The Mozilla Blog

As Melissa mentioned we had some big news yesterday! Please join us tomorrow for a very special edition of Air Mozilla Live. We’ll be discussing John Lilly’s new role as Mozilla CEO and Mitchell Baker’s plans for her Chairman role. As usual, we’ll be taking your questions live via IRC, IM, and email.

So join us, this Wednesday for our live community discussion and “call-in” show.
Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Mitchell Baker, and John Lilly.
When: Wednesday, January 09, from 10:00:00 - 11:00:00 PST (UTC -8).
Where: View the webcast at air.mozilla.com and participate on IRC, IM, or email.

• IRC: join the discussion on irc.mozilla.org at #airmozilla.
• IM: instant message your questions to the AIM/YIM/GTalk screenname airmozilla.
• email: send in your questions before and during the show to airmozilla@mozilla.com.

Air Mozilla is now streaming 24/7 with a new live show every month (or as close to that as makes sense.) If you’ve got ideas for shows, please email us and let us know. Even better, if you’re a part of the Mozilla community and you’d like to be interviewed or present on our live broadcast, let us know.

After an overwhelming response and some tough decision-making, the winner of Operation Firefox has been announced! Winner Agent R.W. from Georgia Tech University and team plastered the giant Firefox logo on their school’s football stadium for thousands to bask in.

The Firefox logo soared to new heights on runner up Agent Teren’s plane.

The Firefox sticker also graced the set of the New York City Opera, as well as a concert bus at an Iowa State tailgate. You can check out all the amazing pictures here or check out the Operation Firefox blog for the full scoop. We want to thank all our special agents for their creativity and participation! Over and out!

It sometimes seems that when someone at Mozilla sneezes, there’s someone somewhere writing about it. From Twitter to the New York Times and everything in between, Mozilla attracts an amazing volume of coverage.

This volume is both good and bad. We don’t have the marketing and pr budgets of the software mega-companies so the press buzz we get organically is wonderful. The downside is that because of the sheer volume of coverage, it’s difficult to follow it all and make sure that Mozilla is being represented fairly.

What Mozilla lacks in marketing and pr budget, however, it more than makes up in the enthusiastic and capable community of participants who have already brought Firefox to 130 million users and made Mozilla a household name.

For the Record (FTR) is a community-driven public relations and press response program that will harness the energy and knowledge of the Mozilla community to 1) catalog all of the online coverage of the Mozilla Project, 2) develop a sustainable team of spokespeople who feel empowered to respond to online coverage, and 3) build a collection of talking points and responses to frequently asked questions.

To start participating today, simply add fortherecord@mozilla.org to your email address-book and forward blog posts or articles about Mozilla projects or products that are a) factually inaccurate or misleading, b) relevant to Mozilla, its products, or the Open Web, but fail to mention Mozilla, or c) thoughtful stories that are factually accurate and favorable, or at least fair about Firefox. Please include a short note explaining why you’ve forwarded the story.

The For the Record team, Mozilla’s marketing team, PR representatives, or various spokespeople will take it from there.

Want to join the For the Record team, and help us further develop the program and write a set of FAQs and other materials that will make it easier for the Mozilla community to better tell the Mozilla story and respond effectively when needed? Well, that’s easy too. Simply subscribe to the mailing list. Please note, unless you’re really interested in analyzing the flow of Mozilla news and helping to distill relevant content into documentation, this probably isn’t the list for you. If, on the other hand, that sounds like great fun, we’d love to have you involved.

This special, extended, Air Mozilla Live broadcast will feature a guest from the Creative Commons, as they get ready to celebrate their 5th anniversary; the Mozilla application team, sharing expertise in extension development; and the Mozilla Mobile Platform team, discussing Mozilla’s mobile goals, target platforms, and next steps.

Join us, this Wednesday for our live community discussion and “call-in” show.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Melissa Reeder, Mark Finkle, Dave Townsend, and Christian Sejersen.
When: Wednesday, November 28, from 14:00:00 - 15:30:00 PST (UTC -8.)
Where: View the webcast at air.mozilla.com and participate on IRC, IM, or email.

• IRC: join the discussion on irc.mozilla.org #airmozilla
• IM: instant message your questions to the AIM/YIM/GTalk screenname airmozilla.
• email: send in your questions before and during the show to airmozilla@mozilla.com.

Air Mozilla is now streaming 24/7 with a new live show every month (or as close to that as makes sense.) If you’ve got ideas for shows, please email us and let us know. Even better, if you’re a part of the Mozilla community and you’d like to be interviewed or present on our live broadcast, let us know.

Editor’s Note: I’d like to share another guest post from one of our international community members — Guillermo Movia of Mozilla Argentina. They’ve been doing a great job localizing Firefox and other Mozilla products, as well as spreading the word and helping more people get involved with Mozilla! Mary Colvig

After a visit from Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s community director, a group of us, including those who helped organize Asa’s visit and translators who had localized Mozilla’s applications, decided to build up Argentina’s Mozilla Community. Our goal is promote the use of Mozilla’s products, as well as the Open Web and open standards. We translate Firefox and Thunderbird, and are now starting with Sunbird and Seamonkey.

On October 5th and 6th , the Cafeconf conference took place in Buenos Aires, and we committed our efforts to be there. Cafeconf is the most important conference devoted to free software in Buenos Aires. Though we didn’t have much time to prepare for the event, off we went and the outcome was really positive. We had a lot of chats with people from different cities in the country, and Felipe Lerena gave a presentation to 50 people on developing websites using Firebug and Firefox. We also had the chance to talk with people working on other projects, which helped us start developing a new Firefox add-on.

Thanks to the Firefox and Mozilla products that the Mozilla sent us (also thanks to Mary Colvig and Asa Dotzler), we distributed pins, stickers, posters and Firefox tattoos, which were hot stuff at Cafeconf. (We were like Santa Claus bringing gifts to the community :-P).

Now, we wish to have our website up soon in order to spread Mozilla’s applications, and recruit more people to the Argentine community to test the translated applications, to help us with new add-ons and to continue spreading the Open Web and the open standards.

Thanks for all your support!

Argentina’s Mozilla Community

Are you ready to infiltrate society and spread Firefox one sticker at a time? Operation Firefox is currently recruiting agents to place huge 3.5’ Firefox stickers where the world will see them. In addition to worldwide notoriety, you might wind up with a new MacBook Pro or a Nintendo Wii.

Operation Firefox began last summer as a project initiated by the Mozilla Marketing interns. We had seen what the Mozilla community produced before, including the New York Times ad, the Firefox crop circle, and the Firefox Flicks contest, and decided to step up to the challenge and create another opportunity for Mozilla fans to show off their creativity.

This newest campaign puts 3.5 foot Firefox stickers in the hands of our community and looks for creative new ways to share Firefox with the world. Ultimately, our goal is to get 50 great photos of the Firefox logo in situations that promote some of the defining characteristics of the Web browser–performance, security, customization, and community.

The contest is two-tiered: first, we’re putting out a call for the 50 best “placements” for these stickers (due November 9th). Then, the most creative agents will receive a fathead sticker to complete their mission: take a photograph and submit before December 3rd. All 50 photos will be displayed on the Operation Firefox website, but the four best ones will receive a new MacBook Pro or Nintendo Wii.

Do you think you have what it takes to be an Operation Firefox agent? To learn more about the contest and how to participate, visit www.operationfirefox.com.

Editor’s Note: Giuliano and his team are doing such great work in Italy we thought a guest post was in order! Mary Colvig

My name is Giuliano Masseroni (aka jooliaan) and I’m currently the president of Mozilla Italia.
To tell you a little about myself, I’m a 44-year old Italian chemist working with the Italian R&D Lab of a Dutch international chemical company called Akzo Nobel researching and developing new paints and application systems for the restoration of historical buildings. You’re probably wondering how I got involved with Mozilla. As you can see I’m not an IT guy, I’m just a chemist who loves everything about computers and the Internet.

Four years ago while reading an article in an Italian monthly computer magazine, I found a copy of a new browser then called Firebird (today it’s Firefox!) and decided to give it a try. The browser was in English so I started to frequent MozillaZine Forums and one day asked why such a great browser couldn’t be available in Italian. To my surprise, it was!

That was a watershed moment in my life: I met the people who would get me involved with volunteering for Mozilla. We decided to band together to form a non-profit association dedicated to our volunteer work and called it Mozilla Italia.

The goal of Mozilla Italia is the localization or translation of all Mozilla Products and Projects in our language, giving support to them through our forums, evangelizing web standards and spreading Firefox and the other Mozilla software around Italy. We’ve worked hard to provide Italian users with translated add-ons, Italian-specific Live Bookmarks, updated versions of Firefox, as well as answer questions from Italian reporters and so much more!

The year 2007 has been wonderful for Mozilla Italia and me. In fact in April, we had our first “official appearance” as Mozilla Italia at a three-day event called “Fa’ la cosa giusta” (Do the right thing) in Milan, that had something like 30,000 visitors, in order to make Firefox and Thunderbird better known in our country (see this photo set). We also had a visit from Tristan Nitot, head of Mozilla Europe, that resulted in great media coverage.

To summarize, I can say that as an Italian Mozilla volunteer I really enjoy the opportunity to work in the international Mozilla environment. Sharing knowledge and suggestions allows me to be more and more open-minded and greatly improves my ability to build interpersonal relationships.

Please drop me a line at giuliano[dot]masseroni[at]mozillaitalia[dot]org if you’d like to learn more about Mozilla Italia or to join us!

[This is a repost of Asa’s original blog post at SpreadFirefox.com - Mary Colvig]

Air Mozilla is the live “call in” show featuring influential Mozilla contributors from all over the world. This week’s show will feature Window Snyder, Chief Security Something or Other, talking about Mozilla and Web security. So join us this Wednesday at air.mozilla.com and on IRC or IM to be a part of the fun.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and special guest Window Snyder.

When: Wednesday, October 10, from 14:00:00 - 15:00:00 PDT (UTC -7.)

Where: View the webcast at air.mozilla.com and participate on IRC, IM, or email.
* IRC: join the discussion on irc.mozilla.org #airmozilla
* IM: instant message your questions to the AIM/YIM/GTalk screenname airmozilla.
* email: send in your questions before and during the show to airmozilla -at- mozilla -dot- com.

Air Mozilla is now streaming 24/7 with a new live show every month (or as close to that as makes sense.) If you’ve got ideas for shows, please email us and let us know. Even better, if you’re a part of the Mozilla community and you’d like to be interviewed or present on our live broadcast, let us know.

[This is a repost of Asa’s original blog post at SpreadFirefox.com - Mary Colvig]

Tomorrow’s Air Mozilla Live will be focused on the recent announcements around Mozilla’s increasing investment in email and messaging. We’ll have both Mitchell Baker, Chairman of the Board, and David Ascher, the leader of Mozilla’s new messaging company taking your questions, live just after 2PM Pacific. So join us this Wednesday at air.mozilla.com and on IRC or IM to be a part of the fun.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and special guests Mitchell Baker and David Ascher.
When: Wednesday, September 19, from 14:00:00 - 15:00:00 PDT (UTC -7.)
Where: View the webcast at air.mozilla.com and participate on IRC, IM, or email.
* IRC: join the discussion on irc.mozilla.org #airmozilla
* IM: instant message your questions to the AIM/YIM/GTalk screenname airmozilla.
* email: send in your questions before and during the show to airmozilla -at- mozilla -dot- com.

Our colleagues in Japan kicked off Mozilla 24 in Tokyo this evening. If you weren’t able to make it there like me, you don’t have to miss out on all the action. You can watch live from the Mozilla 24 site now.

They’re even providing us with front row seats at a Firefox Rock Festival…well, virtual seats!

Our European team will come online shortly from Paris and then we’ll pick up for a day of sessions at Stanford on the future of the Web. We’ll then wrap with a global discussion at 6:00pm PDT that will include Vint Cerf live from Washington, D.C. and Mitchell Baker at Stanford.

Check out the complete schedule of online Mozilla 24 activities and join us!