A Clarifying Question

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 making it (effectively) free of charge for me? And, does this mean that I now have any special responsibilities (besides being a volunteer for the Mozilla Project)? I just ask because I have never participated in such Community Giving Program and this is all new for me.”

Answer: We are creating a community giving program to support the Mozilla community and to try to remove any barriers that contributors might face. We are covering all bases to ensure that there will be little to no tax liability or any other obligations contributors are required to meet. Also, the support we send out is meant to help those people continue to be productive contributors to their aspect of the Mozilla project. We are not signing up anyone up to any contract or required work effort. If we send out hardware, we will track it and we will ask for it to be returned to Mozilla if it is not used to work primarily on Mozilla-related projects. I will add this to the FAQ section of this blog.

In all likelihood, we will announce this week some specific purchases we have made to support the community.

Specific action points

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 memory and disk so these volunteers can run Windows and Linux from the new machine. We’re trying to get something in place for next week. This is a great example of how the Giving Program will begin to support the community.

2) We ran queries using Bugzilla to see who has contributed patches, reported comments, and resolved bugs for all projects in Mozilla that we track through Bugzilla. We’ve gathered some good data that will help us reach out to many volunteers who have done so much for the project. It is likely we will use this information to reach out to people early week.

3) Many have indicated that they would be interested in having regional meet-ups where other volunteers and contributors could come together to discuss projects, have “test-fests” or “hack-fests” or just brainstorm new ideas. This is something the Community Giving Program will support. If you are a volunteer who would be willing to work with me to begin the planning process, I can provide some funding and logistical support. I just need to find those volunteers who would willingly help gather others in their locales or regions to attend and will help with the content and organization of the meet-up. Please email me if you’re interested.

4) Asa and I will start to talk more and more with the Mozilla Foundation to see how what I am doing on the corporate side can compliment what they are doing on the Foundation side. It is completely different and if enough people ping me, I would be happy to articulate the differences in a new post.

As always, please respond to this if you have any comments.