Today, I went to a Council on Foundations meeting in San Francisco on “How to host a Summit”. You can read more about the Council on Foundations here. COF provides a lot of resources for corporate and private foundations in the United States regarding issues like event planning, governance guidelines, strategic planning, and networking. It [...]

I had a productive call today with Aaron Leventhal, the module owner of Mozilla’s accessibility efforts. We talked about the various ways that the Giving Program might support an effort like accessibility. Aside from just providing things like hardware to volunteers, we will sponsor part of the meet-up that the accessibility team will be having [...]

Another idea that has been circulated…
We should help fund get-togethers for volunteer contributors, so everyone can meet each other face-to-face and discuss important issues related to their work. It seems like a lot of people think this would be a worthy cause to support and we are ready to do that. So, we are putting [...]

A critical question that continues to surface relates specifically to how the Community Giving Program decides who receives funding. Because we are still early, this is not permanent, but here is how we are processing our first test cases.
1) We find possible recipients through research done on internal web tools (like Bugzilla), by surveys sent [...]

This week, the Community Giving Program moved forward in providing specific support to various members of the QA community who responded to our survey. We used that first piece of communication to uncover some of the barriers that key volunteer contributors are facing on a day-to-day basis, and then worked directly with those people to [...]

One likely recipient of support from the Giving Program asked the following important question (I have edited the exact wording to place it in better context):
“Just to be sure, Mozilla will support contributors by lending things like hardware to volunteers. You will then treat all this as a business expense, alleviating any tax expense and [...]

We made progress on many fronts this week.
1) Asa and I met with a volunteer who has dedicated a lot of his time to working on Bugzilla. We learned from him that many of the web tool developers could use a new Windows testing machine. We are thinking of buying a box with plenty of [...]