In this issue…

Spread Firefox affiliate rewards
Since July 1st, 2009, every download you generate from your Firefox 3.5 Affiliate buttons gives you an opportunity to be rewarded as an active member of the Spread Firefox Affiliates Program. Everyone with more than five downloads in a quarter will be entered into a reward pool. We will randomly award ten individual Affiliates each quarter with rewards like a Flip video camera, an iPod Touch or Nano, Amazon gift certificates, and exclusive Top Fox t-shirts. Awardees will be notified by email, so please make sure your email address in Spread Firefox is up to date! For more information about this new rewards program, see Laura’s weblog post.

Mozilla introduces Harry Potter personas
Over the past three months, the Firefox Personas add-on has been downloaded over 6 million times, and the community gallery has welcomed nearly 17,000 designs, including art from popular brands like Greenpeace, BCBG, All American Rejects, No Doubt, and the White Sox. Last week, the Personas gallery launched a new “Film” category with designs from the upcoming release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which opens in U.S. theaters on July 15th. Head over to GetPersonas.com to get your Harry Potter persona now!

Discover Shiretoko and interFORest
Gen Kanai has put together a behind the scenes look at the new Discover Shiretoko and interFORest projects. This collaboration “aims not only to inform the public about the philosophy, mission and activities of Shiretoko Nature Foundation and Mozilla, but also to make clear that the power of many can change our environment’s future.” To promote this collaboration, Mozilla worked with the Yasuaki Kakehi Laboratory, of Keio University to build interFORest, a site where participants can create a banner to promote Firefox and Shiretoko on their own websites and blogs. The interFORest site includes a number of unique features that Gen details in his post. This promotion is set to run until Aug 31, 2009, but may be extended if the community deems it important to do so.

Please visit Discover Shiretoko, sign up for a banner at interFORest and help us promote Shiretoko and Firefox.

Does Mozilla champion Firefox users?
Over the past year the Mozilla Metrics team has been working to define and understand our “Voice of the User” — a concept other analytics teams have used to transform their companies and organizations by having it drive most actions and decision making. “Every day, across many avenues, tens of thousands of Firefox users describe a pain point they’ve encountered or comment about their experience with Firefox or make a suggestion. The sum of all of these voices constitutes what I’m referring to as ‘Voice of the User’.” Ken’s post goes on to talk about what specific work they’ve been doing, including a variety of surveys and working with Firefox Support team. The team is looking for input on how they might be approaching “Voice of the User” more generally, so if you have thoughts, check out the post on the Metrics team weblog and leave your feedback there.

Community building with Markos Moulitsas
John Slater writes, “As we work towards the upcoming launch of the Mozilla Creative Collective, a site dedicated to building our visual design community, I’ve begun reaching out to experts in various fields to learn from their experiences. Since the topic of community is always a hot one around Mozilla, I thought I’d share the conversations on this blog. For the first installment, I’m pleased to present a chat with Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos.” Be sure to check out John’s weblog for the full discussion, which covers everything from open source politics to dealing with disagreements within the community and general advice on building communities online.

John Lilly: Lessons from Mozilla
John Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO, gave a talk called “Lessons from Mozilla” at the recent WordCamp in San Francisco. The talk was recorded and is now available at the Wordpress site. John has also made his slides available through Slideshare.

Open Web style lectures
In response to a post by Luis von Ahn about teaching and how to do it better, David Humphrey has written an article about his alternative approach and ideas. “I don’t think big media has much to teach us about how to reach the current generation of students. The web isn’t simply a delivery vehicle for big media productions. Rather, it’s a participatory space that shortens the distance between creator and consumer, often to a single point. Students know this because it’s already how they interact with their friends, their data, their music, etc. As such I believe that the answer is to take a hard look at the web and what it does.”

Lawyers as a community?
Business Week recently published an article about Mozilla’s contributors that has inspired Julie Martin, a new hire in Mozilla’s legal group, to think about whether there’s a place to develop a legal community engaged in public-benefit legal projects as part of the larger Mozilla community. Julie asks, “Do [the same] motivating factors apply to lawyers? And, if so, lawyers at what stages of their careers? My guess is that there is a group that is looking to engage in just this way. My goal is to identify and engage that group. So please tell me your thoughts (whether you are a lawyer or just have an opinion about them). And if you are a lawyer who would be interested in engaging, I would love to hear what would motivate you to get involved.”

Help wanted: Mochitest test cases for docshell
One exciting new feature being worked on for the next version of Firefox is Electrolysis, a project to turn Firefox into a multiprocess application, making it even faster and more stable. “There will be many testing challenges involved in the move to a multiprocess architecture, but one of the most immediate relates to docshell. The docshell object is responsible for loading content from a URI, and managing session and global history objects, among other things. In Phase II of Electrolysis, docshell will be hooked up to the multiprocess code, so we’d like to have a full suite of docshell tests available to catch any regressions.” If you’re interested in helping out, the team suggests first scanning through the list of docshell bugs, picking one you clearly understand, then writing a testcase for it. For further information, see the original blog post.

Litmus project needs owners
Litmus is a repository of manual test cases maintained by the Mozilla QA Test Execution team. Parts of the project are currently unowned (and some new subgroups are possibly being created for upcoming Firefox releases). If you’re interested in helping by taking ownership of and responsibility for one of these unowned areas, please contact Marcia (marcia*at*mozilla*org). The team will help you get up to speed and learn what’s required to keep the test cases in good shape.

Jetpack 0.3 released
The Labs team has been hard at work and has released a new version of Jetpack, taking into account all of the feedback they’ve received about the project. New features include the ability to perform actions on selections and access the system clipboard, and both the slide bar and persistent storage features have been updated. The Jetpack experiment is still in its infancy, so if you are interested in joining the team and getting involved, now is a great time to jump in. See the Labs weblog for more information about this release and about how to get involved.

XULRunner 1.9.1 release candidates
Dave Townsend has posted that there are XULRunner 1.9.1 release candidates available. “We don’t quite have the build automation set up to do XULRunner 1.9.1 releases at the same time as Firefox yet, but Nick has been awesome and manually spun some release candidates. These should be pretty much good to go but it would be useful if anyone interested could try them out and report any serious problems they see.” Dave requests that problems be reported via his blog post or by filing a bug and marking it blocking bug 502915. The release candidates are available on ftp.mozilla.org.

Ubiquity 0.5 released
Last week the Mozilla Labs team released a significant upgrade to the Ubiquity project with Ubiquity 0.5. The release focuses on making the instructions you give to Ubiquity feel more natural and human, as well as bringing Ubiquity’s power to many more languages. For more information and to learn how you can download and get involved with the project, see the Mozilla Labs blog.

Open Web Tools Directory
The Mozilla Labs team has also started a new Open Web Tools Directory in which they’re experimenting with different ways to visualize data in hopes of achieving a “dynamic floating universe of tools”. “We’ll be spending a great deal of energy in building up the directory and turning it into a vibrant, living resource for web developers, and we’d sure love to get your feedback on what you think we should do to it. Because the data is all available via a simple JSON format, we’re also keen to see other folks create their own custom front-ends for it.” You can see the current site at http://tools.mozilla.com/, and more information is available through the team’s blog post.

Upcoming events
* TODAY! – Online – Firefox 3.5 bug triage
* Wed, Jul 15 – Mountain View – Mozilla Crash Reporting and Analysis
* Fri, Jul 24 – Munich – Open Source Meeting
* Fri, Jul 24 – Online – Testing a Mozilla Web Property
* Fri, Aug 7 – Online – Testscripting with MozMill 1.2
* Sept 14-21 – Everywhere! – Mozilla Service Week

Developer calendar
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.

About about:mozilla
about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.

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