This Week’s Update

Just a quick note…I was out of the office last week on travel for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday (if anyone noticed a lull in blogging activity). This week, I will be following up on some proposals that we are considering from the last selection process.

Specifically, I am investigating how Mozilla might further support the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. They have been and continue to be a great supporter of open-source initiatives. Some may remember that the Mozilla Foundation has supported them in the past, too. This time around, there are specific ideas that relate directly to the Mozilla community that we are considering how to support. Also, we are collecting new ideas and proposals for the upcoming selection meeting. Many people who attended the Firefox 2 Summit came up with new ideas that will be evaluated, so I will be researching them and writing a few proposals for evaluation.

You can read about the process on the Mozilla wiki under the community section I created.

Update from the Firefox 2 Summit

This morning at the Firefox 2 Summit, I hosted a session that was an overview of the community program. Firefox contributors from France, Japan, Canada, U.S. and Germany (I hope I didn’t forget any countries) attended and gave some really thoughtful remarks about the development of this program. Aside from the excellent opportunity to meet face-to-face some of the people who have benefited from the program, we also discussed new ideas and ways we can improve.

Some of the questions that came up:

1) How do we reach out to our international community? For example, one way we find contributors is through Bugzilla. But, as some commented, searching for candidates in Bugzilla seems very specific to English speakers. One response to address this concern was for people to blog about the program, link to this blog, or refer others through this blog.

2) Can we help plan meetings or summits? Or, something smaller where new ideas can flow? Getting people together to work on Mozilla projects has been successful in the past. However, the question about summits being the best, most-leveraged use of resources for this program did arise.

3) Communities differ across cultures. How will the community program work to interface with contributors from country-to-country where communication style and process is different?

I created a space on the Mozilla wiki with details about the program’s actions to date, the process, and some case studies that exemplify what we are trying to do. Please take a look at it here. I will also link to this site on my blog so people who want to know more about the process and how to participate. If you have any questions about the program, please email or respond to the blog.

Support Update (v.2)

On Monday, we held our community program’s second selection meeting, looking at seven different proposals. The selection committee comprised a group of six people who represent a good cross section of Mozilla.

We rejected a few proposals that just did not fit in the Community Program and were not highly-leveraged ideas for us to support.

And, although we had specific funding ideas that look very promising, the committee came up with some excellent probing questions about three of them that (when all questions are answered) we will move forward with supporting.

Those ideas include the following:

1) We will work with the Mozilla localizer team to find ways to provide basic hosting services where localizations teams can store files for work they are presently undertaking. (FYI, this idea initially came from a comment posted on my blog.)

2) We will investigate further supporting some of the Mozilla-related work that is being done by the open-source lab at Oregon State University, details to follow.

3) We are going to set up guidelines specific to the localization efforts so we can have a process to evaluate the proposals. Once set, we have a few ideas in the pipeline that we’ll be able to examine and possibly support. Those guideline will be posted for everyone to see and comment on once we come up with them.

If you have any ideas or comments on the above, please let me know.

Inveneo Visit

I invited the nonprofit organization, Inveneo, to visit Mozilla to tell us about the ICT solutions it provides to the developing world. In the organization’s words, it is the on-ramp to the information superhighway for many in the world who have never accessed the Internet. During the introduction to the presentation, the members of the team provided some interesting figures as context for their project: 2.5 billion people in the world have little or no access to the very basic forms of technology (telephone, computer, etc.). An even greater number has no Internet connectivity.

Inveneo offers a solar-powered desktop that runs an entire open-source suite, including an operating system, browser, instant messaging client, VOIP, and more. The browser it delivers is compiled from the Firefox code. The entire software suite is under 100 MB. Open-source solutions are critical to keeping costs down. By some estimates, a proprietary software solution might cost as much at $15,000 more than the Inveneo solution, which can run between $550 and $1850 depending on what is needed from community to community.

The organization sells its hardware, software, and solar power systems at low-cost to international nonprofits, local governments, and private entities who understand the local country needs and context. Inveneo’s partners then work to deliver technology to people who will use it for economic development, education, relief, agriculture and health care projects. To date, Inveneo is serving 15 organizations, more than 50 communities, and over 40,000 people in countries like Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana, Mali and Haiti.

Part of the presentation was to show us the organization’s compiled version of Firefox. We also learned that Inveneo often meets people in the developing world who would like to localize Firefox into their local language. In one example, the team told us about a person who is localizing Firefox in a Rwandan dialect. Mozilla provides a great software solution for Inveneo because, as the team claims, using a proprietary browser would never enable its target market to localize in different languages.

If you have any ideas or would like to contact Inveneo, please email me or visit the website. http://www.inveneo.org

Apache’s Incubator and Its Process

I’ve been reading through the application process for Apache’s incubator, looking specifically at how they solicit new projects and then evaluate them. Part of the extensive proposal writing process relates directly to community. You can read their guide to proposals for the incubator here. From the site:

“Apache is interested only in communities. Candidates should start with a community and have the potential to grow and renew this community by attracting new users and developers. Explain how the proposal fits this vision.”

http://incubator.apache.org/guides/proposal.html#template-community

This Mozilla community program supports individuals and ideas that have an impact in our community. We have started by removing barriers for volunteers who are contributing to Mozilla. Presumably, the better we serve our community, the more people will be attracted to it, whether its new developers or users or everyone in between. I think the incubator has some interesting components to consider and this program can learn from them in some ways about process. Please take a look when you get a chance.