Posts Tagged with “community”

I was lucky enough to be in Amman near enough to the 5 year anniversary of Firefox to join in the 5 year celebration. 20 or 25 people got together in a art-house environment (old building for Amman, refurbished as art studio / hangout / gathering place) to celebrate.

The organizers talked a bit about the activities of the Mozilla Club and the Open Source Association at the Jordan University of Science and Technology. Then we had a discussion about Mozilla. I gave a brief intro for those who weren’t so familiar with Mozilla, or who are familiar with the products we build but not why we build them. Then we had lots of questions. The questions were fun and sophisticated and wide-ranging.

After cake and photos and mingling 5 or 6 people hung out for coffee and tea and we had a classic couple of hours of talking tech and getting to know each other. It was great fun to see some of this small group get to know others for the first time, and set about exchanging contact info and knowledge. I found a sense of humor that I understood completely. (For those in Amman, can you identify the source of this quote: “Can I talk about myself some more now?” )

Many thanks to everyone involved. I was honored and had great fun as well.

Last week I visited parts of the Middle East for the first time. I hope to get a summary and some photos up soon. For now I want to thank a few people of the amazing people who went far, far out of their way to host Mozilla and me.

First, Donatella Della Ratta of Creative Commons, who did an amazing amount of work to arrange a series of Creative Comments events in Amman, Damascus and Beirut and invited me along. I attended only a few of these at the beginning of the Creative Commons tour, but it was enough to see how much was involved and how much Dona pulled together stunningly diverse set of activities. Unfortunately, my involvement caused Dona to miss a pivotal event while she sat with me at a long (6 and 1/2 hour) wait at a border crossing, something I regret deeply.

Bassel Safadi, who showed immense hospitality, patience and flexibility. Bassel is the kind of person who makes it seems as if a large group of people are working on something, when in reality a lot of the work is just one person. And with an attitude that’s hard to match. My prolonged border crossing threw a wrench into Bassel’s day as well but he managed with grace and engineered a series of great gatherings.

Samer, who spent close to 7 hours with me at the border and remained gracious and professional and positive throughout.

Andre Salame, director-general of a publishing organization Al-Aous that gets “open.”

Eman, Issa, Rami and Ashraf of the Mozilla Club and Jordan Open Source Association, who arranged a Mozilla event in Amman, where I met a set of people interested in Mozilla, and to those — you know who you are — who stayed and spent a portion of their evening talking about software, open source, and life in general with me.

Everyone at the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship and the Young Entrepreneurs’ Association in Amman, especially Mohammed Khawaja, Mohammed Kilani, Aya, Basel, Evelyn, Ayman Azzeh, Catherine and Habib, all of whom went out of their way to make a great trip. They organized a week’s full of activities for the celebration of Entrepreneurs’ Week in Jordan, including several that I participated in. And Samer for helping me get to the airport, and offering to pick me up from the border if I got turned back. This turned out to be unnecessary but it was very reassuring to know the offer was real if I needed it.

Starting today, July 6: 11 a.m. Pacific time is the new time for the weekly Monday project-wide status meeting.

We’re moving the meeting two hours earlier in the day to make it easier for European contributors in particular to participate. It still isn’t perfect, especially in Asia, but we haven’t magically found a time that works in all time zones.

This is the first change to the time of this meeting we’ve made in at least a decade. We’ve been meeting at 1 p.m. Pacific time since mozilla.org was tiny, many of us were employed by Netscape and long before we had even started developing the products we know today as Firefox and Thunderbird. In fact, we set this time when SeaMonkey (officially released in June 2002 as the “Mozilla Application Suite 1.0″ or “Mozilla 1.0″) was still years in the future.

I will be heading back to Brazil very shortly. From April 14 to 16 I will be in Rio de Janeiro to participate in the World Economic Forum on Latin America, and after that I will head to São Paulo to connect with our Latin American community.

On April 17 I’ll be visiting a LAN house with Bruno Magrani, who works with our Portuguese-speaking community, as well as Guillermo Movia, who works with our Spanish-speaking community members. April 18 will be devoted to a day-long meeting with Mozilla’s Latin American community leaders on the general direction of the Mozilla Project in Latin America, the individual projects people have been working on, and probably some strategizing for FISL. I’m  looking forward to these discussions immensely and to catching up again with some of the folks I met last year.

I’m also very interested to meet new contributors to Mozilla and those interested in creating an open, participatory web whether or not Mozilla has been your focus.  If you are interested in attending this meeting in São Paolo, please contact Bruno (bmagrani at mozilla dot com) or Alix Franquet (alix at mozilla dot com).

Late in July we got together close to 400 extremely active Mozilla contributors for a face to face gathering known as the Firefox Plus Summit. This gathering was partly acknowledgment and celebration of our work so far, and mostly preparation for the future. The Summit has caused me to reflect on the future of Mozilla. In short, that future is bright.

The overriding reason for this is the strength and vibrancy of the Mozilla community. We’re growing, we’re effective and we’re expanding the types of activities that live within Mozilla. The Summit made this very clear.

There are other reasons as well. Mozilla combines the abstract goals of Internet openness, participation and decentralized decision-making with the concrete task of building great products. This combination is working. It attracts people to Mozilla, and it gives us a way of building products that reflects the Internet itself. The values of the project bring meaning and guide the way we do things. The software allows us to make those values tangible, and put their manifestations in the hands of millions of people.

Another important element is the financial resources Mozilla enjoys. We’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income. We’re also learning more all the time about how to use Mozilla’s financial resources to help contributors through infrastructure, new programs, and new types of support from employees.

Finally, the quality of our technology, products and innovation also holds great promise. In the few weeks since the Summit we’ve already seen a new approach to vastly improving JavaScript performance, the launch of “Snowl,” the introduction of the browser concept series, developer releases for Thunderbird, and video moving into the browser via Firefox 3.1. There’s much more coming.

We have large challenges ahead of us, there’s no question of that. There are many ways in which Internet life could become closed, manipulated and decidedly unpleasant. And Mozilla itself is not perfect. Many improvements are possible in how we work and what we accomplish. To be effective we’ll need to do our best, and then do even better.

Our challenges are real, our opportunities are real, and our strength is real.

Put those together, and the future is bright.