An update on some distributions to the Mozilla Community
February 12th, 2008 by seth bindernagel
The past month has been busy for me with distributing stuff through the Community Giving/Empowerment program. Here is a list of what we have done.
- Philipp Kewisch, who is our first participant in the Community Loan Program. He is helping on the Calendar project. Philipp has been a critical member to the team and figured out how to make Lightning read and write to Google Calendar. He is working on better integration of Lightning with Thunderbird. I asked Philipp if I could include any specific information about his work and he wrote back:”My next big feature will be a patch to bug 353492, to allow support for multiple alarms and also different alarm types. This in turn will allow specifying Email and SMS type reminders for the Provider for Google Calendar. This will be integrated after the 0.8 release.”The unique aspect of Philipp’s participation in the Community Loan Program is not only that he is the first to participate in this new subset of our program, but also that he has mapped out a 1 year project timeline of what he hopes to be doing with the new Dell that we are lending to him. In that year, he hopes to really advance the calendar project and has set specific metrics to hit. Together, we will regularly check in on progress and revisit his accomplishments quarter-by-quarter. After one year, we’ll reassess and see if he is ready to move on to something new, or let another developer use the resource that we are lending.
- Kai Engert: Kai did some tremendous work to get us working on yet another mobile device. Because of his great work and continued dedication to Mozilla, we are reimbursing him for the hardware that he purchased.
- Henrik Skupin: Henrik has been very active doing Mac QA. He does not have the Leopard OS, so we are purchasing him a Mac Mini and I am going to see if it makes sense for him to also participate in the Community Loan Program. We’ll meet at FOSDEM in Brussels to discuss more. For some stats, a quick query indicates comments in 2195 bugs. Lately, he has been very active verifying trunk bugs for QA.
- Babelzilla: We’ll pay the annual hosting costs for Babelzilla. If you’ve visited Babelzilla, you’ll see that it is a very vibrant part of our community, creating a platform for extension developers to have their extensions localized into other languages. Jürgen Berg has been my community contact and his been very understanding and helpful. The payment has been a bit of a logistical nightmare, mostly due to my own fault because I accidentally requested a monthly payment be sent rather than the entire year. Manitu is the hosting company and has been very understanding. Thanks everyone, and sorry for the delay!
I think it’s an important time to recognize that in a little over one year, this program has distributed over US$ 315,000 in resources to the Mozilla community. We have looked at each request carefully to ensure that it fits with the goals of the program. In the coming year, I’d like to continue to focus on leverage, rather than set our sights on any dollar amount. Dollars rarely mean success, unless they’re spent wisely. So, we’ll continue to seek leveraged ways to support our community.
I think that’s “Henrik Skupin”
See you at FOSDEM!
For the benefit of openness about the program, I think it would be nice to release pie charts, that show where those US$ 315000 have gone.
I see it might not be easy if it’s made of a huge number of small contributions, each of them representing a very small part of any chart.
I could work on a pie chart. But, as you hinted, it might be a bit hard to read since there are several recipients of relatively small amounts of dollars and then a few much larger grants. Any idea on a better way to visualize what we have done?
First I skipped this blog post
But on rereading I was so encouraged, Mozilla is really putting its money where its mouth is and amazing to see how seemingly little things are helping advance the tools that we’ve grown to love and enjoy.