• Mozilla 24, FOSS.IN Project Day, & Other Stuff

    August 28th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    In the past two weeks, I haven’t blogged a thing. It’s been a time for a slight realignment of teams, and I now am a part of the newly-formed Mozilla Evangelism team. I’ll bringing all that I have been doing with Community Giving to a great team where we all will work on empowering others, telling the Mozilla story, and building new communities of contributors. Perhaps it’s needless to say, but I am super excited to work with the new team.

    What have I been up to in the past two weeks?

    1) Mozilla 24

    I scheduled a track for Mozilla 24 featuring Mozilla Accessibility contributors. We have quite a line-up ready to go, with a number of our blind or visually impaired contributors putting together presentations about how they are contributing to Mozilla.

    Have you seen the stuff for Mozilla 24? It will be a great worldwide event so please participate on September 15 and 16. Because I have taken a lead in planning a session and have been supporting our lead organizers in Japan in pulling off the conference, I will be going to Japan from September 11 to 17. More travel. More meeting community. If you’re in Tokyo in early September, tell me and we’ll meet up.

    Some other cool stuff about Mozilla 24:

    Everyone on our Japanese team from our marketing team here has really put in a lot of hard work to make this happen.

    2) FOSS.IN Project Day submission

    After my trip, I got inspired by all the activity in India, so I decided to work with some developers there, Chofmann, and others at Mozilla to submit a project day for FOSS.IN. I hope it gets approved because there is really a groundswell of activity happening around Mozilla stuff. If you care to learn more about project submission for FOSS.IN, then read here.

    I’ve been impressed with most of the process thus far. Everyone is communicating over a Yahoo! Group. We are all commenting on submissions and passing along ideas. It’s been pretty cool.

    3) Community Giving & Empowerment stuff

    We’re going to start moving faster here. Shaver, Asa and I will review a few request next week. In about 11 months, we’ve *officially* reviewed 45 requests….very close to 1 per week.

    (I make it a point to highlight officially because a lot of requests have come through that I have simply passed along to the correct contacts, whether internal at Mozilla Corp or to the guys at Mozilla Foundation.)

    We have a good process now and are going to keep moving forward with it, but how to be a bit more agile, experimental, aggressive…just a few of the things needed to scale.

    What else…what else….

    Interns are leaving Mozilla for the summer. A quick shout out to Andrew Stein, Rishi Mallik and Sarah Arora. All have been a real delight to work with and some really great stuff has come from their creative energy. We’ll probably see a few of their projects surface more publicly after they leave, but credit goes to them.

    Last stuff to report: India has been going very well. Chofmann and I are spearheading an en-IN build of Firefox, optimized for Indian users. And, the student teams at IIM-Ahmedabad and Indian School of Business are all starting their projects next week. We’ll be sure to report on that going forward.

    That’s all. I’m out.

  • Foss.IN Project Day

    August 8th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 5 comments »

    I believe that Foss.IN is India’s largest open source conference, but I could be wrong about that.  Either way, it is taking place this year from December 4 – 8, 2007 in Bangalore.  Chofmann and I are thinking of submitting an application for a Project Day, but we would need to make sure we can get enough participation from our Indian developer community.  We’d also consider sending some Mozilla Mountain View developers if we do organize a big enough group.  Chofmann, Mary (Leader of Mozilla Events), and I will talk about it on Friday.

    Thoughts?

  • Post India

    August 3rd, 2007 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    One might ask what is the follow-up for an exploratory, community-building trip to a place like India. Here is a sample of what we are doing:

    1) Monday, August 6: We’ll be hosting a conference call with several teams of students from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmadebad. Each team will present ideas they have about spreading Mozilla software and building community in India. We intend to formalize these presentations into semester-long projects where the students will receive academic credit for their work.

    2) Tuesday, August 7: We’ll host a very similar call with students from the Indian School of Business. Many of the students interested in helping all have technical/engineering backgrounds and have returned to management school to gain some business experience. Nearly all the students we met intend to return to the technology sector after they graduate.

    3) Tuesday, August 7: Mozilla brown-bag presentation about the India trip

    4) Wednesday or Thursday, Aug 8 or 9: Call with Mahiti and Indian localizers who will help take on the localization efforts for Firefox.

    5) Ongoing: Planning for Mozilla 24, where Indian community members participate. I’ve already had one call with Kaori about this and we are trying to find the best way to get the Indian community involved. Looks like we might have one developer who can present. Still working it out.

    If you want to participate in any of this stuff, please let me know. Happy to include you.

    Final thoughts: India was a fascinating place to visit. There is so much activity there around open source and Mozilla and we returned to the U.S. enthusiastic about our community. We also learned so many intangible things that we want to share with our colleagues in Mountain View.

    In a country with over 1 billion people, it becomes obviously clear that as the population continues to grow, the growth of India’s economy and infrastructure will have to keep pace…and hopefully there will be equal distribution of that economic gain.

    Overall, it seemed that everyone we met was deeply aware of the dichotomy of challenges and opportunity that face the country. We heard from one local person we met that Gandhi promoted the concept of “a leader in every village”. Our trip began with an educational stop at Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram where we got an even greater sense of his teachings and influence in India. It was clear that his ideas about empowering others pervades the society. Following his teachings, we hope to find leaders in every village that make up the Mozilla community in India and worldwide.