Category: Project Update

Creating an “Open Planning Checklist” – your feedback wanted

As part of the community building education efforts I’m leading at Mozilla, I’ve created a draft of an open planning checklist. The inspiration for the current content comes from our book Community Event Planning. I’ve modified it somewhat to be more Mozilla-specific.

This is meant to be a quick reference, one that project leaders can read and understand quickly, and reference as they set up their projects.

Please take a look at the draft on WikiMo and let me know what you think. For best collaboration, leave your comments directly on that wiki page. Otherwise leave a comment here on the blog, or visit my Mozillians profile for the best way to get in touch.

Community Building Education Update – 5 May 2014

This doesn’t fit specifically in either category below, but I still wanted to call attention to it: Last Tuesday we launched Firefox 29 “Australis,” our biggest redesign of Firefox since version 4!

Education & Culture Working Group

  • Further planning with Dino Anderson about diversity & inclusion efforts we’d like to roll out this year. I don’t have notes I can share, but will work on putting together some kind of update soon.
  • Drafted an open planning checklist (comments welcome!). This is geared towards all Mozilla teams (of paid and volunteer contributors) to help them adopt and maintain an open planning process.
  • Represented the E&C Working Group at the Grow Mozilla meeting.
  • Facilitated our regular Education & Culture working group meeting (notes).

Wiki Working Group

  • Triaged all open Websites::wiki.mozilla.org bugs. Closed 43 bugs (search).
  • Setup the wiki as a project in scrumbugs. Still updating bugs with user stories, so you won’t see a lot there, except in the backlog.
  • Worked, with Lyre and Larissa, on final drafts of wiki.mozilla.org and WWG purpose and scope documents. We’ll review as a group tomorrow and then I’ll post publicly.

Other

  • I wrote a tiny, simple WordPress plugin called bz shortcode to help make generating individual bugzilla.mozilla.org links on this blog easier.
  • I’m trying to attend fewer meetings so that I have more time to work. My strategy so far is: If I receive a meeting invite without an agenda item making it clear why I’m a necessary participant, I’ve started declining with a note to the organizer asking if I really need to be there. The flip side of this is that I’m doing my best to have clear agendas a head of time for the meetings that I facilitate.

Priorities for this week

  • Finalize scope documents for both the wiki itself and the wiki working group.
  • Update contribute area page for webdev.
  • Outline requirements for project-wide “Mozilla Quilt” (part of Education roadmap). Working on this with Dino and others.
  • Expand the brainstorm of needed community building skills that we started at last month’s MozCamp planning session to entire organization using Mozilla moderator.
  • Collect feedback on open planning checklist and publish.

Get Involved

As always, you are welcome to join me in any of these projects. Look at my mozillians profile for the best way to get in touch with me.

Upcoming meetings

Calendar file for both meetings: ics or html.

Community Building Education Update – 29 April 2014

Note: This is the first in what I plan to be weekly updates about the work we’re doing as part of the Education and Wiki Working Groups, part of the community building team at Mozilla. I’ll tag these updates with mozilla as well as cbt-education and wwg when appropriate.

Wiki Working Group

On Tuesday of last week we help our twice-monthly Wiki Working Group meeting (notes). Key takeaways:

  • We celebrated becoming an official sub-module of websites.
  • We talked about planning an in-person meet-up and sprint at this year’s Wikimania in London.
  • We talked about the need to clarify our vision for the wiki as a prerequisite for creating the long-term roadmap, as well as the need start on a short-term roadmap to address critical needs.

During our next meeting we’ll continue work on both the short- and long-term roadmaps. If you’re interested in contributing, please get involved!

Later in the week, a few of us fixed the following bugs:

  • Bug 858844 – Sortable tables on wiki no longer sortable
  • Bug 1001710 – Recent changes to wiki.mozilla.org break bugzilla plugin
  • Bug 819708 – wiki.mozilla.org editor wont show rich text editor

MozCamp Planing Session

Last week a handful of contributors gathered at the San Francisco office to plan MozCamps 2014, the next phase of what we’re still calling “MozCamps” but which we plan to evolve into a new kind of event.

I’m still synthesizing everything we covered during the planning session, but the most relevant takeaway in terms of the education working group was this list of community building skills that the group generating during a brainstorming session about what content should be included in the new MozCamps. This week I’m working to integrate that list into the existing community building curriculum roadmap.

Open Source Day at Grace Hopper: Core Team Members Wanted

The Open Source Day event (2012 overview) is part of the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference (GHC). This year I am co-chairing the Open Source Day (OSD) with Alice Bonhomme-Biais, who has been involved with OSD at GHC championing the Google Crisis Response project

The purpose of the Open Source Day is twofold:

  1. To give Grace Hopper attendees the opportunity to learn what open source is, how to contribute to open source projects and to make their first contribution!
  2. To help open source projects become more friendly to new and novice contributors.

We accomplish this by inviting a dozen or so open source projects (usually with a humanitarian focus) to join the Open Source Day and connect with contributors (GHC attendees, mostly college students). In the months prior to OSD, we work with participating organizations to prepare their projects for new contributors and during the event we facilitate this on-boarding process.

Soon, we’ll be asking organizations to apply to be a part of the Open Source Day.

Right now we need to assemble our core team. If you’re interested helping to make OSD a success this year, please do the following no later than Friday, 29 March:

  1. Read through the list of core team roles.
  2. Take note of the time commitment and general responsibilities and make sure you’re comfortable with them.
  3. Contact me to let me know that you’d like to be on the committee. If a particular role interests you, let me know that too. DEADLINE: Friday, 29 March (but the sooner the better).

Once we’ve heard from everyone, we’ll meet as a group to solidify the roles and select a weekly meeting time.

For those of you who participated last year, you might  recall that organization leaders were a part of the core planning team.  We have decided to change that this year to let org leaders focus on  getting their project ready for the event. Instead, each org leader will be assigned an org coordinator (part of the core team) as a point of  contact with the core team. We’ve made this change in order to make our  weekly planning meetings run more efficiently and to create a meeting  space where org leaders can discuss the issues most relevant to them.

A Moment of Reflection on Firefox’s Birthday

8 years ago today, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0. I remember when this happened. I was 23 and working for a small technology publisher in San Francisco. Even now, I can feel the excitement I felt then at having a viable open source alternative to Internet Explorer. I was an early Firefox Affiliate and I installing it on every computer I could get access to, including all the ones at work.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think then that I’d be fortunate enough to make my living in open source, let alone working for Mozilla. Mozilla isn’t a perfect organization, and it’s been a stressful first year for me, but I’m still proud to call myself a Mozillian and look forward to being here for a long while. At least long enough so see us successfully launch FirefoxOS and hire some more women and queer people (especially in technical roles).

What about you? Where were you when Firefox 1.0 launched?

Oh, and If you’re curious about this history of the Mozilla Project, including key releases, check out this timeline.

Joining the Technical Evangelism Team at Mozilla

I’m happy to announce that next Monday, 5 November will be my first day working full-time as a technical project manager and evangelist on the Technical Evangelism team within Mozilla’s Developer Engagement group, lead by Stormy Peters.

I joined Mozilla 13 months ago as a Web Product Engineer on the Web Productions team. During that time I helped guide the successful launches of Firefox Live, Firefox Flicks, the Legacy Firefox Startpage, a re-vamped Mozilla Careers and De Todos Para Todos. I’m going to miss working day-to-day with my awesome colleagues on this team!

However, I’m also excited about what I’ll be working during the next year because I’ll be contributing to programs directly related to the launch of FirefoxOS. This includes the early adopter hardware program, and programs to engage developers in writing HTML5 apps for FirefoxOS.

If you love technical project management, consider applying for my previous role. Got questions about that or how you can get involved in FirefoxOS? Drop me a line.

 

Mozilla Now Has Guidelines for Community Participation

Mitchell Baker announced today on mozilla.governance that Community Participation Guidelines have been posted.

While I remain critical of the version that has been put forth (for reasons I don’t have time to articulate now, but will try to later), I recognize adoption of any standard for participation as a step in the right direction.

Thank you to all those involved in moving this forward and getting it published.

Note: If you haven’t been following this issue, read my previous posts on the subject here and here.

Still No Code of Conduct at Mozilla

It’s been nearly four months since events at Mozilla lead several of us to call for adoption of a code of conduct. And yet we do not have one.

I can’t tell if progress is stalled, or if we’re just not hearing of updates. The last post to mozilla.governance on the topic occurred in early May. What’s going on? Why does this appear to be a non-priority for our leadership?

Regardless of the reasons, four months is a long time to wait for something that was long overdue to begin with. It’s a long time to wait to have reassurance from my community that I, and others like me, are welcome, and that discriminatory behavior against us will not be tolerated.