On Thursday (05/10/2007), our community program committee met to review several new proposals for supporting individuals in the community. The committee (Seth, Asa, Chofmann, John, and Mitchell) felt that we should support the volunteers below (please note…I haven’t named anyone specifically). I’ve listed each of the cases we reviewed (#1, #2, #3, and #4), telling a bit about how we learned about the contributor, the role they play, and a little about why we decided and how we can help.

1) The first proposal was nominated by our team members in Japan. I met the volunteer while I was there and saw his work first hand.

Role: Administrator of the Mozilla-Gumi web server, including Bugzilla-jp and the gumi forum; I18n version of bugzilla (bugzilla-ja) project; MDC Japanese Localization Team member (leader); and MDC Japan Project (webtools for MDC wiki).

The volunteer started working on Mozilla in 2003, just as a contributor for translation and event support. Since 2005, he has been a member of Mozilla-gumi’s main staff. (I guess you probably know exactly who it is now or can find out quickly… :))

While preparing for my trip, I learned this about Bugzilla JP: 3,300 unique accounts; 5,656 bugs have been reported; of those, 4,063 are product-related. The volunteer was in need of a new laptop and we will be getting one his way.

2) The second proposal was a self-nomination, endorsed by one of the Mozilla community members. (The volunteer found the template here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Community:CommunityProgram/SelectionProcess/ProposalTemplate#Proposal)

Role: Support and help documentation volunteer; administrator of Mozilla’s support newsgroups.

This volunteer has posted over 4,000 messages to Mozilla newsgroups. We’ve decided to support him because of his contributions and because whenever he would create or update documentation for www.mozilla.org/support/, he would have to go fishing for Mac and Linux users to make sure the documentation applied. We’re hoping to get him a machine that will allow him to do this more easily and without having to get others to do it for him.

3) The next volunteer came as a nomination from many of the senior developers of Firefox.

Role: Spidermonkey E4X maintenance, JS decompiler, other JS tasks, the XPCOM HTTP server Mozilla uses to keep our unit tests from depending on external resources, testing triage, and more. In addition, he owned the Help Viewer, and made a number of improvements to get search etc. working better.

As one Mozilla colleague put it: ““His attitude is great, especially so when you consider the fact that he maintains code most employees are unwilling or unable to work on.” We’ll also be getting him a new computer.

4) The final volunteer came as a nomination from Mozilla’s team in Japan.

Role: Focuses on Windows (including Vista); Mozilla support for Japanese fonts and Japanese versions of Microsoft Windows; prior to that, he was working on Windows-native parts of the codebase; he has also worked on i18n (for Microsoft Windows and Japanese), gfx (for MS Windows), nspr (again, MS Windows), and software update (for MS Windows, specifically Vista.)

As one of our employees commented: “I believe that for Firefox, about 90% of our users are on Windows. And, as the Vista market share grows, it will be important to have people like [him] (who understand the new issues with Vista) working on Mozilla. Supporting [him] will benefit the Mozilla community, especially the growing percentage of Mozilla users on MS Vista.” Because of his exceptional work hacking on code relevant to Vista and Windows users, we will provide him with new hardware and a software license.

Finally, there was one localizer candidate who I need to get just a bit more research done before we can review. I am prepping that case and a few others now. It is likely we’ll do another (smaller) proposal review in a couple weeks, before the end of May. Please send me your nominations!

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