Mozilla

Upcoming “Firefox Plus” Summit

May 13th, 2008

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.

5 comments for “Upcoming “Firefox Plus” Summit”

  1. 1

    Ian McKellar said on May 14th, 2008 at 10:35 am:

    This is great news! At Songbird we’ve talked a lot about how we can contribute to aspects of the platform that impact us more directly than Firefox developers. We’ve been discussing internally, and working on a few things that we’re excited to be able to share with other Mozilla projects including more threadsafe data structures and supporting chromeless, draggable, widgetish ui better, and a XUL tabbrowser implementation that is flexible, extensible and not tied to one application.

    Right now – especially with the impending Firefox 3 / XULRunner 1.9 releases there hasn’t been much opportunity to work out how we can collaborate with the rest of the Mozilla community on these and other platform improvements. I’m looking forward to the more open discussions that can come out of this summit.

    Ian

  2. 2

    Pingback from Home of KaiRo: Weekly Status Report, W21/2008

    […] 1.9.0 vs. 1.9.1, L10n and hg, Firefox Plus Summit, etc. I finally got my invitation for the "Firefox Plus" Summit this summer without losing it via the Junk mail mechanism (my Bayes filter seems to be trained to […]

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    Pingback from All Night Diner : addons.mozilla.org and Localization at the Firefox Summit

    […] planning several sessions at the upcoming Firefox summit including one specifically about AMO and L10n in which we hope to connect with localizers and start […]

  4. 4

    parag said on June 4th, 2008 at 12:50 am:

    mozilla organisation is doing a great job and i am very happy
    that firefox 3 the latest version is going to come. please dont stop working go ahead develop more explore more improve more and discover more. mozilla firefox is simple and the best
    it is great man

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