May 31st, 2009
In this issue…
- Mozilla Service Week: Be the difference!
- John Lilly on poetry and pragmatics
- A new look for the Spread Firefox project
- Creative Collective and building social capital
- Geolocation in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec
- Improvements to Firefox.com
- Creative Collective site design: round 1
- Mozilla.org redesign: round 3
- AMO: Firefox 3.5.* maxver now available
- AMO: New developer agreement
- Personas gallery expands: help wanted!
- Developer calendar
- About about:mozilla
Mozilla Service Week: Be the difference!
Mary Colvig is heading up an exciting new project that aims to harness the amazing energy and skills of the Mozilla community to help organizations and individuals in need.
The project has been dubbed “Mozilla Service Week”, and you are invited to participate by using your skills to help people learn how to use the Web, have better access to the Web, and to have a better Web experience overall. Activities can take a variety of forms, and suggestions include helping a school set up a wireless network, refurbishing and donating hardware to a community center, creating documentation and tutorials on how to get started on the Web, or helping a non-profit refresh its website. “The possibilities are endless for people of all skill levels to jump in and make a difference.”
Mozilla Service Week will be taking place from June 22 to June 29, 2009. This is your chance to take some time to get involved and help make the Web better for everyone. Lots more information is available in Mary’s blog post.
John Lilly on poetry and pragmatics
John Lilly recently gave a talk at the Mozilla all-hands meeting, and he has posted his slides for everyone to see. “I wanted to talk about some of the context that we find ourselves in now and how we can think about becoming a longer term organization, now that Mozilla’s first 11 years are behind us. I focused on the tension between what I’ve come to call Poetry & Pragmatics. The pragmatics of an organization are how you do things; the poetry of an organization is why you do them.” See John’s blog post for some more explanation and a link to the slides.
A new look for the Spread Firefox project
Last week a new design was unveiled for the Spread Firefox project, Mozilla’s community marketing home. “With the new layout and design, we’re striving to make the site more engaging and reflective of the great personalities behind Firefox grassroots marketing. At the same time, we’re trying to make it more straightforward for users to figure out what to do and where to go next when they come to the site.” A full recap of the major improvements is available, and it’s easier than ever to get involved and help spread the word.
Creative Collective and building social capital
The Mozilla Creative Collective is an initiative to organize and build Mozilla’s visual design community. “Building a successful online community from scratch takes a lot of work and planning. To attract members and encourage active participation, you need to offer incentives for people to join and unique benefits that they can derive from their membership over time. In other words, it’s important to offer heaps of social capital.” The Collective has spent a lot of time thinking up ways members can build social capital, and Tara Shahian has written about some of these ideas on her weblog.
Geolocation in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec
Doug Turner has announced that a new feature called Geolocation is being included in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec. “Geolocation is an opt-in tool that lets users share their location information with web sites through Firefox and will enable a new range of services on the web. Geolocation can make web sites smarter and you more productive. Websites that use geolocation will ask where you are in order to bring you more relevant information, or to save you time when searching.” Doug’s weblog post goes into a lot more detail about the new features and what this new feature means for both users and web developers.
The Marketing and Metrics teams have been working to improve the user experience of the Firefox download page and to increase the visit-to-download conversion rate. After experimenting with and testing various designs, they have implemented browser detection on the en-US locale of that page so users will get different content based on whether they’re using a non-Firefox browser, an old Firefox browser, or the current version of Firefox. “It turns out that presenting visitors with relevant content actually seems to work!” Ken Kovash and David Rolnitzky have both recently blogged about this initiative.
Creative Collective site design: round 1
The team developing the Mozilla Creative Collective project is looking for feedback on the first round of site mockups from the designers at Airbag Industries. John Slater has blogged about these initial designs, and he’s looking for feedback. “A big source of inspiration was the logo itself, as Airbag incorporated its colors, style and major elements whenever possible. They also made an effort to evoke the feel of the other Mozilla sites (especially mozilla.com and QMO), resulting in subtle textures, rough edges and a generally open, handmade feel. As always, the goal is to reflect Mozilla’s ‘people-powered’ essence rather than creating something slick and corporate.” John’s blog goes into more detail about the project, and the initial mockup is also available through his post.
Another Mozilla design project that is well underway is the redesign of the Mozilla.org website. David Boswell has posted the third round of designs. “It’s taken us a few weeks to complete this round because we made design changes based on feedback from the community and we coded the pages.” Three different coded pages have been posted for review, and the team is looking for help. “We are very interested in getting people to view these templates on a range of devices, including phones and netbooks. Any and all feedback is welcome.” The team is also accepting patches if you have better ideas about how to approach the “liquid layout” they’re going for.
AMO: Firefox 3.5.* maxver now available
Add-on developers take note! “With the Firefox 3.5b4 release, we’ve enabled the 3.5.* maxver in the AMO Developer tools. For the vast majority of add-ons without binary components, you can simply update your maxver to 3.5.* and it will be compatible with all versions of Firefox 3.5 through the release. If you do have a binary component, you should only have to recompile your code against the latest — for more information see the Firefox wiki.” It’s time to start updating your add-ons to ensure your users have the smoothest possible experience when upgrading to Firefox 3.5.
Nick Nguyen has posted about the new Developer Agreement that is part of the Addons.mozilla.org (AMO) site. “Up until now, we’ve had a fairly basic developer agreement that hasn’t changed with the needs of our developers and our service. We’re launching a new agreement that clarifies and protects our developers’ rights and ensures that we can continue to promote add-ons via multiple ways and channels as our service expands.” Nick’s post goes into more detail, describing what has changed in the agreement and why.
Personas gallery expands: help wanted!
Since launch, the Personas add-on has been downloaded over 2.5 million times and now exceeds over one million active daily users. “More importantly,” writes Suneel Gupta, “we have welcomed over 3,000 new designers and over 5,000 new designs to the Personas community.” This incredible number of submissions is overtaking the team’s ability to review and approve them all, however, so the team is looking for help. “The immediate goal is to reduce the size of the approval queue. The near-term goal is to reduce the amount of time a community member needs to wait between submitting a design and being able to view that design in the gallery and share it with friends.” If you would like to help the team achieve these goals, check out Suneel’s blog post and get involved.
For an up-to-date list of the coming week’s Mozilla project meetings and events, please see the Mozilla Community Calendar wiki page. Notes from previous meetings are linked to through the Calendar as well.
about:mozilla is by, for and about the Mozilla community, focusing on major news items related to all aspects of the Mozilla Project. The newsletter is written by Deb Richardson and is published every Tuesday morning. If you have any news or announcements you would like to have included in our next issue, please send them to: about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com.
If you would like to get this newsletter by email, just head on over to the about:mozilla newsletter subscription form. Fresh news, every Tuesday, right to your inbox.
Related posts:
- The Creative Collective is Here! Join Us.
- about:mozilla – Service Week, New AMO, Community store, 3.5 demos, FSOSS, audio/video, Design Challenge, Weave, Jetpack, Personas, and more…
- Creative Collective Design Challenge: Firefox Goes Mobile
- Mozilla Service Week: A little help from our Friends
- Mozilla Service Week: How to help!