Mitchell’s Blog

For months I’ve said I’ve been optimistic that the Mozilla Foundation would be able to reach an agreement allowing us to host and improve the materials from the former Netscape DevEdge site. I’m very pleased to report that my optimism was well founded.

We’ve reached an agreement with AOL that allows us to post, modify, and create new documents based on the former Netscape DevEdge materials. The agreement is done. I want to thank AOL for making this happen. Netscape DevEdge was a great resource. We’re very pleased those materials haven’t been lost and that the Mozilla Foundation can host their continued development and use. I also want to thank the many people who wrote to offer encouragement and help regarding the DevEdge materials — your encouragement was very helpful.

What happens now? Well, we probably won’t be able to simply recreate the site — we don’t have the build scripts for one thing. Naturally, we’re eager to get the data sorted out and the most important documents posted asap.

Starting next Monday we’ll have a new person working full time at the Mozilla Foundation to help with just this activity. On Monday Deb Richardson joins the Mozilla Foundation as a Technical Editor and Project Manager for DevMo. DevMo is our community based project focused on developer documentation and resources. We have a group of people interested in working on this, and are thrilled Deb can join us to provide the overall coordination, support and project management for this effort, working very closely with our volunteer community. Deb comes to us with extensive documentation and open source experience, having founded both Linuxchix and the Open Source Writers Group. She has also worked professionally as a technical writer, freelance editor, web designer and developer.

One of the first things we’ll ask Deb to do is to work with those familiar with the DevEdge material and sort out the most important documents, get those posted asap, and then develop a plan for handling the rest of the material. We want to make critical resources available asap and also build a coherent site. We already have a website at the developer part of www.mozilla.org that is hard to navigate, not well designed, and filled with material that is or may be outdated. We don

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Mozilla. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.