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.