Community in Japan

Mozilla’s Japanese team will be hosting a series of events in December for Mozilla contributors to get together to discuss different items. A few of the Mountain View team members will be traveling there to help guide the developer activities that will take place. For my part, I have sent some information to distribute to the network about how we can help volunteers there. Hopefully, by the end of December, we’ll have a good set of people or ideas to consider supporting in Japan.

For many reasons, this event in Japan is a good example of how our community can meet-up and how we can help. All of the volunteers who will attend are excited to make the meeting when it happens. Mozilla Japan is helping to set the agenda and will provide other limited resources related to the day’s events. Getting people together at a local level is a highly leveraged way for us to support our community to meet with each other, and I would love to hear from others who are interested in doing similar events.

Support update

From last week’s selection meeting, we agreed to provide the following support:

1) Windows 2003 server license to test Bugzilla.

This will be set up on Landfill as a VM. It is follow-up to Bugzilla after the upgrade to the Landfill server, which is a much more powerful machine. The new Landfill will accommodate a lot more than what the old machine was able to provide and will still have a space left over to support other projects.

2) 40GB and 512 MB RAM set up for the volunteer Mozilla website developers

We will provide this to the community of web developers who have helped maintain & redesign Mozilla’s website. It was unanimously agreed that we would not have been able to ship Firefox 2 with as much success as we did without the work of this part of the community. This request seemed like a very reasonable idea to support and we will most likely host it on some of the extra space we have on the Landfill server.

First Selection Meeting

Today was the first selection meeting we conducted to review requests of the community program. Rather than evaluating each case as it comes in, we are now filling a pipeline of proposals that will be looked at occasionally by a committee and decided by consensus. The group represents a good cross-section of the Mozilla organization, and comprises those who know the organization well and have been following the developments of this program.

The first selection meeting was very productive because we agreed on how to support some contributors while also thinking about how to promote some larger concepts that have been brought to our attention that will help develop the community. Once we have finalized everything, I’ll post a more descriptive update.

This Program’s Name

Last week, I blogged about how the community program is evolving and that we might work to rename “community giving”. Since then, I have been trying to ask around to see what nouns and adjectives might help define this program. Here are some words I have heard. What do you think?

• Development
• Give-back
• Investment
• Resource allocation
• Venture
• Enrichment
• Facilitation
• Empowerment
• Encompassing
• Participant
• Good Citizen
• Citizenship
• Thriving
• Inspiring
• Create
• Do More
• Incentive
• Attention
• Removing barriers

If you think there are a few words that summarize what we doing, please email me. Thanks.

Community Update

It’s been over a week since the last blog post. Sorry about the radio silence.

A few updates:

• Congrats on the release of Firefox 2.0. Now that the community of volunteers who have worked so hard to created Fx2 have shipped, we are gearing up to contact them to see how the Community Program can empower and support their work.
• A few of us will be meeting casually to brainstorm about what this program should be called. If you have any ideas on how this is more than a giving program, email me. You would be surprised how many people think this is corporate philanthropy.
• Speaking of, have you checked out Frank Hecker’s Blog? He would welcome comments from you. It is a good starting point to see what the Foundation is doing and how it is different from this program. And, like us, the Foundation is still figuring out how and what it should support. Please visit it.