topic, so maybe we can get together and figure out how to move forward? If this conversation is already happening and I’ve missed it, please feel free to clue me in.

* Here’s my data portrait:

It looks like only one of the pages used in the portrait relates to me and the rest are all about other David Boswells. I just can’t compete with jazz guitarists and state congressmen.

Say Hello To The New Mozilla.org

The www.mozilla.org site has just been relaunched! And this is just the beginning—there are many more ideas to make the site better.

This is the community’s site and it’s truly been a community effort to create a new look as well as a new vision. Many people were involved with the redesign, but several community members have also been doing a lot of less visible work (modernizing the server, dealing with abandoned content…).

I’d like to thank Sam, fantasai, Reed, Robert, Chris, Stephen, Jeremy, Gordon, Eric, John, Simon, Frank, Mark and everyone at Happy Cog and silverorange for making this happen (and I apologize for anyone I’ve left out).

There’s lots more to do, so if you’d like to get involved with the site let me know.

Mozilla.org staging site (now 80% less broken!)

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been addressing issues with the mozilla.org staging site. We’re getting close to wrapping things up, but we wanted to post one more call for testing before going live (currently scheduled for August 25).

When we initially asked for help testing, much of the front-end was broken because our focus had been on back-end changes. At this point, there are some known issues remaining, but a lot of bugs have been fixed and the site is much more polished than before.

If you have a chance to look at the staging site and you notice any problems, please feel free to post a comment here and let us know.

What We Talk About When We Talk About The Open Web

There have been several discussions lately, both online and in person, about what Mozilla can do to encourge large numbers of people to participate on making the web more open.

It’s not really clear what the right answers are, but people have been pointing out that we don’t need to have the answers—it’s more important for us to ask the questions and get people involved with thinking about possible actions.

This fits in well with what we’re doing with the mozilla.org relaunch. In the home page mockup above, there is a section where we’re asking people a question—in this example it is ‘Do you agree?’

There are all sorts of other questions we can be asking though. If we asked people instead ‘What would you do to keep the web open?‘ I know we’d get some interesting answers since Mozillians are always doing interesting things and have good ideas.

Someone Liked Their Plums

The house we’re renting has a great backyard that’s full of different things to eat, such as asian pears and blackberries. There are also plums, but I hadn’t paid much attention to those since I’m not a huge plum fan.

Now that we’ve been here a while and I’m more familiar with the backyard, I’ve noticed three different types of plums (from what I can tell they are mirabelles, damsons and cherry plums). There are a few cherry and damson plums out now and literally a bazillion mirabelles everywhere.

Someone who lived here sometime before us must have really liked plums and planted a bunch of trees. I guess this is a good opportunity for me to learn to enjoy something new.

I can use them in pies, tarts, smoothies, cookies, sandwiches, lemonade, mixed drinks and anything else we happen to be eating or drinking over the next several weeks — did I mention that there were literally a bazillion of these plums on the trees and all over the ground?

Featured Mozilla-Based Applications For August

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.

IMVU is a new way to hang out and have fun with your friends online. You can create your own avatars who chat in animated 3D scenes. Check it out and experience 3D chat for yourself.

Moblin is an open source project focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized for the next generation of mobile devices including Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and In-vehicle infotainment systems.