• Redesign of Access Firefox

    March 20th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    Ken Saunders (see A Few All-stars) and Michael Buckley redesigned the Access Firefox site.  Have a look.  Great work, guys!

  • A Few All-stars

    March 12th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 2 comments »

    When I was in Boston last week, I spent time meeting with some members of the Mozilla accessibility community. Ken Saunders and Aaron Leventhal are both working tirelessly on web accessibility issues for those with disabilities, and both are helping to promote Firefox as a great solution for many who want to access the internet.

    I pointed everyone to Access Firefox in the past. Ken created this site to showcase all the tools available to Firefox users with disabilities. He’s worked with many people along the way, including Aaron. We have started to brainstorm on how Ken envisions expanding this site. Presently, it is an entry point to Firefox and a straight-forward presentation of information for those who face accessibility challenges. For example, check out these three extensions developed by Mozilla community members that are featured on Ken’s site:

    Great extensions for those who want and need better web accessibility! More are listed on the site, so please take some time to poke around.

    Having spoken with him on several occasions, Ken is enthused to make Access Firefox even bigger. He’s enlisted the support of a young Australian developer to address some of the coding issues. With limited resources, he’s already made a big impact. Perhaps one day, Access Firefox will do for the accessibility community what Spread Firefox did for our first users.

    Special thanks to Ken and Aaron and all the extension developers listed above and on Access Firefox for embodying the ideals of our community — empowerment, creativity, leverage, respect for others, dedication, socially conscious…the list goes on.

  • Social Enterprise Conference

    March 7th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    On Sunday, I traveled to Boston to serve as a judge for Harvard Business School’s Pitch for Change competition that took place at the social enterprise conference hosted by the students at HBS. As it turns out, the contest was pretty fun.

    Our day started with 24 student teams giving our panel of judges 30 second elevator pitches about their high impact, entrepreneurial ideas. From these 24 ideas, we whittled the group down to 7 finalists who would give a longer 2 minute presentation. We came to our seven, but only after debating the 20+ great ideas.

    Interestingly enough, in many cases we were forced to eliminate teams because we were left wondering, “What does that business do?” Thirty seconds is not a lot of time and I’m sure those who have given an impromptu elevator pitch have reflected on what “coulda” or “shoulda” been relayed. The best contestants were those who were able to state a social problem and then tell us what business idea they would create to solve that problem. In many ways, the contest was all about speaking skills.

    At times, I felt like I was participating in a pop-reality program for social entrepreneurs. But when the smoke cleared, we awarded a win, place, and show to three great student ideas. Third place went to an interesting program that delivers humanitarian aid through the front line troops to people in Iraq and other war torn regions. Second place went to an innovative idea that hopes to prevent counterfeit pharmaceuticals from reaching the marketplace in the developing world. And, first place went to an idealistic car company designing light weight carbon based chassis, and then distributing them through a locally run supply chain, hoping to create more local jobs and domestic car production while reducing carbon emissions. Whoa.

    After judging finished, I was able to poke around and sat in on a great discussion about “top-down” versus “bottom-up” approaches to starting social enterprises. There were some good nuggets that I took away from that session.

    All in all, a great conference. Congrats go out to the students who organized the whole thing.

    p.s. Weather in Boston was cold! Wind chill was negative 9 degrees Fahrenheit when I left. And, I forgot my winter coat in sunny California.

  • Localization Server

    March 5th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 5 comments »

    The server we put in place in the Amsterdam colo is ready to go. Initially, the idea came from members in the l10n community and I blogged about it on January 10, 2007. It took some time for it to get up and running…our apologies. But, it’s now ready to go.

    If you are interested in accessing the server, please file a bug in Bugzilla under “mozilla.org” in Client Support, and then list Localization Server in the component section.

    Many thanks to all who helped get this rolling, including Justin and Matt from Mozilla’s IT team, Reed from the community, and Chofmann and Axel.

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