For the last couple of years the Mozilla Corporation has organized and hosted an event known as the “Firefox Summit.” We’ve done this twice so far; once after the release of Firefox 1.5 and once after the release of Firefox 2. The Summits have been a gathering of the people most deeply involved in creating the just-released product, and likely to be deeply involved in the design and creation of the next version. The summits are part celebration, partly closure, and mostly planning and consensus building for the future efforts.
The Summits bring together a range of contributors, both volunteers and those employed by Mozilla and other organizations. The fundamental goals are to build closer bonds between contributors who rarely meet face to face, and to do serious planning and focusing for the future Firefox work (including the underlying platform). We also try to have some fun, of course. 🙂 Mozilla funds participation — travel, lodging, food, etc — for our volunteers. Mozilla Corporation employees are expected to attend, others attend by invitation.
We’ll be having another Summit this July. This time we plan to expand the focus a bit to move beyond Firefox and the platform technologies that make work. The main focus will still be Firefox and the technology that underlies it — that’s still the key that so much of our vitality. This includes discussions about how our products and technologies can and should move the Mozilla vision forward. And we’ll undoubtedly have discussions about building strong communities, this is an element that runs through every Mozilla activity.
Eventually it would be great to have a broader Mozilla Summit, discussing not only our technology and products but also the range of other activities that the Mozilla project is, or should think about, undertaking. We’re not ready to plan and take that one quite yet, but it’s time to see if we can broaden the focus somewhat.
We’ll clearly broaden this to include Thunderbird, email, and Internet communications. That’s an official Mozilla product that shares our technology and the Mozilla mission. We’ll undoubtedly broaden this in other ways; mobile, Weave, data, and Prism are obvious candidates.
So while we’ll probably refer to this as the “Summit” or the “Firefox Summit,” its official, somewhat-awkward name is the Firefox Plus Summit. If we knew exactly the scope we could figure out a more precise name. I came up with this name to be clear about what we do know: most discussions in the context of Firefox, not completely Firefox, not aiming to cover the entire possible scope of the Mozilla project.
We’re just starting to plan for the Summit. This includes invitees, content, how to get the most input into the discussions and how to get the results dispersed to greater audiences. We hope to make progress in the next couple of weeks, and the bulk of the content development will happen as more and more people finish up their work on Firefox 3.