• Give Something Back

    September 27th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    Two days ago, our office manager alerted all of us to a change in how Mozilla would get its office products.  Our new provider is called Give Something Back.  I pulled this quote from their website’s “About Us” page:

    “Give Something Back started with a basic idea — sell business products for less and donate the profits back to the community. Fifteen years and more than $3 million in donations later, over 13,000 customers have chosen Give Something Back.”

    In addition to being one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area, they are also trying to source and sell environmentally responsible products.  Now at Mozilla, we can buy recycled products including “folders, calendars, pens, and of course a wide selection of recycled papers that match or beat the quality of virgin-fiber papers.”

    Give Something Back’s headquarter building in Oakland is also environmentally progressive.  It has “solar panels, high efficiency lighting fixtures and the latest low-flow toilets. The Company recycles its paper, batteries, toner cartridges, aluminum cans and cardboard, and practices environmentally sound printing.”

    Give Something Back knows what’s up.

    Glad we can support them at Mozilla.  And, a special recognition to Karen, our office manager, who worked out all details of the relationship.

  • Community Giving and Empowerment stuff…

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

    What have I (we) been doing lately?

    We tried to streamline the discovery/review process a bit.  With the new evangelism team, I will be working very closely with colleagues like Asa, Mike Shaver, mfinkle, jresig, sheppy, and dria.  (What an honor!)  And, as a part of this new team, I am able to triage requests and present ideas more quickly…resulting in a faster turn around time.  With a review process that’s been in place for over a year, it is a nice addition to be able to move a bit more swiftly through requests.

    In the past few weeks, we have reviewed a number of new ideas:

    We will be providing funding for an accessibility meetup in October.  Here are some deliverables from that meeting:

    • Live region and Javascript application behavior in Orca screen reader
    • Rich text editing in Orca
    • A strategy and architecture going forward for Jambu on screen keyboard
    • A system for automated testing
    • A minimally accessible Chatzilla 

    We will also be helping the “Rhino”project by setting up a VM on our community box in Amsterdam.  The VM will host a fee license given to Rhino by Atlassian for their continuous integration product, Bamboo.

    Now, we are looking at individual contributor requests.

    …Still looking for ideas to support, but we are really trying to find tools to provide to the community that will benefit larger groups of contributors.  Setting up a VM on a community box is an idea that makes sense because it allows many people to access it.

  • My Mozilla 24 Wrap

    September 18th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with 2 comments »

    Returned from Tokyo yesterday after a whirlwind tour… Alex Polvi and I pulled some “almost-all-nighters” working on fun projects and participating in Mozilla 24.

    To see all the moving parts of Mozilla 24 happening at once, and to witness the amazing teams in Japan, Thailand, Paris, and Stanford all working tirelessly to pull off this event was both awesome and exhausting and so much more. Repeatedly, I would get IMs, emails, IRCs (is that a term?) mentioning what a creative and interesting event it was while 24 was taking place. Messages came to me from India, Germany, U.S., France, Japan — all remarking on the coolness of what was going on. I believe we have to give a big “congratulatory-blog-on-the-back” to Chibi, Kaori, Gen, Kohei, Masayuki, Eiko, Shimono, and all the tons of others who made this idea a reality.

    I took part by organizing the accessibility track, as mentioned in my last post. Pretty much, it happened with relatively few snags. From my location at Keio University in Tokyo, we were using Skype to dial into a conference call that I had set up for all the panelists to dial into so we could have a live phone conversation. Skype dropped our call once in the middle of Tim Keenan’s presentation. Aside from that, everything else seemed to go pretty well. If you are in my timezone in California and did not get up at 4:50 AM to watch our discussion, here are all the presentations (or as much as I can provide):

        1. Video presentation by Dr. Nagarjuna G and Krishnakant Mane from the Homi Bhabha Centre in Mumbai
        2. Video presentation about Access Firefox by Ken Saunders
        3. Aaron Leventhal’s presentation: Aaron L’s Moz 24 presentation
        4. Tim Keenan’s three links about Mozilla’s QA for accessibility:

    What were some outcomes of this session?

    First of all, it was definitely nice to get a few of the players in the Mozilla accessibility world together for a session. I think having each person chat about their specialties was very valuable. A lot of praise and congratulations were exchanged, and I believe this is pretty valuable.

    Secondly, I think we found some developers or contributors in Japan who might be willing to work on some Japanese-based accessibility issues.

    Third, the team of panelists has already started planning for future events, including an accessibility hack fest in October and a game plan for participation at the annual CSUN conference.

    If you viewed the accessibility track online (thank you!!! I know it was 4:50 AM in California…), then please comment on what you thought. It was exciting to be a part of and congrats and thank you to all of the panelists. They were terrific.

  • Mozilla 24 Takes On Accessibility

    September 10th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    Have you checked it out? In a prior post, I blogged about Mozilla 24 and all the things you can do to participate. For my part of the conference, I’ve helped plan an hour-and-a-half session about accessibility efforts at Mozilla. Here is the short description:

    1. A discussion on new accessibility features in Firefox 3
    2. Demos from interesting projects like Access Firefox
    3. How a blind developer performs QA and testing for Mozilla
    4. A blind contributor shows off Firefox 3’s best features with a screen reader and his own nightly build of Firefox.

    In the spirit of 24, the team of presenters is truly international. I will be in Tokyo, helping to organize the conference and emcee-ing the session. One group will present from Mumbai, India. Then, we’ll have 2 contributors from Boston. Our final participant will be dialing in from San Diego at 4:30 AM!!!

    I’d love to hear if you’re up-all-night with Mozilla during 24. I will be!

    Please check out our accessibility session, it will be very cool.

  • FOSS.IN Project Day Accepted!

    September 7th, 2007 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    Mozilla has been accepted for a project day at FOSS.IN in Bangalore in India this December. FOSS.IN is the largest open source conference in India and we are so thrilled to be a part of it this year.

    Project Days at FOSS.IN are not presentations about an open source project. They are meant for community members (both for new contributors and long-time participants) to get together to work on the project. We have created a very packed schedule for extension developers, localizers, and bug testers to come together to work on Mozilla. Here is the proposed schedule:

    Name of the project:
    Mozilla Project Day, Wednesday, December 5, 2007

    Url:
    http://wiki.mozilla.org/DeveloperDays/FOSS.INDecember2007

    Date:
    (Proposed day) December 5, 2007

    Name of the proposer:
    Seth Bindernagel, Mary Colvig, Chris Hofmann, Mark Finkle & Axel Hecht

    Proposers involvement in the Project:
    Mozilla will send a team of employees to help lead a Mozilla Developer Day with the Indian Developer Community.

    Pre-requisites to participate:
    Interest in learning more about Mozilla. All participants are welcome. During the project day, we would like to shine some light on Indian contributors, specifically mentioning where work has been done. It will be most helpful for Mozilla Indian contributors to participate and discuss what they have been contributing. Some knowledge of the localization process or knowledge of the XUL programming language, JavaScript, and/or the Mozilla platform would be helpful, but is not required.

    Audience:
    application developers, extension developers, open-source evangelists & enthusiasts, localizers, security experts

    Handouts to be distributed with pointers to material:
    Most materials will be distributed electronically or developed for all to see and contribute to through the following wiki site: http://wiki.mozilla.org/DeveloperDays/FOSS.INDecember2007

    Proposed Schedule for the Day
    Theme of the day: Building a Mozilla Community and getting Firefox working better in India
    (We hope to have two concurrent project plans, one discussing how to get involved with Mozilla via the extension development platform. The other describing how to get involved through either the QA/Testing or localization efforts.)

    Time Activity
    09:30 – 10:00 Opening remarks about the developer day by Mozilla employees who are in attendance and will lead the day
    10:00 – 10:45 Introduction to Mozilla by a Mozilla Senior executive describing the state of the Mozilla Project and its community
    10:45 – 11:00 Break
    11:00 – 11:45 Attack of the Indian font problems (bring your favorite site that doesn’t render correctly in Firefox — we’ll identify problems, reduce test cases, file bugs)
    11:45 – 12:25 Become a Mozilla evangelist: Blogging, speaking, evangelizing to websites (i.e. how to find sites that need to be contacted and how to do that. How to file bugs that are Mozilla related issues, and not a the problem of a website, and more)
    12:25 – 13:15 Lunch
    13:15 – 14:15 Plan A: Lightning demos of extensions developed by local developers and Chrome Java Script Libraries or Plan B: How to Localize in India, with a sprint to the end of the day.
    14:15 – 15:45 Plan A: Extension development tutorial/intro to FUEL, or Plan B: Continuation of localization sprint
    15:45 – 16:00 Break
    16:00 – 16:30 Plan A: Intro to Babelzilla; Plan B: continuation of localization sprint
    16:30 – 17:00 Closing remarks, party

    Other ideas to include in the tracks above:

    • QA sprint — Introduction to the Mozilla QA process and then have folks do ready to testing on different platforms. (We might need to do this because as Mozilla comes closer to the release of Firefox 3, having a localization sprint might not be feasible.)
    • Localization hands on workshop and/or Testing Day — Will depend on release schedule of Firefox.
    • Need to keep it focus on empowering users and developers
    • Presentation of developer tools that will help you better develop web content: Fuel & Firebug/Finkle