mrz's noise

noise from a mozilla IT/Operations wrangler

Mozilla IT & Growing Community

2

under Community, Mozilla

Last week Lukas blogged about her thoughts on David Eave’s community lifecyle audit. I jokingly told her that I felt she called me out.

Until we require Directors to create annual and quarterly goals that include measurable goals around volunteer growth, retention, participation, and effectiveness we will only see people (like myself) trying to do this “off the corner of their desks” which means it’s not a part of your paid work and thus less likely to be sustainable and effective.

Community today

Two points:
  1. I’ve made it clear to my teams that Community is a focus in 2012. I want each of them to spend some percentage of their work time engaging with the Community.
  2. I, as a Mozillian who carries the title “Director IT/Infrastructure & Operations”, have created annual & quarterly goals that involve the Community.

I’ll restate the commitment I made back in October:

My own personal goals by the end of 2012 are:

  • to have 5-10 volunteer Community Sysadmins actively helping run Mozilla’s network and servers.
  • to have a vibrant Community IT group…
  • to have a premiere source for open source video technology, a site where the Mozilla Community can find, share and create video content

Community, tomorrow?

Back to Lukas.

She’s right and while it may not seem obvious, Mozilla IT started including Community specific goals since last quarter.

2011 Q4 Goals – Grow Mozilla
  1. IT Pivot to Open. Start discussions to generate 2012 plans.
    1. [DONE] Community IT
    2. [DONE] Community Volunteer Sysadmins
    3. [DONE] Air Mozilla
2012 Q1 Goals – Grow Mozilla
  1. Community IT. Empower the wider Mozilla Community.
    1. Spin up infrastructure to support Open Badges
    2. Enable @mozillans.org community to join Yammer
    3. Develop infrastructure for Community website hosting (Joint with ReMo)
  2. Air Mozilla
    1. air.mozilla.org Website Reboot (bug 712717)
    2. Mobile Air Mozilla Kit. Develop a reference kit to enable anyone to stream a live event through Air Mozilla.
    3. Host one Community Air Mozilla training event
    4. Incorporate one Open Badge concept around video tagging or event streaming/recording
    5. Vidyo & multi-tenancy with Mozillians.org

Lastly,

I keep coming back to this powerful but simple idea:

Be fierce. No one will build into the Internet the kinds of things we want to build.

This can not be done alone.

Step 3.05: Overwhelmed

3

under Community, Mozilla

On November 28 I posted about our efforts to get more volunteers into Mozilla IT. A lot has happened in the background since and I want to let you know what’s happening (and why it’s taking so long!).

O. M. G.

The response and interest has been overwhelming.

I listed five different positions volunteers could “apply” to. I chose to use our exising applicant tracking system, Jobvite (I already have enough wheels, don’t need to invent another) and many of you have already expressed interested and applied.

Here’s a run down of responses so far:

Volunteer Role Responses
Mozilla Mirror Administrator 30
Desktop Padawan 5
Air Mozilla Stage Hand 4
Mozilla Foundation SysAdmin 14
Data Center Operations Engineer 4

What’s next?

    • There’s a lot of people to talk to and we’re slowing scheduling time to chat.
    • I talked about the Mozilla IT Volunteer Agreement. We’re continuing to refine it. With Gerv’s and Jishnu’s help we’ve carried this conversation to mozilla.governance.
    • We are double-checking to make sure we understand issues around volunteers and various government regulations.

Unfortunately this means we’re moving a but slower than I had hoped. If you’ve already expressed interested, that’s fantastic and we’ll be talking to you soon.

Bear with – I think we’re in slightly uncharted territory!

Step 3: How can you volunteer @ Mozilla IT?

under Community, Mozilla

In most ways, right now at least, you can’t. We’re too closed. It’s like I said in my first blog post,

IT is generally closed. Mozilla is not. There’s a incredible disconnect there. How do we leverage the expertise of the Community in running some of the busiest websites in the world?

In my travels over the past year I’ve met a number of passionate volunteers with IT skills who are looking for different ways to volunteer and contribute to Mozilla.  In the past two months, that list has exploded.

I’ve talked about ways Mozilla IT is trying to help the community, how we are trying to be your IT (we’re still talking about it too!).

I’ve talked about how we want to reboot Air Mozilla, how we want to open video and make it possible for more people to tell the Mozilla story in video.

But Mozilla IT is still closed.

Help me change it?

I want to illustrate what we want to do.

The best way to do that is to share a little open video and popcorn.js, with some help from Popcorn Maker. (This is what happens when you go to a Mozilla Festival. See how great the open web is?)

Watch this to see how we want to pivot to open.

How?

Good question.  I think I need your help to figure this out. It’s going to feel weird and uncomfortable for us.  Of all the steps we set out to do nearly two months ago, this has been the most challenging.  There are so many processes to work out.

  • What sort of agreement should volunteer Mozilla IT sign? A code of conduct? There are some parts of the infrastructure that must remain secure and secret even as we strive to be open.
  • How do we build the trust necessary to give someone root access?
  • How do we on-board new Mozilla IT volunteers?  Does everyone get root access on day one?  Is there some graduated process?  What is it?
  • Do we host onsite (or remote) training events to teach you about our tools and processes?

Today, as a code contributor, we ask you to sign a Committer’s Agreement.  It’s a simple document that shows you understand what it means to contribute code to Mozilla and understand our legal requirements.

As part of Mozilla IT,  you’ll have access to some pretty mission critical systems. I invite you to take a look at the Mozilla IT Agreement and share your feedback with us.  It’s meant to be a lightweight agreement similar to the Committer’s Agreement.

Want to get involved?

We’re doing a lot of this thinking out in the open at https://wiki.mozilla.org/IT/CommunitySysadmin and I invite you to join and participate -

Preparing for 2012

I want to reiterate two of my goals I mentioned in my first post nearly two months ago.

My own personal goals by the end of 2012 are:

  • to have 5-10 volunteer Community Sysadmins actively helping run Mozilla’s network and servers.
  • to have a vibrant Community IT group…

I made the comment that it felt like the most ambitious thing we’ve done.  It probably still is but in two months we’ve shifted our way of thinking, took Air Mozilla Mobile on the road and have a long list of things you need from us.

2012 will be fun.

Mozilla’s new Santa Clara data center

1

under Datacenters, Mozilla

Short story:

We’re building out a 1MW data center presence in Santa Clara, CA.

Our hosting needs are radically different than they were five years ago when I started and we had a couple racks in Sunnyvale.

We now have six data centers around the world, three of which are within fifteen miles of Mountain View and consume about 455kW of power.

We’ve reached a point where it makes more sense to look at wholesale data center space (the same sort of space that the Facebooks, the Googles & the Zyngas use).

We spent a good part of the first half of 2011 researching various locations in the area before deciding to partner with Vantage Data Centers.

Construction started about a month ago and we’re on track to start turning on services in January!

Being open

Taking inspiration from our own creative design process and even our development process, we’re going to build out this data center in a uniquely Mozilla way.

We’ll be as open as we can about the whole process. Building a data center like this is something new for Mozilla and this will give the community an opportunity to see how we do it.

Here’s why this matters. Facebook/Google – those guys’ scale only applies to 1% of the world. The number of content providers that can shut down a whole data center because it got too hot outside and not even flinch can be counted on one hand.

Our scale is much more inline with 90% of the world. We have a lot of expertise in doing scale. We have a lot of expertise in running data centers that apply to most of the world. This is where we get to share how we do it & why we do it the way we do it.

Long story:

This isn’t an mrz effort so I’m not going to talk about it here.

Instead, we’ll be talking more about this at the Project: SCL3 blog. In fact, you should go there right now!

Step 2.1: #MozFest, Air Mozilla & London

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under Community, Mozilla

What. A. Weekend.

My first real stay in London was punctuated by Mozilla Festival. And what a weekend it was. Radically different DNA than any other Mozilla event I’ve been to.

In many ways it reminded me of the Hacks/Hackers meetup I was at last spring in Buenos Aires. The combination of the open web and journalism is pretty energetic, a mixing of common values and beliefs.

It’s like the MoJo wiki says,

“Journalism and the open web are built on common values. And, like the web, the future of journalism lies in universal access and participation. ”

I meet interesting people (@GemmaCocker, @RadioKate, @cubicgarden & @nukeador to list just a few). I learned about the The Attitude Academy, learned I want an octocopter, talked to the folks at visionOntv, who are working hard to enable anyone to use video for social change, saw a room full of people focused on building a new generation of web & media makers and found out that I actually love popcorn(.js)!

But most importantly, @amilewski and I took Mobile Air Mozilla on the road.  We showed up at the Science Fair. We talked to people. We learned from people.  We even got talked into streaming the keynotes and closing on Air Mozilla.  And it worked.

I learned:

  • Open source video production is hard.  We both spent a lot of time trying to get the WebM capture box we had working.  This should not be this complicated.
  • The website, air.mozilla.org, was less interesting to most.
  • Most I met were more more interested in the technology we had onsite, the technology to stream from remote locations.

Some of the brain storming ideas that came out from this:

  • Create iOS/Android app to capture video and stream to Air Mozilla.  Air Mozilla will transcode and broadcast.  App could even store video for offline transfers.  Make it easy to capture and broadcast video.
  • Create web app that grabs live video and transcodes.  Why do I need to drag a special hardware capture/encoder box along?
  • How can Mozilla help push the needle on producing WebM video?

This was a great experience.  I walk away from every community event like this jazzed.  This was no exception!

Step 1.01: Mozilla IT @ MozCamp

under Community, Mozilla

We are just about two weeks away from MozCamp Europe (Nov 12-13) and three from MozCamp Asia (Nov 18-20)!

As I talked about in Step 1, we want to figure out how we can leverage our resources and expertise to support the entire Mozilla Community and build a better, stronger Mozilla.  At each MozCamp we’ll be hosting a workshop to talk and learn from you.

Even though we’re a couple weeks out, I wanted to share with you a draft version of the slide deck.  Take a look – Mozilla IT & Community IT.

ps. Have you joined our Mozilla Community directory @ https://mozillians.org/ ?

 

Step 2.01: Air Mozilla Stage Hands Opportunity

under Community, Mozilla

Mozilla.  Get Involved.  Do IT.

Do you have a penchant for wearing black?  Were you in the AV club in high school?  Did you (or do you) run lights/sound in high school?

(Are you a thespian and not afraid to admit it?)

Take your involvement with Mozilla to the next level!  Be part of the stage crew behind live Air Mozilla events.

Mozilla IT is looking for a number of volunteers to join the Air Mozilla team and help behind the scenes to make live Air Mozilla events more successful. Be a part of the Air Mozilla Reboot. Learn more about this role and click here if you’re interested.

Air Mozilla Stage Hand role

As part of the Army of Air Mozilla Stage Hands you’ll help behind the scenes at live Mozilla events. You’ll be the person in the black shirt helping folks with microphones, setting up cameras and making sure AV just works.

You will volunteer onsite at MozSpaces (Mountain View, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, Paris) and offsite at Mozilla-related events.

Primary responsibilities include:

  • Help run behind-the-scenes support for brownbags & Project meetings
  • Work with presenters and speakers to make sure they are successful, including making sure they are properly mic’d and have their laptops properly connected
  • Man the cameras, including switching between laptop presentation, camera view and PIP
  • Pre-flight & setup before the show goes on

Requirements:

  • Passion for telling the Mozilla story in audio & video
  • Interest in sound/lighting tech
  • Ability to commit to 1-3 hours per event (setup/show/teardown)

Bonus points for:

  • school or community theater experience

Interested?  Let us know!

For more ways to contribute to Air Mozilla, look at some of the other Air Mozilla SIG opportunities.

Step 2: Air Mozilla Reboot

2

under Community, Mozilla

Continuing the conversation I started a few weeks ago and Step 1, I want to focus on one of the most powerful tools we have to engage the Mozilla Community and facilitate participation.

What is Air Mozilla?

Air Mozilla is different things to different people.

  • The original wireless network at the 1981 Landings office
  • The live stream from Mozilla’s Mountain View office (10F)
  • The website, air.mozilla.org

In a sense it is all of those things but if I articulate it differently it is:

  • The website
  • The technology to host and steam open source video, live and recorded, at scale
  • A platform – a service & API – for others to use

Our needs for Air Mozilla have outgrown what the current website and infrastructure provide.  It’s time for a reboot.


What is Air Mozilla (take 2)?

Consider this proposed Air Mozilla Mission Statement:

Air Mozilla is a central hub for Mozilla’s rich media, a place for live video streaming and prerecorded video content. It is a site where the Community can find, share and create video content, an open repository of video & audio resources that are freely available to the public, accessible by anyone and any device.

Air Mozilla is also a place to set a good example for open standards by publishing all rich media in open formats with Creative Commons licenses.  It is a place to help drive open standards on the web; a showcase for new rich media technologies.

Air Mozilla is where we tell the Mozilla story in video, where we bridge the gap between video production and web standards evangelism, ensuring that the video we produce is distributed in a manner consistent with Mozilla’s values.

The Reboot

This Reboot is going to require a lot of help from the Mozilla Community.  My teams are acting as the initial stewards, to kick-start this Reboot.  We’ve had the luxury of listening to some great minds who have put a lot of thinking into this already and I’ve summarized and collated a lot of that thinking and have realized that there are two main pieces to Air Mozilla:

  1. The website
  2. The technology

The website
The website, simply speaking, is http://air.mozilla.org/.  It should become the focal point for Mozilla’s rich media.  Some of the goals for this site should be:

  • improve discoverability of Air Mozilla content (past content & future content)
    • future programming guide, listing upcoming live broadcast events
    • searchable archive of media content (with #tags & metadata)
  • improve post-event distribution of Air Mozilla content
    • strive for WebM, fallback to h.264
    • iTunes/RSS podcasts based on #tags and metadata (everyone’s Web is a little bit different *)
    • consumable by anyone, by any device including iOS & Android as well as desktop operating systems
  • increase the amount of content available on Air Mozilla, including content from the various Mozilla Communities
  • be mashable
  • probably more we haven’t thought of

The technology
Open source video, today, is hard. It’s harder to natively create content. It’s harder to stream WebM at scale. Even at Mozilla we’ve relied on Flash-based partners for streaming projects at Mozilla’s scale.

What if you could change that?

The technology behind Air Mozilla should empower you.  It shouldn’t care what tools you use to create content.  It shouldn’t care where you are.  It should showcase video technologies like popcorn.js or Universal Subtitles.

Air Mozilla should allow you to:

  • upload video content – from any device in any format – and have it transcoded to various open source codecs and fallback codecs
  • broadcast a live video stream from anywhere you have Internet
  • support one-to-many and many-to-many collaborations, live & recorded

The technology behind Air Mozilla should:

  • be a lightweight skin on a reusable stack of tools & processes
  • a service/API that can be the source of media content for Mozilla websites.  You won’t need to build your own toolkit for handling multimedia content
  • probably a bunch of other things we haven’t thought of

Want to get involved?

Step 2 is very exciting to me.  Imagine if you will, an Air Mozilla that rivals the likes of TED, of YouTube, of Vimeo – but is the premier showcase for open source video at scale.

Step 1: Community IT

3

under Community, Mozilla

“Help me… help you. Help me, help you. ” ~ Jerry Maguire

Last week I blogged about our efforts to be radical and pivot. The first area we’re focusing on is what I’ve started calling Community IT.

Mozilla’s IT/Infrastructure & Ops team is very adept at supporting the large and complex environment needed to support Firefox users. This same team supports Mozilla’s growing number of paid staff and supports the Mozilla Spaces & Offices, including network infrastructure and audio-visual systems.

There are a lot of technical tools this team manages at a very large scale.

We want to answer the following question:

How can we leverage our resources and expertise to support the entire Mozilla Community and build a better, stronger Mozilla?

For the remainder of 2011, we hope to lead a discussion into what the Mozilla Community needs from IT.  Think of it like your IT department.  You are our customers.

  • How can we help you?
  • What IT resources do you need when you’re  hosting a Mozilla Community event?  A brown bag?  A meet-up?
  • What sort of collaboration tools do you need?

I invite you to look at some of the notes we’ve already started collecting at https://wiki.mozilla.org/IT/Community.

Want to get involved?

  • Join the conversation and join the Community IT mailing list.  Help us understand what you need from this team.
  • Join the IRC channel, irc://irc.mozilla.org/it
  • Join the Community IT SIG.  Be part of this task force.
    • Help us teach others about the IT tools we have available at your disposal
    • Help act as IT support at Mozilla Community events
  • Meet us in person! At these events we’ll be holding round table discussions to learn more from you. We’ll also be on-hand to to lend support.

This is a particular interesting Step 1.  I’ve seen what Community can do.  Imagine what you can do with the right set of IT tools.

My job, after 5.558 years

11

under Community, Mozilla

I’ve been at Mozilla for 5.558 years (or 2001 days but who keeps count?).

Over that time I’ve seen my role within Mozilla change from a network engineer on a team of three to helping orchestrate a team of 38. While my role and job title has surely changed, I don’t think my job actually has. In fact, I can sum up my entire job description with the following:

To empower the Community to promote the Mozilla Mission.

So great, that’s my job, summed up in one line. What does that actually mean? How do I go about doing that?  And what is the Community?

Good questions.

First, the easy one.  In the Mozilla world, people are everything*. The Mozilla Community is you.  It’s me. It’s everyone who contributes to the Mozilla project, whether paid staff or volunteer contributors.  Es todo el mundo.

Second, I’m going to back up a bit.  Anyone who knows me knows I’ve been spending time with Engagement and talking more and more about Community, so much so that I’ve started using it as a proper noun.  How did I get there?

Back in late Spring, I took a now pivotal trip to Buenos Aires. People close to me are probably tired of hearing me say it, but I came back from that trip with an affinity for gelato and espresso. And Community.

Then I took a trip to Paris (and yes, lost my passport).  I spent a little time there learning more about the Mozilla Community.

Then it hit me.  I’m IT, an Ops guy.  I am also Engagement. We all are.

A couple weeks ago Mozilla had nearly all 600 employess onsite for a company All Hands.  One particular keynote hit me and focused a lot of my thoughts and feelings into a singular point.  I took notes.  A lot of notes.

  • We will never have enough employees to compete
  • We need to create on ramps to create & participate
  • You do not need to be an employee to participate
  • Make others stronger, build better aspects of Mozilla
  • Be fierce.  No one will build into the Internet the kinds of things we want to build

In less than 60 minutes, I saw 2012 as a chance to pivot IT and came up with this simple idea to guide 2012:

How does IT put Community first?

So back to that question, how do I “empower the Mozilla Community”?

There’s the obvious and then the three things that will define 2012 for me.

  1. I orchestrate a group of nearly 40 folks who manage Mozilla’s IT Infrastructure and Operations.  These are the folks who are largely behind the scenes running all the computers that support all the websites.
  2. Community IT.  My collective teams manage an dizzying array of technology.  We support a company that was nearly 40 strong when I started and is nearly 600 today.  We have all these tools at our disposal.  Do you know about them?  How do I make these same set of tools available for you to use?  Teach me what other tools you need.  Help me help you leverage the resources and skills we have to empower the Community and push Mozilla’s mission forward.
  3. Community Sysadmins.  IT is generally closed.  Mozilla is not.  There’s a incredible disconnect there.  How do we leverage the expertise of the Community in running some of the busiest websites in the world?
  4. Air Mozilla.  How do we reinvigorate Air Mozilla such that it becomes a focal point for the Mozilla Community?  A place to show case open source video and technologies?  A place for the Mozilla Community share content?

Over the next several weeks  you’ll see a couple more blog posts talking more about those and how you can get involved.  I’m going need your help, afterall.

My own personal goals by the end of 2012 are:

  • to have 5-10 volunteer Community Sysadmins actively helping run Mozilla’s network and servers.
  • to have a vibrant Community IT group…
  • to have a premiere source for open source video technology, a site where the Mozilla Community can find, share and create video content

And, quite frankly, I’ll be even more excited if those are thriving on their own, independent of me.

This feels like the most ambitious set of projects I’ve ever tried to start.  We might stumble, we might fall.  I suspect, however, we’ll succeed because of the strength of Mozilla’s Community.

To be crystal clear, and to quote Mitchell, I am utterly committed.

 

ps. For those Excel folks,  ROUND(YEARFRAC(DATEVALUE("3/15/2006"),TODAY()),3) & DAYS360(DATEVALUE("3/15/2006"),TODAY())