I won’t go into detail, instead pointing you to Selim’s report of the event. A few observations though:

• The power of the Firefox OS draw was evident because our table was consistently busy despite our lack of swag.
• Everyone was telling me that while Open Source was prevalent in Turkey, it has not really caught the imagination of people beyond a core community. I see opportunity there.
• Happy to have met Emin Mastizada who is leading a budding new community in Azerbaijan.

With Selim and Emin.

Mozilla Turkey is small, and we are looking for people to join and help out in a number of areas. These include leadership, community building, marketing, programming, social media, and more. Our hope is to grow and become a strong community to help Mozilla with their mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web. Contact Selim or I to find out more.

Hope to see you again soon Istanbul. Here are more pictures from my visit.

Our Contribute page funnel is getting it’s first real stress test as of yesterday when we launched our 15 Years of Mozilla campaign. Via various channels (Twitter, Facebook, Snippets, Email, …) we are pointing people to the Contribute page where we have a lovely new design showing.

Contribute Page in German

Already we spiked yesterday with the number of contribution inquiries coming in. Head over to arewegrowingyet.com for more details. It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out as the campaign continues.

I’m leaving you with something a little fun. Jeff Beatty and I wanted to share our tips on Community mentoring (for Capture Mozilla) and made a video last week at the meetup. Thanks for Curtis Koenig for shooting and editing it, he definitely has a potential career in the movie industry.

[Can't see the video? It's here]

What better way to start 2013 than to reboot your community. Last Saturday we met in Berlin and in attendance were 15 of us. The goal was simple. Find a new direction and structure for the community. We had folks from Switzerland, Austria, and Germany so we have an evolution from Mozilla Germany to German Speaking Mozilla. Something similar has happened to the French Speaking Mozilla Community in the last year. Mozilla Hispano is also a huge inspiration.

[Update: I got a bit carried away here. The community has always been inclusive and German-speaking, not just contributors from Germany. The Swiss contingent at the meetup made up of relatively new contributors threw me off. Apologies.]

We wanted to envision a core community that grows to 100, or 200, or 1000 in the next year. The challenge was to come up with a structure to handle that. Some fun facts:

• We have over 30 million users of the German Firefox version (14 million ADIs)
• The SUMO site gets 1.7 million unique German speaking visitors per month.

After I gave my introductions and vision for Mozilla communities in general in 2013 (in essence to scale up and move into all areas of the project) the team got right down to business.

German Community Meetup Attendees by s_hentzschel on Flickr

Mission

First up, a new mission statement. Here it is:

“Eine starke Gemeinschaft für das offene Internet”

This loosely translates as “A strong community for the open web“.

Structure

After some brainstorming, discussions, and post-it notes fun, the following functional areas were identified:

• Administration
• L10n
• WebMaker
• Dev Evangelism
• Marketing
• Community Building
• Policy / Activism
• Support
• Programming

Areas of Interest (Photo credit: King Molan)

The community will now structure around these areas, with people assigned to work in each area. While we did talk about some specific topics at the meeting, the important thing was that all initiatives and work will flow from this in 2013 and beyond. A commitment was made to integrate more deeply with functional teams at Mozilla, and a structure like this leads easier towards that goal.

Shout Outs

Mozilla events are always a collective effort. Special thanks to:

• Tobias Markus – for kicking off the organisation of the meeting and helping come up with a date
• Kadir Topal – for his continued commitment to community, despite his other responsibilities in the organisation
• Rosana Ardila – for helping with organisation, and convincing me to go ahead with it so soon in the new year
• William Quiviger – for support on the ground in Berlin and mentorship
• Attendees – for giving up your weekend to to participate
• All members of the community – for your dedication and amazing work

Looking forward to the next event to meet even more German speaking community members.

Related articles

• The Genesis Of A Get Involved Page
• 2012 – A Year in Review, The Firefox OS App Days and more…
• Mozilla Reps 2012 Recap

Don’t Work For The Man (Photo credit: King Molan)

At Mozilla Slovenija we are a core group of three and have long lamented how we have a hard time getting more people involved. So we set about changing that. And the time from idea to execution was a matter of days with very positive results. Here is how it happened.

• Nino suggested a team meeting to work on our 2013 plans, which included getting more people on board. We haven’t had the meeting yet, but in the meantime took action
• Matjaz sets up an etherpad with a plan for getting more people on board
• After feedback, Matjaz composes a “job posting” listing the how and why of getting involved with Mozilla Slovenija
• Again after feedback and tweaking, this turns into a blog post on mozilla.si
• We drop the blog post all over social media
• The responses start to flow in at a rapid pace
• After initial vetting, we have about 20 people who seem enthusiastic and we will talk to them and hopefully find roles for them

We have turned the blog post into a permanent Get Involved page on our site. Now we are wondering why it took us so long to do this. If your community doesn’t have a Get Involved page, I encourage you to do it now!

Picture from FOSDEM 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is a post by Benoit Leseul, Rep from Belgium and point man for Mozilla participation at FOSDEM, and wordsmith Claire Corgnou who is a woman of many talents including writing for Bonjour Mozilla.

———-

Like each year since 2003, Mozilla will have a Developer Room at Fosdem. Fosdem (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) is simply one of the greatest events in Europe around free and open source software development: it is THE place to be, to know everything is happening about FLOSS, to meet people… and to have fun! Fosdem is held, during the first weekend of February, in Brussels (Belgium), a very nice city, with the best fries you could ever eat ;-)

So, as usual, Mozilla will have a Developer Room. And, as usual, it’s going to be packed.

If you are interested in giving a talk, leading a workshop or some other session we should hold in the Mozilla DevRoom, please add it to this PAD : https://etherpad.mozilla.org/fosdem2013-talks before 2012-12-20. You can also propose a talk you would like to attend, and we’ll try to find a speaker! Please, do it in the same PAD, in the second section : https://etherpad.mozilla.org/fosdem2013-talks

We want some talks from both Mozilla contributors and employees. All contributors who are selected to be official speakers in the Mozilla DevRoom will be eligible for travel and hotel sponsorship.

Please make sure to list your contact info (Mozillian page, or mail address) in the PAD, so we can reach you easily if your talk is accepted.

Of course, any other Mozilla-related proposal which you think would be  interesting to share with other FLOSS communities is welcome. Please, feel free to propose any kind of talks, even crazy talks, brand new ones, etc. We hope to receive a lot of proposals or suggestions to make this Fosdem be a success with you!

Related articles

• FOSDEM CrossDesktop DevRoom 2013 – Call for Talks
• FOSDEM 2013 Dev Rooms Announced
• FOSDEM 2013 Call 4 Papers

Picture by mozillaeu on Flickr

As of 2 weeks ago, I am now working for Mozilla as European Community Manager. This is somewhat of a departure for me as up until now I have mostly been doing development work for a living with Briks and other employers before that. Yet in many ways it is a continuation of the work I have been doing as a Mozilla volunteer for a long time. After starting out myself on newsgroups and IRC, I moved into helping others new to the community. I helped scale out and organise the mozdev.org community at a time when it filled a gap for developers to host and work on their software. I helped run events, such as Mozilla’s presence at FOSDEM. And more recently I’ve been heavily involved in the Mozilla Reps program.

Europe is a very diverse region in many aspects, from culture to language to how business is done. It is a region going through tremendous upheaval right now, as indeed is much of the world linked though an ever pervasive Web and global economy. In this I see opportunity. Europe has some of the older Mozilla communities that started around localisation, and now new ones are springing up around all aspects of the project. As I’ve traveled around and met many great people and seen how communities work over the last few years, I’m amazed by the endless energy and ideas. This is a time of change for Mozilla as we move into the new areas to fulfill our mission. The community is rising to the challenge.

I’ve been hearing many interpretations of what a community manager is. Many people don’t even like the word manager as it can be misleading in some contexts. In general, I see my role as helping grow Mozilla. I’ll be working with communities to make sure they have all they need to do their work effectively, and with functional teams in the organisation to ensure they are working with the community to get more done. At Mozilla we push back against interests that go against users and rob them of choice. We do this through first-class products like the Firefox browser for desktop and mobile. We are going further with Firefox OS and the Marketplace to bring more choice to the mobile ecosystem. With Webmaker, we encourage you to create the Web, not just consume it. Our job is to empower you to shape your Web experience.

I’m really excited to continue working with everyone and looking forward to the challenges ahead.

I want to say a huge thanks to Mozilla Bosnia. Thanks to Aleksandar Savic for setting up Mozilla’s presence at the event and inviting me. Thanks to Kerim Kalamujic for the walk up in the hills, the conversation, and the hospitality. And thanks to Adi Zeljkovic and Nedim Zecic for the work and support. This event helped increase the profile of Mozilla Bosnia and Mozilla in general. There is a strong team in Bosnia that is only getting stronger.

With Adi and Aleks

Here is some coverage:

MozCamp Asia 2011 (Photo credit: Benny Chandra)

The latest MozCamp, this time in Warsaw, is approaching fast and it will be the best ever. I want to get the word out about a few things:

1. Will you be in Warsaw on Thursday 6th before MozCamp? If so, come and join us at an event at Reaktor. We’ll be talking about Firefox OS, WebFWD, and all the goodness of the Open Web. Sign up here.
2. I have started my Mozilla Mission. If you are attending, you should too! More details about the Buddy Program.
3. I’ll be contributing to a WebFWD session. Curious? Sign up here (see bottom of the page) if you are interested and pre-submit your questions.
4. The schedule will action packed, with some fantastic talks and speakers. It is going to be completed this week, so continue to check in and find out what sessions you want to attend.

That’s it for now. Make sure to join #mozcamp on IRC, and keep checking the wiki for the latest developments.

UPDATE 1 : The schedule is now (mostly) filled out. Have a look to see what sessions you want to attend.

UPDATE 2 : We need your help! Check out the volunteer opportunities.

Related articles

• Mozilla at CampusParty ’12 and Berlin
• Welcome video, MozCamp LATAM highlights and more…

The Mozilla Reps Council submitted a talk early on when the CFP was announced. The talk, titled ‘How To Multiply Your Community By A Factor Of X‘ seemed like a perfect fit for the Community track. The goal was two-fold, to get the word out about what we are doing in the Reps program, and to learn from other open source communities. Some last-minute shuffling meant that only one member of the Reps Council (myself) could go, but luckily we have a great Rep locally in Portland (Benjamin Kerensa) who jumped in to co-present with me. Our slides are at htmlpad.org/remo-oscon-2012/. I took some pictures, check out the set on Flickr.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams Keynotes

On Community

Everyone has their own ideas about what community is for an open source project, organisation or company. In essence, for me, it is about nurturing a group of individuals with the common aim of forwarding the cause of your project. For any entity with a platform, technology, or mission that they want to succeed, community is crucial. The community as a whole can be made up of sub-communities, for example localisers, developers, and evangelists but it is essential that they all work together. Nurturing means harnessing the passion people have and sustaining that passion over a long period. Mozilla is a community driven organisation and has recognised this for a long time, and the Reps program aims to make life easier for contributors. O’Reilly recognises the importance of community, hence the dedicated track at OSCON. Everyone was talking about community this year, not as an afterthought but as a core component of any project.

Community Leaders at Lunch

Sessions

Coming from a development background, OSCON this year was a departure for me as it was the first time at a conference where I focused on non-technical sessions. See all sessions (click though on a talk for details and slides). Here are some of the highlights of talks I attended.

Harnessing the Good Intentions of Others for your OSS Project

[Listing] This was very much a hands on discussion about how you catch a person during the first period when they express interest in helping and guiding them to achieve what they want to do, e.g. write a patch. If they have a positive first experience, they are likely to return and contribute more. Some general take-aways:

• Pairing: Value lies not in the area of common knowledge but in what each of you knows separately, i.e. what you don’t know. Pairing leads to commitable code, quicker.
• Listening is important, e.g. Twitter
• People who express interest … 2 days window of opportunity before they move on. The opportunity for first engagement is even shorter
• Github lowers barrier to entry to a project
• Average person has 2 hours to give you (initially)
• Other tools: Mikogo works well on low bandwidth. Also: Skype, G Hangouts, Join.me, AWS ec2, remote desktop, VNC
• When asking for help, be specific!

Lleweln and Lynn are doing great work, for just a couple of examples check out teachingkidsprogramming.org and the Geek Road Trip.

Open Source Community Growth as a User Experience Problem

[Listing] Asheesh and Karen from OpenHatch focused on the Web entry point into a project and how this can be make or break for you. A welcoming entry point is a way of turning potential into actual.  The ‘Funnel Analysis’ approach is popular now and the goal should always be to figure out where and why people drop off along the way so it can be refined. They have a few examples: Nano (bad), GNOME (ok), and LibreOffice (good). In general, you want to get people to where they want to go without overwhelming them with too much information. Want to know more about what OpenHatch does? Check out their cookbook.

Mozilla is pro-active in this area. As part of the Grow Mozilla project, David Boswell has been working on a number of initiatives to ensure contributors can more easily become involved via the Mozilla Web pages. One of these  efforts is connecting with people all over the world by filtering potential contributors to their local Mozilla community.

Scaling your community by nurturing leaders

Meghan Gill leads the community marketing efforts at 10gen. 10gen began the open source MongoDB project, and provides commercial support, training, and consulting for Mongo. This is a great example of a commercial company driving an open source project where in effect the success of one is reliant on the other. Some of the things they are doing are similar to the Reps program (e.g. events/swag) and the main take-away here is that for continued health of the community you need to build up a strong set of leaders and give public recognition. The MongoDB Masters program aims to do this.

Open Source – The Next Generation

[Listing] This was an amusing talk focusing on some of the inequalities hampering FOSS communities. The gender issue came up and that has been on the agenda for a number of years. The general consensus is that things are getting better, slowly. The main take-away here is that the FOSS world needs less Kirks, and more Picards. If you are a Trekkie, no further explanation is needed!

Open Source: The Next Generation

Learnings and Next Steps

I had the opportunity to talk to many community folks during the course of the week and they face many of the challenges that we face at Mozilla. There are a common set of issues to deal with – governance, enabling, tools, metrics, events, and so on. And many times, we come up with the same solutions. The levels of success vary. I heard more than one person talking about how the Apache Community is working well, and without know the inner workings it seems that have the right structure and set of documentation in place to make a great experience for contributors. In general I think Mozilla’s efforts are on a greater scale, and more ambitious. There are a few reasons for this, namely being in the right place as the computing industry moves en-masse to the Web, and the fact that Mozilla is walking head on into issues outside their own products such as identity and data privacy.

Open source has been in in crisis in recent years, having to deal with numerous issues such as the move away from desktop, the building of walled gardens on the Web,  and other challenges. Projects are evolving, e.g. Ubuntu’s cloud efforts. We are all working outside our comfort zone. Yet now more than ever we need to rise to the new challenges. To do that we need more passionate people. We need more community. So get involved now with your favourite open source project. Interested in Mozilla? See how you can get involved, and find out more about the Mozilla Reps program.

Related articles

• Steve Holden: Fun and Games at OSCON
• Benjamin Kerensa: I’m talking Community at OSCON 2012

Here is a quick rundown of what it does and what it looks like. After install, an icon will appear in your add-ons bar at the bottom of Firefox (Cutomize and drag to the toolbar if you wish). When activated, a panel widget opens:

Reps Companion Tools Panel

The Tools panel gives you access to the most commonly used tools that Reps use, including the event setup form, and the budget request and swag request forms.

Reps Companion Reports Panel

An important monthly task of a Rep is to fill out their monthly report so that we know what you have been up to and what you plan to do next. A link here is the first step in helping Reps with this task. We’ll be building in a notification to the add-on that alerts the user when the end of the month comes around.

SOPs Panel

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are essentially the guidebook for Reps. Right now they live on the wiki but will soon be moved to the Reps portal. This panel provides easy access to all the published SOPs in one place.

Reps Companion Social Panel

Find out the latest happenings of Reps from their blog posts and posts on social networks. Get social, and spread the word.

Mozilla Reps Companion About Panel

We pulled in other open source software to help us. Find out about it in this panel. Foundation is used on the Reps portal, so we used it here to maintain a consistent look and feel.

That’s it! Enjoy and please help in order for us to make it even more useful.

The Mozilla Reps program is getting in on the act. Local Rep Benjamin Kerensa and I are presenting ‘How to Multiply Your Community By A Power Of X‘. We’ll be talking about the Reps Program. In particular, where does it fit in in the general Mozilla community, how the project works, our successes so far, and challenges we have had. We’ll be picking the brains of folks in other open source communities to get ideas on how we can do things better.

Mozilla Reps talk at OSCON

There are other talks by Mozillians, both employees and community members. Go see them!

• Tara Tiger Brown and Chris McAvoy – Legitimizing interest based learning with Mozilla Open Badges
• David Eaves - Open Source 2.0: The Science of Community Management and The Science of Open Source Community Management
• Christie Koehler - Event Planning for Geeks
• Andy McKay – Large Django sites at Mozilla
• Laura Thomson - Everything you ever wanted to know about deployment but were afraid to ask and I Can’t Believe You Still Do It That Way:12 Years of PHP Best Practice Talks revisited

Where would you like to go?

Structure

The format of the weekend has not changed much since and is as William Quiviger wrote about in 2010. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The Aviary.pl Crew in action

In summary:

• Day 1 : Meet in the late afternoon / early evening and catch up, talk, hack together.
• Day 2 : Day of sessions, conversation, status updates, and more.
• Day 3 : Voting in the new board and goal setting for the next 6 months

It was just the right balance between getting work done and collaborating and learning from each other. On Saturday evening after dinner we settled into some game playing (board and video) that showed the great camaraderie that exists in the team.

Governance

Aviary.pl is a structured organisation with a board, a board audit committee, and members.

• 3-member Board (see the new board)
• A board audit committee
• Members

The board and audit committee are rotated every two years. Aviary.pl tried and failed to become a registered non-profit organisation in Poland once before and during the weekend documents were prepared to make a second application. The main reason for this is to accept money more easily. I know that other Mozilla communities are wondering whether to do this in their country. You should examine if you really need to do it, and if you do to expect a certain amount of administrative overhead.

Many Mozilla communities have problems attracting and keeping new members. What I liked about Aviary.pl in this context is that they have a set process for new recruits that includes mentoring for 6 months which in general seems to lead to a better retention rate.

Guests

One thing that worked really well was the presence of invited guests from outside the Mozilla project. Members of the Gnome, Opera and Kaszëbsczi language communities brought a fresh perspective to proceedings. Also present was Lukasz Kluj who works for Lewis PR that does PR work for Mozilla in Poland.

Kashubian (Kaszëbsczi) Language

Yurek Hinz, among other things, works promoting the Kashubian language. He talked to us about his experience on getting the language integrated into Firefox, both the challenges and opportunities for a small language. Some interesting random points:

• In the 2002 census, 53,000 people in Poland declared that they mainly use Kashubian at home.
• Currently 3 active members of the team working on the Firefox localisation
• After many false starts, it reached beta in 2011 and full version in 2012 listed at http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all.html
• Not getting ADU stats from Mozilla yet, we don’t know the number of users currently
• Supporting languages like this really differentiate Mozilla over other browser and software vendors where they only support languages based on market forces

In Summary

Aviary.pl is working well. It is made up of dedicated individuals. In numbers it is strong, yet as always new contributors are welcome. The community was established in 2004 making it one of the more mature communities. As with all established Mozilla communities, it faces challenges in adapting to new Mozilla projects and priorities while at the same time keeping on top of localisation work. I gave my thoughts on how Aviary.pl can rise to the challenge and they have already been moving in that direction with outreach and development efforts.

[More Pictures]

Related articles

• Learning from the Aviary.pl crew (somethin-else.org)
• Gdansk: 5 free things for visitors to do (cbsnews.com)

The Gist

Mozilla is working on tools to help get more contributors involved and better engaged. This includes a taskboard, events manager, and an improved phonebook. For reference, see:

Blog post: http://aakash.doesthings.com/2012/03/19/community-tools-platforms-roadmap-2012/
Slides: http://htmlpad.org/community-tools-roadmap-2012/
Video: http://vid.ly/0j3y7t

With this better infrastructure will come better rewards for contributors. This will includes Mozillian public profiles, badges, events, and where appropriate material items such as t-shirts.

However, your work in the Mozilla Community needs to be self-motivated. Much of the time there will not be any hand-holding. Take the initiative. If you are on board with Mozilla’s mission and the Open Web, use that as an inspiration to drive you. Like all fields in life, there is no substitute for hard work.

5 Areas

In the meantime, we need to work with what we have, and there is a lot out there if you know where to look. For convenience, let us identify 5 areas to start with where you can get involved. With each one are some links to get you started.

I. Boot To Gecko

This is Mozilla’s mobile Web platform.

https://mozilla.org/b2g/
https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gecko

II. Add-ons

Learning add-on development is a great way to add to your skills, provide useful tools to people, and make an impact. Use the Add-ons SDK or Add-ons Builder to get started.

https://addons.mozilla.org/developers/builder

III. Localisation

Localisation is still crucial for any community who want to make an impact among all speakers of your native language(s). Break up your activities into 2 areas, product and web.

Product includes Firefox (desktop and mobile) and Thunderbird.

Web properties include SUMO, Mozilla Add-ons, and much much more.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n
https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Overview
https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Resources

IV. Evangelism

Talk about HTML5 and the Open Web! Make a Web App. Help write documentation.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Evangelism
https://developer.mozilla.org/Project:en/How_to_Help

V. Web Makers

Mozilla wants everyone in society to be a Web Maker.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webmakers

And More…

Other projects to get involved with are Hackasaurus, core hacking, QA, SUMO (support). There are more, find the one that suits you. See:

http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/areas.html

Getting Help

If you need guidance when getting started, there are people who can help. Apart from posting on Mozilla mailing lists or asking on IRC, there are folks known as Stewards designated to particular areas:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute#Stewards

Building a community is different in every country and region. One size does not fit all. But remember to collaborate with and learn from others. Read this great post from Nukeador of Mozilla Hispano on how to organise a Mozilla community:

http://www.nukeador.com/09/12/2011/organizing-a-mozilla-community/

So as you can see there is plenty to do, and Mozilla needs you to help out. I am looking forward to seeing the work you do moving forward.

Related articles

• What Mozilla is about..(garykwong.wordpress.com)

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Briks Is 6

I meant to call out the 5 year anniversary last year but it slipped by as I was too busy. Six is better, it rhymes! I set up Briks Software this month 6 years ago. Briks is a Web Consultancy that specialises in all things Mozilla and sometimes beyond. We do Add-ons, XULRunner apps, bug fixes, mobile work, and more. We’ve worked on projects large and small, with big companies and startups. Briks is not a 1-person show, I like to call it a Mozilla Development Collective. I’ve had various folks come on board per-project over the 6 years and quite frankly Briks would not have been so successful without them. There are 2 people that I would like to give a special shout-out to. Chris Neale is the glue that keeps everything together, from the web site to design to graphics to listening to me ramble on Skype all day. David McNamara is a coder who can whip something up before you can say ‘digital drifter’. See his recent profile on Bonjour Mozilla!.

The Briks experience so far has been wonderful. Anyone who has ever done consulting will understand what I mean when I say that it has it’s ups and downs. I’ve been fortunate to have more ups. Some projects succeed, some don’t. Some clients come to you with a clear vision, others let you shape it. You meet many different people who become at best friends or at worst good contacts. Almost every day there is a new challenge, and each now project is a puzzle to solve. Hopefully I will get time to write more about this, it deserves a separate post.

However lately I’ve been thinking that I have got to the point where I am looking for a different challenge in my career. The obvious choice would be moving into management in a tech company. Another option would be to do a startup. Or another would be to move to a tropical island and set up a tourist resort. All of these sound great, everything is open. If you have any opportunities you think would suit me, let me know.

Mozilla in Slovenia

Mozilla Slovenija is trying to keep the momentum going for promoting Firefox and Mozilla this year. Our primary tool for doing this has always been localisation, and the team are doing a great job in keeping up with product and web. As far as events go, so far we had a Firefox 10 event and Dan Odporte Kode (Open Source Day), both organised by Reps. And I can’t finish this section without mentioning Matjaž Horvat’s heroic efforts in the ACTA debate here.

ReMo

The Mozilla Reps program is going great and my work on the council has been taking up a lot of my time. It has been a victim of it’s own success in the respect that we are still going through some growing pains and smoothing out many of the processes that will solidify the program going forward. We met in Athens to work through many of the issues and come up with a plan for the project for the next year. Shortly after the new Mozilla Reps website launched. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out, it is a hub with profiles of all reps and will be a wonderful tool for reps and for the those looking for reps.

In general I have learned a ton over the last year while helping out with ReMo in the areas of mentorship and community building. It has been a privilege to help get the program started and to work with community members who feel so passionate about Mozilla.

FOSDEM 2012

For the first time in about 5 years I was not putting together the schedule for and running the Mozilla devroom at FOSDEM. And while I missed the hustle and bustle, let me tell you it was great. I could wander around other rooms, head over to the stands (in a new building this year), and listen to other talks. The show this year was run my local Mozilla Reps and the Belgian community. William Quiviger wrote more about this aspect in his recap. You can catch all the blog posts, slides, and picture on the Mozilla wiki.

WebFWD

I previously wrote about my motivation for getting involved in the WebFWD program. As a scout I’ve been seeing an explosion of startup activity recently in Central and Eastern Europe. While I have not (to my knowledge) directly influenced any projects to apply yet, I have certainly tried to raise awareness of the program. Much of the startup reading I have come across has been shared in the Scout Sightings blog posts compiled by Havi Hoffman. I’ve given an intro talk twice, first at FOSDEM and then at the Firefox event in Kiberpipa. The slides are on Slideshare.

Mozilla Croatia

I was in Zagreb in January for a meeting of the Mozilla Croatia Community. Also present apart from local community members were Ioana Chiorean from Romania, Oskar Ivanic from Serbia, and Matjaž from Slovenia. Up to about 9 months ago, the community was very much dormant with the exception of good work by Edo Huric and also the Firefox localisation team. Then a new force of nature entered in the form of Nikola Matosovic and he has already put together a team of about 40 volunteer members (yes, 40) to help with Mozilla Croatia.

Clockwise from top left: Ivona Haban, Niko Visnjic, Vedran Kovacevic, Satine Anais, Mislav Zorko, Denis Oswald, and Nikola Nikola Matosovic (middle)

The goal of the meeting was to get everyone up to speed with the latest projects and issues in Mozilla, and provide insights into Community building. Having already achieved much in outreach in 2011, the challenge in 2012 is to gain momentum and carry out the ambitious set of goals they have given themselves for 2012.

What Next?

In no particular order here are some things I want to achieve in the short-term:

• Get some crucial releases out the door for Briks clients
• Finish the ReMo add-on, currently a work-in-progress
• Help the Mozilla Ireland community to the next level. We now have hosting for mozillaireland.org and we have to put the site up and plan some events to get new community members up to speed and for Mozilla to get more coverage in Ireland
• Help out more in Mozilla Balkans, and hopefully attend the next meetup which is planned for Zagreb this time around
• Forge deeper links with the startup community and perhaps attend a couple of related events in my region
• Continue to dip my toes in the Dev Engagement project. I’ve been following the mailing list, and curating posts for the MDN Google+ page.
• Put some real thought into my next career steps and act on them

And so it continues.

Compatible By Default does not enable all extensions. The types not enabled include the following:

1. Add-ons marked to work with a Firefox version less than 4.0
2. Add-ons with binary components
3. Add-ons explicitly marked by the author as incompatible, i.e. opt-out of Compatible By Default
4. Add-ons tested and determined to not be compatible with a given version of Firefox, and marked as incompatible by Mozilla
5. Themes

UPDATE (See Blair’s comments below): Add-ons installed by 3rd party software are enabled if you opt-in, which is a feature introduced in Firefox 8.

The original aim of ACR, hence ‘Reporter’ in the name, was for users to inform authors if their add-on did or did not work. I would still encourage you to install it and if an add-on degrades Firefox in any way then please use the reporting mechanism (Compatibility button on the add-on listing) to let Mozilla and the author know.

Note that ACR also works with Thunderbird and Seamonkey.

Related articles

• Firefox 10 Is Here. Is it Worth Your Time? (mashable.com)
• Thunderbird 10 Fixes Add-On Compatibility, Adds Right-Click-to-Search and More Keyboard Shortcuts (lifehacker.com)