Support update
Last Thursday (5/31/2007), another team was assembled to evaluate new proposals for empowering the Mozilla community. We are moving forward on the following ideas:
1) On the weekend of June 16 and 17, 2007, Mozilla will open up Building K for the Camino team to gather and for a developer/community day. Building K is one of two buildings here in Mountain View where Mozilla Corp employees work. We will provide lunches on both days for the developers, give them access to the wireless here, and let everyone use the building for the weekend. Sam Sidler, Mozilla employee and long-time Camino contributor, will be on hand both days to help out.
2) We will also be helping our lead localizer in Italy who has been one of the centers of the community there for some time. He is administrator of the support forum (which he helped grow from about 200 to almost 16,000 users), manages the press, coordinates our QA activities, founded Babelzilla and is an administrator of the Extenzilla project. He is doing a whole lot more and we are so grateful to have his leadership in Italy. Please check out the Italian Mozilla effort at Mozilla Italia. We’ll be providing him with a new laptop because he is currently sharing his computer with his girlfriend. This will help him a lot.
3) In our attempt to relieve some of the burden that localizers face, Pascal Chevrel and I have been working on providing some level of monetary support to cover very basic costs for tools often paid for by the localizers starting communities in new locales (i.e. paying for hosting costs and domain name registrations). We are hammering out the details, but it looks like somewhere around Euro 300 could be enough to offset basic costs that localizers and community members are facing to get a new community in smaller locales up and running. It will help relieve the work of localizers because we can now help cover costs of tools provided by them for the community to use. Hopefully, community forums and discussions will be able to thrive by providing this small level of support.
Questions? You know how to contact me, so please do. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sometimes it is not easy to explain what we (volunteers) do and how many efforts we spent in localizing, supporting and trying to spread Mozilla’s applications all around the world.
The Community Program, provided by Mozilla and managed by Seth, is a great initiative meant to give us the necessary help whenever is needed.
Well, I can personally state that the Community Program is working fine and fast and that I have found here a lot of kindness and attention to our needs.
So, I’d really like to thank Seth and the other people who’re using part of their own time helping us Mozilla volunteers in such a significant way.
Grazie!