about:mozilla » Mozilla

Discussing Mozilla’s proposed 2010 goals

deb — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:33:11 +0000

Last month, Mitchell Baker posted a list of proposed goals she believes Mozilla should work towards achieving by 2010. Now Mitchell is looking to expand and continue the discussion around these proposed goals, and she has written a blog post outlining the next steps we’ll be taking towards ensuring that the whole Mozilla community has an opportunity to participate in the discussion and provide thoughts and feedback. “Mozilla has many groups of people who work together on particular aspects of Mozilla products, technology, adoption and mission. These groups are a natural setting for discussing the overall goals of the Mozilla project, and what motivates people to contribute. With that in mind, we’re planning a set of discussions to give more people a chance to participate comfortably. Some of these will be face-to-face meetings; others will be online discussions.” For more information about these smaller group discussions and other forums that are available for ongoing feedback, see Mitchell’s blog post.

Impact Mozilla: Community-sourced marketing challenge

deb — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:38:11 +0000

Last week Mozilla’s marketing team launched a new community-focused marketing challenge called Impact Mozilla. The idea is to further open Mozilla’s marketing process to the community, and see who can come up with the best ideas. This challenge is specifically focused on gathering and developing ideas that will help increase Firefox’s user retention rate — which is to say increasing the number of people who continue using Firefox after downloading and installing it.

“We’re looking for innovative ways to make sure people who download Firefox become regular users. Interested? Start by sending us a summary of your ideas and an oveview of how you and your team will carry them out. If your initial strategy makes the cut, we’ll ask for a complete plan detailing your solution. If your plan is selected as the winner, you’ll have the opportunity to manage a marketing campaign for one of the top brands in the technology world. We’ll give you the resources to enact your solution, plus $3,000 for the winning proposal.” For all the details, including how to get started and where to submit your plans, see the Impact Mozilla website.

Two Mozillians make BusinessWeek’s “25 Most Influential”

deb — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:36:22 +0000

Melissa Shapiro, Mozilla’s public relations lead, recently announced that Mitchell Baker and Joi Ito were both included on BusinessWeek’s list of the 25 most influential people on the Web. “Each year, we turn to readers and BusinessWeek staff for the Best of the Web list, asking them to contribute names for a list of the Internet’s movers and shakers.” Watch the full slideshow, which includes all 25 honorees, over at BusinessWeek.

Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS)

deb — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:35:04 +0000

David Humphrey writes, “The Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) is scheduled for Oct 23 and Oct 24, and online registration is open. There are various early bird rates, so register early. This year’s line-up includes many familiar Mozilla faces. The list of speakers is long and diverse, and represents the best of the web, the open source desktop, open source business, policy, law, etc. We’re also going to be running a track on Teaching Open Source, which will bring together professors, students, administrators, and community leaders to discuss the potential and challenges of taking students into open source projects.” For more information, check out David’s full blog post, and check out the FSOSS web site.

Basic examples of usage data

deb — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:40:25 +0000

Mitchell Baker has written before that she believes there is a need to make basic, aggregate, anonymized information about Internet usage more widely available. “If everything that is known about the basic usage of the Internet is closed and proprietary then the Internet as an open platform will suffer.” Mitchell has now posted some examples of what she means by “usage data”, most of which we’re quite accustomed to seeing in aggregated, anonymized forms. These include: a site’s bandwidth usage, site “traffic” in a day or month, and software download numbers. “These examples are clearly very general. I use them precisely for this reason — to demonstrate that we already understand the usefulness of this type of data and that it can be presented in an aggregate, anonymous form. There are other forms of aggregate, anonymous data that can be equally useful in understanding how the Internet is being used and ultimately, understanding what the Internet really is.” To read Mitchell’s full post, visit her weblog.

Mozilla Community Store: Opening soon!

deb — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:32:05 +0000

Part of the Firefox 3 launch included a t-shirt contest in which we “open sourced” the design process to create the official Firefox 3 t-shirt. Not only did we get a fantastic winning shirt, we also received a huge number of other great designs. There’s been a growing demand to make more of these community designs available for purchase, so for the past few months the Marketing team has been sorting out the legal and logistical challenges to make this possible. Tara Shahain has recently announced the good news: “[W]e’ve partnered with Zazzle.com to create the ‘Mozilla Community Store’ – a sidekick to the original Mozilla Store which will serve as a new and open channel for community generated products. The Community Store isn’t quite finished yet, but I hope to have it ready in the next month or so. Make sure to start thinking of your designs! Once it launches, we’ll have plenty of details to help guide you through the entire process. Stay tuned!” More information about this project is available on Tara’s weblog.

New Firefox Logo style guide

deb — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:15:37 +0000

John Slater and Tara Shahain have been working on developing a new and improved style guide for the Firefox logo, with the aim of refining existing guidelines and communicating those out to the widest possible audience (previous coverage: Defining Firefox logo style, and Firefox logo style guide progress update).

Last Friday, John announced that the new style guide has been released. “Our hope is that this guide will answer many of the commonly asked questions about how (and how not) to use the logo. We’ve also included a section where people can donload the various configurations so there won’t be any confusion about what the official versions are. [W]e’re calling this style guide a beta launch for now because we want to make sure the community at large has a chance to review and weigh in before we officially declare it final. So, if you have any questions, thoughts or comments please let me or Tara know, or post your feedback on the Spread Firefox discussion page.” For full details, see the complete post on John’s weblog.

Powered by Mozilla FAQ

deb — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:14:16 +0000

David Boswell has been working on creating some guidelines to determine how the “Powered by Mozilla” logo can be used as part of projects and products. He has just posted a Powered by Mozilla FAQ that answers the questions he’s seen asked during the ongoing conversation about the logo. “Some more information (guidelines about the logo and an application to request using the logo) still need to be posted and those pieces will be coming soon. For now though, I’m posting the FAQ to let people give us some more feedback before the other pieces are finished up.” More information about the FAQ and the Powered by Mozilla project is available through David’s weblog post.

Mozilla Community sites: theme design

deb — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:11:52 +0000

Earlier this year, Stanislaw Malolepszy and Seth Bindernagel conducted the “Mozilla Community Survey” to learn more about the ideas and opinions of the people who make up the Mozilla community. One of the most commonly requested tools in the survey was a website template that could be used for all community sites. This has led to the inception of the Mozilla Community Sites project, which aims to make it easy to set up and deploy a website for your community project by providing some basic tools and templates. Zbigniew Braniecki has been working with designers on developing a prototype theme for these sites, and is asking for feedback. You can find screenshots of the mockup and leave your feedback over on this weblog post.

Managing in/with/around/by chaos

deb — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:13:33 +0000

John Lilly recently gave a talk at Stanford about Mozilla’s structure and decision-making processes. “[I]t’s about how Mozilla is organized, and how we push decision-making to the edges of any organization we have — it’s really an organization design and behavior talk.” The presentation is an interesting look into the thinking and blended system of chaos and order behind Mozilla. John has posted his slides over on Slideshare, which you can view here: Stanford Presentation on Mozilla.