What’s up w/ MozFdn – November Update

by Mark Surman |

Here is a brief status update that I shared with the Mozilla Foundation board last week. This report is based on team goals outlined here.

In addition to Drumbeat, the last two months have focused communications and community support as well as launching a new education initiative. Highlights include:

November and December will continue to focus on early Drumbeat roll out and web development, as well new fundraising push built around the Namoroka park, which is the Firefox 3.6 namesake.

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).

  • Core Mozilla Education work with colleges and Mozilla community grew as expected in late summer and early fall.
    • Mozilla-related courses and activities now underway at 13 schools on five continents, with participation from ten professors and almost a hundred students. Students working on  Bespin, GCC optimization for Mozilla, Gecko, WebGL, Fennec, Firefox, Thunderbird.
    • Processing for the Web project particularly successful, energizing students to work on WebGL and Firefox. Ten students from Seneca College and Université d’Evry.
  • Received grant from MacArthur to fund Jetpack for Learning, a mashup of Mozilla Education and a Mozilla Labs design challenge. Launched challenge in late October.
  • Planning and early work on Drumbeat moving quickly, especially in late October. Web site mockups and year one plans have been posted, and first projects and events scheduled.

Communications

2009 team goal: dramatically increase awareness of Mozilla’s mission and public benefit nature amongst the broader public.

  • Ran Mozilla Service Week and OneWebDay campaigns in September. Significant community contributions and enthusiasm, although not as much as hoped in some regards.
  • Pointed one of five snippets on google search page to new ‘Better Internet’ page on mozilla.org, aiming to increase awareness of Mozilla’s mission.
  • Initial version of new engagement and fundraising database delivered by vendor, almost operational.

Community

2009 team goal: improve the Foundation’s ability to support, strengthen and grow the Mozilla community.

  • New Get Involved  page launched on mozilla.org and community-wide contribute group established to make it easier for new people to get contribute to Mozilla.
  • Improvements made on a number of project governance fronts including: new Committer’s Agreement, commit access policy harmonization, dormant accounts.
  • MoFo-led Bugzilla Innovation Project made first release of web-friendly API, second release almost ready. One client has already been written to use it.

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.

  • Most organization development efforts in last two months focused on Drumbeat planning, and developing budget and goals for 2010.

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