DODOcase: Revitalizing SF’s manufacturing community!

Congrats to DODOcase for helping San Francisco’s small, but thriving manufacturing community flourish over the last three years! Conveniently, they are also offering a 48% off discount (supportsmall) today…why 48%? 48% of people working in manufacturing are at companies of less than 200 people just like DODOcase!

DODOcase – Support Small Manufacturing Infographic

Taking the LEAD

Ray Lewis’ seminal rally speech – “Leave your Legacy” – made it’s way across the Web recently as a lovely video. Not only did it make me nostalgic for life on the farm (and had me in near tears) – it was a good reminder to dedicate more energy to my participation in Mozilla’s LEAD (Leadership Exploration and Development) program.

In Debbie Cohen's words (she's the instigator behind it): To Grow Mozilla we need great people, doing great things, in great ways. She and her team have pulled together Mozilla leaders to help hone our skills, knowledge and capabilities in our roles. While it's very focused on individual growth, it's intention is to better the project and bring out everyone’s “greatness.”

At the end of our first session we were asked to share what we’re leaving behind and stepping into to become better leaders. By sharing we’re also setting up accountability. I know this sounds hokey…so bear with me…but I decided to share mine here and get additional “witness”:

Leaving behind any passivity and bringing in the Mary that knocked out three Ironman races, an ultra and doesn’t take no for an answer or any crap.

While I look forward to bettering myself personally and professionally, I’m hoping that it will be in service to all you Mozillians!

[Side note: And, Mozillians…listen to Ray’s words. Let’s leave our legacy!]

MozCamp LATAM: ¡Gracias + Obrigado!

Thanks to everyone for joining us in Buenos Aires for a truly magical MozCamp.  As with all MozCamps, this was a team effort and I’d like to especially thank Katherine Naszradi, our track leads (Winston Bowden and Havi Hoffman) and the MozCamp planning committee (Guillermo Movia, Santiago Hollman, Nukeador, Reuben Morais, and Gloria Meneses).  This list could go on and on – it truly embodied the spirit of ¡De Todos. Para Todos!

 

In order to wrap up the event, we’d like to get a few minutes of your help with the following:

• Survey:  If you attended, please take a few minutes to let us know how we can make MozCamp even better with this survey.

• Photos:  Make sure you tag your photos with #mozcamp.  Check out Jusai Prieto’s “Many Pictures. One Mozillian“

• Slides:  Please post your slides on your talk proposal on the wiki.

What’s next?  We’re working to review and finalize locations and dates for upcoming MozCamps.  Current schedule is shaping up to be:

• September: MozCamp Europe

• November:  MozCamp Asia

• December: MozCamp Africa + Middle East

Reminder: We’re not hosting a Summit in July as in past years, but have opted to host more MozCamps in region where our volunteers are.  MozCamps aim to reward core contributors, as well as mentor and train them to help us bring our products and initiatives to market and Grow Mozilla.  This won’t be a direct replacement for the Summit and unfortunately, not all paid staff will get to attend one.  However, it provides paid and volunteer staff a unique look at active local community — their challenges, their motivations, and a bit of their culture.  It also reinforces that Mozilla extends far beyond North America.

Stay tuned for specific dates and locations in the next few weeks, as well as how you can help shape these upcoming MozCamps. We’ve already gotten some great feedback on how to make them even more useful!

Contributor Audit: Findings are in!

Update:  Please join us on Air Mozilla  to watch and listen, and #airmozilla on irc.mozilla.org for questions. You can also dial in:

• US/International: +1 650 903 0800 x92 Conf# 8600
• US toll free: +1 800 707 2533 (pin 369) Conf# 8600
• Canada: +1 416 848 3114 x92 Conf# 8600

Happy New Year!  To kick off 2012, we’ll be sharing the findings from the audit Dave Eaves has been working on for Mozilla.   We asked David to assess the experience of volunteers at Mozilla to help inform our efforts to grow Mozilla and improve the contributor experience.  He’ll present them and host a Q+A on Wednesday, January 18th at 9 a.m. PST/ 17:00 UTC.

I’ll post broadcast details shortly.  We’ll plan on archiving for those that can’t make it.

Mozilla Volunteers: We want to hear from you!

As I mentioned in late summer, Contributor Engagement is knee deep in a contributor lifecycle audit with Dave Eaves.   Our charter as the Contributor Engagement team is to help grow Mozilla and this poses a challenge if we don’t step back and assess the experience of volunteers at Mozilla.  Enter the audit:  we aim to get a sense of why people do or don’t get involved with Mozilla, why or why they don’t complete a project, why they stay or leave, how we can make the whole experience better and more.

He’ll be providing a set of recommendations that will help us improve the contributor experience and polling our volunteers is absolutely critical to this exercise and will shape our efforts for the rest of 2011 and into 2012.  So if you’re a current or past contributor, please take some time to fill this survey out (http://mzl.la/pCnv4Q).  Be thoughtful, be candid.  Share it with your follow volunteers and get the word out.  Reponses should be in by Oct. 21st.  (Note: we’re in the process of ensuring that forums like surveys and townhalls are a regular happening.)

I appreciate your help with the survey and of course, all you do for Mozilla.  Let’s make contributing to Mozilla even more awesome splendid.

 

 

 

 

Contributor Engagement: New people, updates + more

The Contributor Engagement team, which aims to inspire and empower individuals to participate in Mozilla, has had a busy summer making strides on key projects such as Mozilla Reps and the Phonebook (not without the help of many teams of course!).  We also added three new team members:

• Jason Haas who focuses on student outreach and reviving Student Reps.
• Mozilla veteran (both volunteer and staffer) Aakash Desai who is overseeing the Mozillians engagement platform.
• Paul Booker, veteran Spread Firefox volunteer and much more, as lead writer and coordinator for the about:mozilla newsletter, our main contributor communications channel.

Our overarching goal as a team is to grow contribution to Mozilla by an order of magnitude.  In order to get there we’ve had to step back and put some foundational pieces in place.  As such our topline goals for this summer and early fall are:

• Launch the Mozillians community directory or phonebook which will be coming in September. This is critical to making the overall Mozilla community feel more connected and to provide baseline numbers such as how many contributors we have and in what functional areas and regions. We encourage everyone to signup for the launch alert here.
• Continue to grow and train Mozilla Reps, key to extending leadership to the edges of the Mozilla Project and making it easier to advocate and represent Mozilla around the world. By summer over 250 core contributors joined the ranks with a goal of over 500 by the end of 2011.  Join today!
• Launch a contributor lifecycle audit with the help of David Eaves to assess the experience of volunteers within the Mozilla sphere.  The aim here is to get a sense of why people do or not get involved with Mozilla, why or why they don’t complete a project, whether they stay on or not and more.  He’ll be providing a set of recommendations that will help us improve the contributor experience.  Stay tuned for surveys targeted at both paid staff and volunteers that will help fuel his research.

• Kick off townhalls to discuss the many happenings and news within the Mozilla project, as well as improve our communications flow as we grow.  We’re currently working with Mitchell Baker on a series of townhalls with community leaders to discuss Mozilla in the new era and held our first last week with Europe.  We’ll be rolling out more in mid-September on this same topic and then jumping to a regular schedule on various pertinent topics.

These are just a few things that we’re working on.  You can check out Q3 goals for more information and our weekly video updates.  I’ll be posting much more regular updates.  We’re looking at a very exciting and busy fall – especially with the coming of MozCamp Europe (Berlin, November 12 – 13) and Asia (Kuala Lumpur, November 19 – 20).

Catch our first rapid release launch live!

Just three months ago we launched Firefox 4 and we’re at it again as part of our new rapid release cycle. Tomorrow, June 21st, we’ll launch the next version of Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android!

If you’d like to catch it live and learn more about the new Firefox, and our rapid release process and what it means, join us on Air Mozilla at 6:45 a.m. PDT to 8:00 a.m. PDT.  We’ll be taking questions in #airmozilla on irc.mozilla.org, as well as on Twitter (please use the hashtag #airmoz).

You can also join us via phone:

• +1 650 903 0800 x92 Conf# 8600 (US/International)
• +1 416 848 3114 x92 Conf# 8600 (Canada)
• +1 800 707 2533 (pin 369) Conf# 8600 (US Toll Free)

Looking forward to tomorrow and marking this special milestone for Mozillians!  As an added bonus – not that our scintillating broadcast needs more – we’ll be giving out shirts to some viewers.

Firefox 5 and you

Next week will mark the first release for us in our new rapid release cycle – huzzah!  We’ll be launching Firefox 5 for both desktop and mobile on June 21st.  This will also mean a special edition of Air Mozilla, providing a look at what went into shifting our release cycle and offer a chance for you to ask questions.  I’ll post shortly with the timing and details, but please note anyone you’d like to hear from in the comments below.

As we mentioned in yesterday’s Mozilla project call we’ll also host a community marketing call tomorrow, June 15th at 10 a.m., on Firefox 5. We’ll cover what’s important about this release, the different ways to get involved in promoting this milestone and brainstorm a few ideas.  Details can be found here.

I’d be remiss in not addressing the question of launch parties.  By no means do I want to discourage anyone from hosting a launch party.  Please feel free to get together fellow Mozillians and Firefox fans! However, with this new quarterly release cadence it will be a challenge both financially and logistically to provide swag for hundreds of parties every three months.  One idea we’ve kicked around is to shift the focus from marking the launches and releases to Firefox’s birthday, other anniversaries or major milestones or to kick off/wrap up major campaigns. I’m completely open to ideas and don’t shy away from celebrations so share your thoughts below.

Update: Spread Firefox is taking a breather

Today we took Spread Firefox offline as I shared earlier.  I want to thank everyone that has worked hard on Spread Firefox over the years.  When it took off in 2004, it was truly innovative as a social network and organizing ground for our grassroots marketing efforts.

This doesn’t mean we’re turning our backs on community-driven marketing.  In fact, it’s stronger and more in-depth than ever with over 300 people joining our Firefox 4 launch team and over 4 million supporters on Facebook.  If you’d like to help out with our efforts, you can  get in touch and find opportunities on our Get Involved page.  You can also grab Firefox site buttons for your blog or website here.  Users coming to Spread Firefox will be redirected to this Get Involved page and the new button page.  Stay tuned for a banner that will notify users of this change when redirected.

 

What’s new with Contributor Engagement?

The team and I – inspired by status reports shared by Stormy Peters and Michael Verdi – are experimenting with a report we can share each week.   We’re looking to create something fun, interesting and informative from both a content and format perspective.  This week we’ve put it into HTML slides.  Take a look and please provide feedback.  We’re going to aim to do a quick video update for this coming week and see how people respond!

If you’d like to learn more about contributor engagement at Mozilla, we’re hosting a brownbag this Wednesday.  Here are the details:

*12:00 p.m. PDT

* Dial-in Info: +1.650.903.0800, followed by 92# and then 7391#

* Or you can use our toll-free number: +1.800.707.2533, followed by 369# and then 7391#. If you’re outside the US, use Skype to call in with our toll-free number.

* You can also watch the meeting live on Air Mozilla

* For those that can’t make the call or want to participate online, join us in #mozillians on IRC (irc.mozilla.org)

See you on Wednesday!