Community Giving update

In the past few weeks, we’ve helped a few different Mozilla contributors who have been doing more great work for Mozilla.  Here’s the summary:

• Les Neste will participate in the Community Loan Program.  We sent him a Mac Mini to use for the next six months so he can continue to do some great work running up to the release of Firefox 3.  After six months, we’ll reassess to see if he’d like to keep it for another few months to work on other projects, or send that Mac Mini to another contributor who might need it.  Les will be working on the following:
  1. development of the evolving Firefox user interface
  2. support Firefox 3 general theme development community by communicating changes in the Firefox UI
  3. continue to develop and maintain customized themes

• Mozilla Italia needs better web hosting as we close in on the release of Firefox 3.  The user community has been growing in Italy and we are going to pay for hosting costs to make sure that there is enough bandwidth and service available to support the upcoming release (and increased traffic due to downloads).

•  SeaMonkey Project requested 2 VMs (1 linux, 1 win32) to setup unit/mochi/crash/reftest buildbot slaves.   We partitioned a small part of the l10n server in Amsterdam, which was being woefully underused, to help out SeaMonkey.

• Narro Project created an account on the l10n server in Amsterdam to allow for collaboration on the project for those who are interested.  I blogged about this last week if you want to read more.

The good news about this last month of activity (and the past few months) is that requests are coming in unsolicited.  I’m not prodding people to try to find ways to help, which I have to admit, feels good.  Perhaps it’s also a sign that the Mozilla community thinks this program is useful and is something that should persist…not that it’s been a question as to whether or not it should cease existence.