John Slater posted yesterday about how we’re on the verge of making some big changes by combining http://www.mozilla.com and http://www.mozilla.org. This is part of something we’ve been talking about for a couple of years and this is one more step to bring everything that Mozilla does under a common home at the mozilla.org domain.
There will be more to do after http://www.mozilla.com becomes http://www.mozilla.org/firefox and I want to present some ideas about how to bring the vibrant set of local community sites into this One Mozilla structure. I’d like to create a set of regional hubs that could live at:
These hubs could be built around the regional maps that show where local communities are and how people can get involved. The maps are in English only now, but the hubs would be fully localized and each locale could present the information most relevant to their needs.
One thing that these hubs would not be is a replacement for any of the existing local sites. We simply want a better way to promote the great things that these local communities are doing and to help them attract more people who are excited to get involved.
This could also help with the evolution of the Mozilla Europe site. Historically that has had information about both Firefox as a product and Mozilla as a community. Those Firefox pages will move in with the other Firefox pages at mozilla.org/firefox and this frees up space to fully focus on the European community.
There is a ton of great work going on locally around the world and it will help our mission to make it easier to find this information and simpler for people to get involved with Mozilla where they live. Do you think this idea of regional hubs help us achieve this?
davidwboswell 
We could also bring in maps of where Mozilla community members are located by trying in info the upcoming community phonebook – that is, as much as location info is public there. đŸ™‚
And suddenly some items I have heard in the OpenStreetMap community swap over to here, making me think this could be done using OpenLayers or something like that…
Kairo,
Great idea about bringing in maps of where community members are. I hope there will be lots of cool uses of the public phonebook data when we have that available.
I’m not that familiar with the OpenLayers stuff you mention, but if you have ideas you want to try out here, it would be great to get your help.
David
David,
I love the idea of distributed Mozillian hubs. Is what we are trying to do in Barcelona and seems to work well so far.
Would be great to see those regional websites evolve into micro community online platforms for Mozillians (eg. with events, info, languages, maker spaces etc.).
As an example, in Romania are a few groups, as a part of open web movement, that are also contributing to Mozilla through various activities (events like Design Jams, building open web technologies, QA, tech evangelism or academic outreach programs).
And those groups don’t really communicate or coordinate (which is good) so I can say that there is no central Mozilla Romania. Would be great (and more effective) to actually can identify those city-based, small groups/hubs on the map.
Looking forward to seeing how this evolves and how I can help.
Alina,
Glad to hear you like the idea of creating hubs. I also like your idea of having the pages evolve into community platforms for each locale.
It would be great to get your help here. Unfortunately we can’t start localizing anything right now, but we should be able to soon when the mozilla.org/.com unification is a little further along.
For now though, brainstorming what a more evolved version of this page would look like for the Romanian Mozilla community could be a great way to build a roadmap for how to move forward with these pages.
David
David,
I think that localization is not a priority now. Better to focus on how those microsites could evolve, eventually come w/ a study of community dynamics and what they need.
I have a series of blog-posts on the way (on community and more). Happy to talk during the engagement call. Or maybe would be a good topic for MozCamp Europe.
Talking about this at MozCamp Europe sounds like a good idea.
I’ll be looking forward to your blog posts and to any ideas you have about how these pages could evolve.
David
In ReMo land, we split the world into regions that can be split across continents (e.g. EMEA – Europe, Middle East and Afria) or part of continents (e.g. South East Asia). Some of these groupings can be seen on the Events page (https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/Events) but in other parts of the project such as mentoring it is broken down even more. Perhaps this might not make sense for mozilla.org, but it is something worth thinking about. Some questions to ask — Do we want to define groupings by geography, culture, or something else? Do we want to promote cross-pollination between different communities and can this be done on the mozilla.org level? While defining such groupings, how can we do it in a way to empower community members while at the same time not making them feel disconnected from Mozilla HQ in California?
Brian,
Thanks, it’s useful to see how other people set up groups in other parts of the project for comparison and it is definitely worthwhile to do things in a way that fits with existing patterns.
I don’t think there’s one right way to group things (geographically or culturally or by project area or whatever) but different groupings may be relevant in different cases. It would be interesting to play with the geographic grouping more though to see how useful it could be or not.
Any ideas about how to evolve things is certainly welcome.
David