This Bird Has Flown

Yesterday was Moustache Monday at Mozilla. With a little help from my friends and their fake moustaches, I summoned the nerve to show up at work with my own real long, long, long facial hair. That means a lot to have people do that for you.

After five months of beard innovation though, it’s all too much and I have shaved. I’m down in the dumps a little bit now that the experiment is over, but things are getting better because all I’ve got to do is wait and it won’t be long until opportunity returns.

But something tells me that this isn’t the end and the moustache is still out there. Shaving allowed it to stretch it’s wings and now it is flying as free as a bird. I’ve got a feeling I’ll see it again–maybe the next time I’m watching rainbows in calico skies I will see it sailing past.

Moustache Related Contest: Guess how many Beatles songs are mentioned in this post and win an almost new container of Clubman brand moustache wax!

Getting Involved Redesign Round 2.5

The next round of designs* for the new Getting Involved page is now available. I think things look better and flow better than the first mock-up we posted. Specifically:

• All of the pathways for getting involved are now above the fold—the ticker has been included as another option in the tabbed browser and a contact form is in the sidebar.
• The original design was all text and a bit drab. A tweaked star graphic from the home page (this can develop as a theme across the site whenever information about contributing is available) and a prominent space for graphics promoting opportunities livens things up.

What do you think? Getting better? Still needs work?

* This is round 2.5 since we developed three designs for the second round but felt that two of them just didn’t work as well. So we took the strongest and tweaked it a bit.

• One we decided not to use built on the original search box idea that I think is impracticable.
• The other featured a more prominent email form that ended up taking up too much space.

We may be totally wrong though. If you think the above design is going in the wrong direction and we should revisit other options, let us know.

Thoughts About The Future Of The Internet

I finished The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It the night before OneWebDay. It’s a good fit since OneWebDay is about broadening awareness of web issues and deepening a culture of participation and the book identifies both actions as key to keeping the Internet healthy.

“Today’s consumer information technology is careening at breakneck pace, and most see no need to begin steering it. [...] Internet users enjoy its benefits while seeing its operation as a mystery, something they could not possibly hope to affect.” (from paragraph 40 of the Conclusion)

When I was reading I also noticed similarities between how the book talks about the benefits of the Internet and how Mozillians have been talking about the same thing.

Jonathan Zittrain talks about the benefits of the Internet using the term generativity and he describes five features of a generative system:

• Leverage
• Adaptability
• Ease of mastery
• Accessibility
• Transferability

There are certainly differences between this list and the way other people have been describing things, but the common elements are clear: the Internet is a global public resource and people need to get involved to keep it that way.

Another Moustache That Loves The Web

Love the web? Have silly facial hair? If so, then print a poster and join the movement.

Meet the original web loving moustache.

Pluto Correctness

I recently finished reading two books that had Pluto in them (one had a little, one had a lot).

When is a Planet Not a Planet?: The Story of Pluto felt like an article that had been stretched into a small book by using lots of photos and illustrations. A pretty book, but it didn’t have anything new in it for me (to be fair to the book, I spent a big chunk of time in graduate school writing a paper about Pluto’s so-called demotion).

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is supposed to be one of Philip K. Dick’s best books, so I was curious to read it. For Pluto, it’s just mentioned as a place where a ship crash lands. For the rest of the book, it was like the other things I’ve read by him—it had a lot of sci-fi elements but was really about people’s perceptions of their world. Weird and interesting.

To round out the Pluto references, my daughter started pre-school recently and I was fascinated to see that the teachers had crossed Pluto out of the solar system material they had (wanting to stay up to date, but not getting around to buying a new planet puzzle yet).

It’s a really interesting time right now—the change in status is new enough that a lot of old information is still out there, but it’s been long enough that younger kids have grown up only knowing that Pluto used to be a planet. It’s a paradigm shift in action with the new generation simply accepting the new status as normal while any disagreements among older generations start to fade away.

Up next: The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.

Slow Food and Fast Internet

Yesterday I went to Hidden Villa, a non-profit focused on environmental and social justice education, to help with some of their web needs for Service Week.

Some other Mozillians were helping with their web site, so I ended up having an impromptu help desk and answered a range of questions about how they can use different web tools to improve how they do their jobs.

I was happy to help, but I was really more interested in helping them do some stuff around the farm (I could use tips about how to improve my so-far-unsuccessful gardening efforts). I guess it’s not surprising that people often volunteer to explore different interests instead of doing the same thing they do for their job.

This is useful to keep in mind for our redesign of the Getting Involved page. We could sort opportunities by experience, but someone with a lot of programming experience might not want to do more programming. They may want to learn how marketing works instead.

Rethinking How To Get People Involved With Mozilla

We’ve started on a redesign of the Getting Involved page on www.mozilla.org. For the initial design we discussed several alternatives to the current long list of links and realized that it might make sense to include each those methods in one page. It’s likely there’s no one way that works for everyone, so let’s give people options.

There are three different ways to present information here:

• Search box: As people type in what they’re looking for or interested in, there is a drop down area that presents available options.
• Ticker: This area could feature opportunities that rotate regularly and/or it could have a feed that scrolled through options. For a feed we could expand on the VolunteerMatch listings we set up for bringing in people to help with the recent redesign.
• Tabbed browser: This area would be more like the existing Getting Involved lists, but we could slice things up in different ways—there could be lists that are sorted by area of interest, amount of time available, skill level, etc.

Does this seem like we’re on the right track? What changes would you make? For example, I think having a contact form instead of a search box would work better since it would give us a way to point people in the right direction instead of hoping someone finds what they’re looking for.

Feel free to leave comments on this post or on the wiki page where we’ve been doing some brainstorming.

Putting Mozilla’s Mission On A Button — Bumper Stickers To Follow :)

There are a number of buttons people can use to promote various things going on in the community, but there aren’t any buttons that promote Mozilla’s mission and how to get involved with what we’re doing. Thanks to Jamey Boje, that bug will soon be fixed.

The buttons above are a first pass to get discussion going. We’d like to hear from you to figure out what the next round of buttons should look like. We have a few specific questions and are also interested in hearing general feedback:

• What sizes do we want?
• Is this style on the right track?
• What tag lines should we use?

There actually are buttons still around that promote Mozilla’s mission, but they are a bit out of date. Even if the designs didn’t need an update though, the message does. Mozilla’s mission has evolved from being strictly about creating source code to building a better Internet and using software as one way to do that.

Note: If you like the old school design of these buttons, check out the buttons for hacks.mozilla.org. These do a great job of using this old style in a new way.

Update:

Here is another set of samples for a different size:

Planet Mozilla – Now With Large Dino Head

If you follow the Planet Mozilla blog aggregator, you may have noticed that a large dino head has shown up on the site (thanks to Sam for getting the new theme created).

Several Mozilla sites, such as Planet Mozilla and the wiki, had shared a design with the previous www.mozilla.org theme, although you might not have necessarily noticed since the old design was relatively undesigned.

Having a shared visual identity and some common navigation elements (such as the Looking For bar at the top of the page) can serve as a useful guide for people as they make their way across the dozens (if not hundreds) of sites in the Mozilla community.

That’s not to say that every Mozilla site should have the same design but there is probably a core group of sites that we do want to sync up in this way.

If you’re interested in modifying the new www.mozilla.org design for other sites, let us know. We could use design and web development help to adapt things to the specific needs of different situations.

Featured Mozilla-Based Applications For September

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.

The powerful Maemo Browser for mobile devices has a fast Mozilla engine and gives you full access to rich interactive content—just like a browser on your home computer.

Yoono is an easy to use application that allows you to connect to all your social networks and instant messaging services – in one place. Get all your friend updates, update your own status, and easily share stuff.