Yesterday, Mozilla Japan shared the Discover Shiretoko campaign with the world!
Discover Shiretoko was born as a collaborative project between Japan’s Shiretoko Foundation and Mozilla Japan. Shiretoko is a national park in Northern Japan – it is also the codename for the latest version of Firefox. The campaign is designed to help more people learn about Shiretoko national park and the newest version of Firefox.
You can read a full post about Discover Shiretoko on Foxkeh’s blog.
Arun Ranganathan and Seth Bindernagel are just arriving in India to meet with our community and attend several events. As you may or may not know – Arun is part of our Evangelism team and focuses on standards and open Web tools, while Seth focuses on localization. Both have a ton of knowledge about the Mozilla project. It’s going to be a great visit thanks to our passionate and active community in India!
Where in India will Seth & Arun be you ask?
We’ll post more details as they continue to evolve. Hope you can make it out to meet them — we’re always looking for new campus reps and India-based members of our community marketing team!
Editor’s note: Mozilla Labs introduced the first of a series of Design Challenges on Tuesday, January 27, 2009, as part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series. See Pascal Finette’s, Mozilla’s open innovation catalyst, comprehensive post on the Mozilla Labs blog, excerpted here:
The Design Challenge is a series of events to encourage innovation, and experimentation in user interface design for the Web. Our aim is to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.
For the inaugural edition of the Design Challenge, we’re focusing on highlighting the creativity of students: if you don’t know what’s impossible, you’ll accomplish it.
If you’re a student, help us answer the question: “What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.”
March 1st, 2009 is the submission deadline for Initial Mockups. If you’re interested in participating, please see the Labs discussion forums for more information. If your school is interested in participating, please contact Mozilla Labs at conceptseries@mozilla.com.
Editor’s Note: Today we bring you a guest post from Felipe Gomes of Brazil, a winner of the Extend Firefox 3 contest. Felipe is a newer, but very active Mozilla contributor. We asked him to share how he came to be involved with Mozilla. Congrats again and thanks for all of your hard work, Felipe!
Hi all! I’m Felipe Gomes, a computer science student from Brazil. As a geek, I’ve always appreciated and believed in open-source, and have tried to get more involved since going to college. I began using Firefox add-ons when I started with web development, and that led me to learn more about the technologies behind Firefox and its platform. I learned XUL and JavaScript by reading, practicing and trying to run random ideas and experiments in the browser.
I had been following the Mozilla project for a while, but discovered how fruitful it is to be an active member earlier this year when I joined the Brazilian community. I discovered that there are many passionate members all over the world who love Firefox and want to promote the culture and the browser, regardless of their city or country. I’ve had the opportunity to interact with many community members this year when I gave talks about XUL and add-ons development.
It’s been very fun and rewarding to be involved. During the frenzy of the Firefox 3 launch, I created a Download Day Countdown add-on, helped spread the World Record in Brazil and organize our local launch party! I also had the opportunity to work on the programming side, when I did some Processing.js demos and, more recently, submitted an add-on to the Extend Firefox contest.
I got involved with the Extend Firefox contest because when the betas came out it was clear that the browser was growing to a whole new level. There was just so much potential to explore in basically every aspect of the browser. And the Extend Firefox 3 contest was the perfect fit, encouraging developers to leverage the new potential that Firefox 3 brings.
To be one of the contest winners was a very special moment for me, and an honor, especially because of the number of great extensions that were submitted and chosen (I’m already using many of them!). The great responses, comments and suggestions that people have been sending in the last week made me realize that when you have an idea that you believe in, you really should work on it. Turns out, other people might like it and believe in your idea as much as as you do!
I’d like to thank all the nice people I got in touch with this year in Mozilla Brazil and the greater community: Marcio, Mario, Clauber, Fernando, Andrea, Mary and Chris. And congratulations to every developer who joined the contest! Let’s keep spreading the love for Firefox!
We broke the million mark for worldwide pledges to get Firefox 3 on Download Day thanks to all of your hard work! Kudos to the Firefox community. This is quite a feat.
It’s not too late to keep spreading the word. Here are some easy ways to get involved:
Again, we’ll let you know the actual date for Download Day as soon as we can!
A huge thanks to everyone for pledging and helping spread the word! We’ve exceeded 700,000 pledges to help set a Guinness World Record in less than a week!
Our dedicated community got to work quickly to support the effort from all corners of the globe. Some highlights include:
I could go on and on about all the great work everyone is doing! Please post a comment if you’ve heard of any other cool things people are up too. We’d like to continue highlighting all the hard work.
Keep it up!
The New York Times ad…Firefox Flicks…the Firefox crop circle…Operation Firefox…you name it! The Firefox community is always up to some cool, collaborative way to declare their passion for Firefox. What better way to do this than band together to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours?!
It’s a whole lot easier and safer than donning a beard of bees or underwater jump roping. All you have to do is download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day — some time in June. In the meantime check out Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3. We’ll let you know when Firefox 3 goes out the door, kicking off our 24-hour attempt.
Here are some other ways you can help in the run up to Download Day:
* Get the word out; tell your friends, your neighbors, your grandma, anyone and everyone to participate in Download Day.
* Host a party to download Firefox; you provide the people and we’ll provide the party favors.
* Put a Download Day badge on your blog, profile or website.
With your help the Firefox community can go down in history! If you have any questions or ideas please drop us a line at worldrecord @ mozilla.com.
Update courtesy of Ronaldo Lemos: 7,400 people attended FISL!
Mitchell Baker, Chris Hofmann, Chris Blizzard, Taras Glek, Marcio Galli and myself just wrapped up an amazing visit to Porto Alegre for FISL, Brazil’s largest open source conference. The conference drew over 6,000 people from Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, Angola and more! I wanted to extend a huge thank you to Bruno Magrani, Ronaldo Lemos, Mario Rinaldi, Clauber Stipkovic Halic, Giullermo Movia of Argentina, Felipe Gomes, Antonio Gomes, Andre Pedralho, Fernando Silveira, Marcelo Terres, Juliano Bittencourt and everyone else who helped make our experience so great!
Some of the highlights:
It was great to see all the contribution that is going on in Brazil and to meet new volunteers. Thanks for the hard work!
Editor’s Note: I’d like to share a guest post from Ronaldo Lemos and Bruno Magrani of the Center for Technology & Society at FGV Law School, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Bruno Magrani
Next week, Mozilla will participate in the 9th Fórum Internacional do Software Livre (International Free Software Forum – FISL) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This is the second time that Mozilla will be in Brazil on an “official” visit. This time, the group includes Mitchell Baker (Mozilla’s Chairperson), Chris Blizzard, Marcio Galli, Mary Colvig, Taras Glek and Chris Hofmann. In their visit, they will be in touch with a vibrant and growing community of free software users, developers and enthusiasts. This is a great opportunity both for Mozilla and for the Brazilian community to get together and work with Firefox and other initiatives that promote the core values of the net, including openness and freedom.
Ronaldo Lemos and I have been helping support Mozilla’s presence here in Brazil and at FISL. This is not the first time that our institution, the Center for Technology & Society at the FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro has participated in the Forum. We’ve worked closely with FISL in the past few years and we launched the Brazilian branch of the Creative Commons project at the Forum in March 2004. This was an unforgettable event, I believe both for us, and for the more than 1,500 participants attending the launch, anxious to hear Minister Gilberto Gil, Marcelo Tas, Terry Fisher, Lawrence Lessig, Luis Nassif, André Midani, Claudio Prado, Joaquim Falcão, and so many others who care a lot about the future of the internet. A video of the launch can be watched here.
This year we are very happy to be back again at the Free Software Forum (this will be our 4th year at the event). Besides organizing/participating in a few panels, we will be there to support Mozilla´s visit the best way we can, including their workshop. We are very honored to do this, especially because we believe Mozilla will find in Brazil a place where not only we share common values, but also, put them into practice, thanks to our natural “tropicalist” mindset, and to the fact that the meaning of “openness” is very strong for us. One symbol of that is the fact that President Lula is expected at the Forum this year, and Brazil is well-known worldwide for its support of free software and free culture. Without further ado, we look forward to a great conference and Mozilla visit!
The Firefox Support team (support.mozilla.com, or SUMO for short) would like to invite you to our first SUMO day! This Friday, starting at 7 AM PDT, we’ll be hosting a day all about getting to know SUMO and learning how to use our site to help other Firefox users enjoy their favorite browser.
If you haven’t already, this is a great opportunity for you to get involved with Mozilla, regardless of your interests or expertise. We need people to write articles, create screenshots, correct spelling and grammar, answer people’s questions in the forum, or interact directly with Firefox users in live chat — just to name a few of the many ways you could help us out. Even if you’re just curious to learn more about the project and don’t really plan on participating, we’d be really excited to have you joining us on Friday.
Of course, we’d be even more thrilled if you stayed with us throughout the Firefox 3 launch, which is going to be an exciting event for the SUMO project. Have a look at the SUMO Day home page for more information and please pop by on Friday!
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