What’s up w/ MozFdn – July Update

by Mark Surman |

Here is a brief status update that I shared at last week’s Mozilla Foundation board meeting. This report is based on team goals outlined here.

The last two months have been very outwardly focused – adding new schools to Mozilla Education,  making partnerships around open video, gathering other hybrid orgs at our new offices in Mountain View. All of this brought in new ideas and energy to help drive our messaging and visioning efforts. Highlight include:

  • Programs. Progress Mozilla Education continues, w/ Mozilla courses happening in Spain, India and France.
  • Communications. Mozilla Service Week announced for September, will tie into One Web Day. Open Video Conference very successful in terms of mission + tech messaging link.
  • Community. Gerv Markham now back full time, focused on community support. Main work is on Bugzilla innovation and sustainability plus Mozilla project governance.
  • Org Development. Next phase of visioning process starts now and continues into fall. MozFdn team meeting happening in July, will include piece on long term planning.

Things are rolling faster and faster now. We have a good foundation from which to start thinking much bigger as we move into this next phase of MozFdn action.

Program

  • 2009 team goal: develop a small handful of programs that go beyond software as a way to promote Mozilla’s mission (e.g. education).
  • Continued progress w/ Mozilla Education, including confirmation of full Mozilla courses.
    • Number of students working w/ Seneca has now grown to about 100, and full scale courses on Mozilla confirmed now for Spain, India and France. See map.
    • Presented on Mozilla Education at FISL in Brasil. Looks like significant potential there.
    • Next online course experiment: Jetpack for Learning, design challenge on learning related Firefox addons. Possible collaboration w/ MacArthur Foundation.
    • Joi Ito and Mark working on grassroots, bar-camp-like follow on to Mozilla / Creative Commons course on ‘open digital skills’.
  • Support for accessibility-related initiatives continues, guided by a new high-level Mozilla accessibility strategy, and with funding help from across Mozilla and increasingly from other organizations as well (e.g., Microsoft and Yahoo! support for the NVDA open source reader project previously funded almost totally by the Foundation).

Communications

  • 2009 team goal: dramatically increase awareness of Mozilla’s mission and public benefit nature amongst the broader public.
  • Continued collaboration with people across Mozilla to improve the messaging of our public benefit mission.
  • Mozilla Service Week announced for September September 14 – 21. Mozilla-wide experiment in organizing community around a broader open web cause.
    • Discussions underway to link closely w/ One Web Day, which is on September 22.
  • Significant presence at Open Video Conference in NYC,
    • Firefox 3.5 timing plus this conference provided excellent opportunity to message link between mission and technology. Slides w/ links to demos here.
    • A number of follow on efforts being considered including a CC-like Open Video Logo program. Under banner of Open Video Alliance (OVA).
  • Held ‘hybrid summit‘ in mid-June, full day discussion on making hybrids better.
  • Expanded fundraising and engagement efforts start to ramp up this month.
    • Chelsea Novak from Sick Kids Foundation in Toronto hired as fundraising manager.
    • Initial campaigns around One Web Day and Open Video Alliance being discussed.
    • Working w/ Wikipedia and CC to jointly improve open source fundraising tools.
  • mozilla.org redesign slowed down briefly due to limited of IT implementation resources.  Now back on schedule to launch sometime this summer.

Community

  • 2009 team goal: improve the Foundation’s ability to support, strengthen and grow the Mozilla community.
  • Gervase Markham now finished school and back working full time. Almost all of his time dedicated to community support initiatives.
  • Working w/ people across the Mozilla community to find ways to improve Bugzilla and make it easier for people to innovate. Also, helping w/ Bugzilla sustainability strategy.
  • Collaborating w/ Mitchell to facilitate progress on outstanding module ownership, community renewal and project governance issues.

Organizational Development

  • 2009 team goal: consolidate and strengthen the Foundation team, and develop a long term vision that clarifies the Foundation’s role within Mozilla.
  • Vision discussions with board happening in July and September.
  • Mozilla Foundation face to face team meeting happening in Toronto in July. Focus will be combination of team consolidation and longer term planning.

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