Supporting Accessibility

Our program supported some Mozilla volunteers working on accessibility issues with Aaron Leventhal. The team of contributors met up in Boston to discuss their work and we provided some catering for a few days of lunches. Aaron and team did a great job getting support from several other resources and we were happy to provide some food over the days of the summit.

You can read about their meeting at the following blogs:

Mark Pilgrim

Steve Lee

Shane Anderson

Evolving thoughts about the Community

The more I discuss this community project with everyone, the more I realize that this is something bigger than simply giving resources to volunteers of Mozilla. It is about empowering, enabling, and developing the community. Chris Beard has some great thoughts about this and he, Asa, and I (and a few others) will be developing these thoughts going forward. It is an important point to articulate because as we scale, we want people inside and outside the community to know what we are about as Mozilla. I’ll start by steering clear of the title “community giving”. It might be a while before we know exactly what this will be called, but we can begin by not referring to this simply as community giving.

Just to be clear, we will not stop doing what we have begun. We’ll continue to look for volunteers who are doing great work and trying to find ways to remove any barriers that they might face in their efforts. But, we want to foster a sense of community, not just by giving back, but by doing more.

One Laptop per Child Initiative

Just a quick (not-so) off-topic article for everyone to read from the New York Times World Section.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/world/africa/11laptop.html?ref=africa

The article tells about the One Laptop per Child Initiative that Nick Negroponte started and how he presently is working with the government of Libya to get a computer into the hands of every child in school. “Mr. Negroponte said Microsoft refused to sell its Windows software to the project at a price that would make it possible to include in his system.” Now O.L.P.C. will use Linux as mentioned in the article.

Unfortunately, Community Giving is not focusing on anything like this right now, but it is interesting to read about.

Recently researched models for Community Giving

I have been trying to research other models that we can learn from as we build our program. For those who have been involved in Mozilla for a long time, it may come as no surprise that it is hard to find anyone who is doing exactly what we are trying to do. This makes it hard to find one clear model that could serve as an example of success.

But, I thought I would share with you these organizations who I have met with so far.

Perl Foundation — dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. I met with Nathan Torkington and Allison Randall who gave me a lot of background on Perl Foundation. Programatically, this is probably the most closely related to what we are doing. I really recommend checking out what they are doing because I could see us creating a similar process and structure to the community giving program.

Omidyar Network – Started by the founder of eBay, they are trying to build a strong community of users on their Omidyar Network. This community can use the online forums to discuss and create new ideas about social change. In addition, they provide funding, but are operating as a hybrid venture fund and foundation. More specifically, they invest in both innovative companies, taking equity just like other venture capitalists, and nonprofits, where they give support to those who can prove how to make change. Here is a list of the companies, nonprofits, and communities they have supported. They are obviously very different from us because we are starting to look at our community and trying to find innovative ways to support the key contributors to Mozilla. However, they do state on their website that “[they] believe issues are best addressed by the people who face them, so [they] fund citizen-driven models that enable individuals to pursue what matters most to them.”

Google.org — Google.org is still in its early stages and is looking for the best first areas to support. As the website says, it has offered a lot of free advertising to partnering nonprofits, and seems to think about how it can incorporate the interests and work of its employees into what they are doing. That’s cool and we might do that one day, but not yet. It also looks like they are going big and will hopefully address issues with the same scale as the Gates Foundation.

Yahoo! for Good — Yahoo! tries very hard to match all of its “for good” efforts with its brands. It typically will not push anything that doesn’t also align with its business goals. I think this actually pretty smart and innovative because they are doing some cool stuff to promote both their own efforts and the work of many interesting nonprofit organizations. Check out the site. Aligning their good-will with their business practices seems like a win-win solution for everyone. Mozilla has always done what is best for its community and for open-source, creating a brand around this concept rather than what can make the most money. There’s a similarity in there somewhere, I believe, even if it is small..

Skoll Foundation — Very similar to Ashoka, which has been supporting social entrepreneurs for 25 years. Skoll is working hard to also support social entrepreneurs. It is also trying to use the power of the Web to spark social change conversations…this is where the community building comes in. I think we could learn a lot about how they empower people with new ideas and how they convert discussions into actions.

Ashoka — I have pointed to Ashoka before. Very cool place and I used to work there. They have a rigorous selection process that has many levels of research to ensure that they find the right people where their support will provide the highest leverage for social change. Since we don’t have unlimited resources, I believe this is one area where we can really learn. How will Mozilla’s support be leveraged to provide the greatest change that advances Mozilla’s mission.

Bugzilla

Community Giving purchased a new testing machine to replace the existing Landfill machine used by the Bugzilla developer community. Bugzilla is used everyday by so many people in the Mozilla community. Now, Bugzilla developers will be able to use an updated, better machine to test their latest builds. We will host the machine on our server rack at the co-location facility and will virtualize it so developers can test on multiple platforms. At this point, I turn it over to our hyper-intelligent IT staff to actually set it up. My expertise stops here.