Mozilla Service Week – its easy to help bookshare.org

I think most of you know its Mozilla Service Week this week. We’ve been featuring stories and opportunities on the Mozilla Service Week blog, and as you know here on my blog –I usually like to try to find ways that everyone can get involved in making the Web better, no matter how technically advanced you are! Everyone can help make a difference.

One way I’ve been getting involved this week is to help bookshare.org. Bookshare are a non-profit org who are committed to helping people with visual impairments, physical disabilities and/or learning disabilities by dramatically increasing the quantity and timely availability of books and newspapers in accessible formats.

What does that mean? Its means for example if you are blind, you want to be able to have access to books (and the latest bestseller books) just like everybody else. bookshare.org is helping people enjoy the beauty of reading.

They already make more than 50,000 books available to folks who need them in accessible formats for people of all ages and disabilites – who have different tastes.

People in the world love to read and those of us who read everyday take that completely for granted. One of the small ways you could help bookshare is by writing a review of your favourite book and sending it to them. We all want to have recommendations before we start reading a book, so please help by sharing your opinions with others.

Its easy to get involved, simply…

1. Visit http://bookshare.org/ and use the search field to check for the book you have in mind.

2. If its there, write a brief or detailed review (your choice!)

3. Email it to volunteer@bookshare.org – and they will upload it onto the site for you.

Its amazingly rewarding and so easy to do. Why not make a point of doing it every time you finish reading a book!

Mozilla Service is finally here

For folks in the Mozilla community volunteering is a way of life. Its what drives them and what has created one of the most wildly used and translated pieces of software in the world…

… Today we kicked off Mozilla Service Week - which has brought a new element to what volunteering at Mozilla means. Over the past months we’ve been encourgaing people to step up and make a difference in their area by directly offering technology related help. That’s more than sitting behind a monitor and coding, and more than submitting a bug — its about meeting face to face, offering advice, and helping someone enjoy this really wonderful thing we call the Web.

As someone involved in Marketing and who is not a coder, web designer, and doesn’t have anything like the amazing skills most of you have — I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to get involved and help make a difference. Well, I can tell you that it doesn’t matter what skill level you have — you can always help someone else have a better experience on the Web. Advocate why you love it, share how you use it, make sure people know why we need to protect it. There’s so much we can do.

Please go to mozillaservice.org, sign up and help us make the Web a better place this week, and for always.

Read more:

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2009/09/14/mozilla-service-week-is-here/

http://mozillaservice.org

New Term: School of Firefox coming soon!

There are some things in life you need to learn … such as learning to walk, to read and knowing that pie is ‘off’ in your fridge (though all of that is hopefully instinctive)

And there are also some things in life in worth learning well … such as speaking French, having patience, and making great brownies!

Then there are those things in life which by learning, you just know are going to make your life a whole lot better! Learning about Firefox is one of those, and for the last few weeks, we’ve been working on a new fun learning destination for Firefox – called the “School of Firefox”. We’ll soon be able to take you through lessons, tips and videos on all you need to know about using Firefox.

Its going to help new Firefox users get set up and familiar with Firefox features fast, and for those of us who think we already know the deal, we hope there’s lots more besides to learn about your fox!

We’ll be sharing more about the site in the next couple of weeks. So get your pencil’s pencils sharpened – a new fun way to learn Firefox is coming soon!

Firefox 3.5 London launch party, downloads, demos and beer!

Gerv, Pascal and I got together last night with some London Firefox and Mozilla fans to help celebrate the launch of Firefox 3.5 last Tuesday.

About 25 of us enjoyed a few beers and snacks, there were several familiar faces who joined us last year for the Firefox 3 launch. Gerv demoed some neat 3.5 new features – Location Aware Browsing, Open Video, Downloadable fonts and Performance. Pascal talked about the cool dev stuff which is going on at Mozilla Labs.

Some interesting people were there from:

Ubervue – A group of Romanian super smart guys who have built the next gen social media conversation tracker. They now have opened up their API for anyone to hack on. Check it out!

Open Rights Group - a campaigning organization aiming to raise awareness of digital rights and civil liberties issues.  They need your help and support in the UK!

Influence Crowd – Philip Sheldrake the guy behind this is one of the smartest and highest energy folks around in Social Media analytics – there’s nothing he doesn’t know! He’s working on some cool new stuff in social media and measuring true success and accountability:

Fun moments:
- We watched live on screen Firefox 3.5 downloads pass 16M – we are now at 17.5M – see where we are now here: http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/
- Gerv ran the original Firefox code on loop – apparently it takes 25 mins to cycle through and it was shown at the first release party. All pretty cool stuff.

T-shirt & Cause moment:
We actually had some t-shirts to share, and was delighted to see people donate. In a beer glass we raised 75 pounds (125 US$) for the Mozilla Foundation — helping to keep the openness of the Web. A big thank you to all who donated.

A great night was had by all. It was wonderful to join with people who deeply care about the future of the Web, and are so supportive of the Mozilla community and cause.

More pictures here — unfortunately they are a bit grainy, the light wasn’t so good.

Mozilla Service Week – ‘Be the Difference’

Over the past few months we’ve mentioned several times about our plans to launch a technology related volunteer week, and today we are very proudly unveiling mozillaservice.org

During the week of September 14-21 we are asking people all over the world to step up and make a difference in their local communities by using the beauty of the Web.

We want people to come forward and volunteer their time, to seek out opportunities to do good in their communities, and make a real difference to people’s live with technology.  We’re looking for people who want to share, give, engage, create, and collaborate by offering their time and talent to local public benefit organizations, non-profits and people who need their help –

i) you could be a coder, or do testing, localize, or you might know networks etc

ii) you know how to use the Web, and are Web savvy

Here are some ways you could help:

* Help a full time working Mum learn how to buy groceries online when her kids are sleeping
* Connect with your local community centre and offer to build a website, or a calender of events
* Reach out to a local library and offer to write a tutorial on how to use the Web
* Design a twitter background image for an NGO
* Go to your local school and volunteer to help set up wi-fi network
* Refurbish an old laptop and donate it to a senior citizens retirement home
* Call a family meeting and explain to everyone why the Web is important
* …. the lists are really endless.

Everyone should have the opportunity to know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a good experience when they’re online. As you know, Mozilla as a public benefit organization has a firm mission to make the Web better for everybody. In fact, the Mozilla community already has an incredible track record of doing amazing things. So we know, that however big all small people’s action are — they will make a serious difference.

We’ve so far launched mozillaservice.org in English, however, over the coming weeks with the help of the Mozilla community, Mozilla Service Week will be available in many languages and with additional partners.

So what should you do next?

You can learn more on how to get involved by either volunteering or listing your, or your organization’s needs. You can also already pledge how many hours of support you would like to volunteer.

Giving and creating are so much of open source life, we are very proud to bring those skills, the energy, and the caring nature of people into the lives of as many people as possible.

Please get involved with Mozilla Service Week – Everyone can help build a better internet.

Go to mozillaservice.org

Add Mozilla Service Week Twitter

Tag anything related – mozservice09

Credits:
Mozilla Service Week so far has been made possible by scores of people – Mary Colvig, Austin King, Stephen Donner, Krupa Raj, Jeremy Orem, and Peter Deitz. There are many, many more people Austin has mentioned on his blog as well.

NB: We are building Mozilla Service Week out in the open with the help of many volunteers – there will be many more people to thank over the coming weeks.

Mozilla Service Week – Update

a few weeks ago my colleague Mary gave a short announcement about Mozilla’s plans to organize a Technology Volunteer Week. This wasn’t about volunteering for the Mozilla Project, in terms of coding or localizing  Mozilla projects – but about encouraging folks out there to do technology acts of real life public good.

The Mozilla Service Week – will bring together the Mozilla community, and many others who deeply care about technology to make a real difference in their community with the help of the Web.  This could be something as small as helping your grandma get online, (which is actually, I’m sure a very big deal for you, your grandma and your family!), to organizing a group effort to collect used hardware for your local community centre.

Every action will help, and make a difference to someone’s world.

Since we first told you about Mozilla Service Week, we’ve made great progress. 17 different Mozilla communities around the world have come forward to help us build Mozilla Service Week in their local language over the coming weeks (please let me know if you would also like to help). And, we nearly have the English site ready to go.  Just a few more tweaks, and then we’ll be ready to share this with you. The week of service itself will now take place in September, but there’s plenty to do together before then to make sure this is a brilliant volunteering week.

We’ll soon have more news for you very soon… please stay tuned!

Openness: Enjoy, Advocate and Maintain

Seth Godin (of which you know I’m a fan of from time to time) blogged yesterday about how the term “open source” is being over-used. In fact it was the buzz word of 2008, and seems to be continuing to right into 2009. Its used with regard to anything and everything, and can be confusing to say the least… and both frustrating and enlightening if you actually work in open source. Seth & Michal Migurski produced a list of the most common ‘open’ terms to try and set folks on the straight and narrow – its worth taking a look.

In some respects its delightful to see the term open source be used in so many ways… we have entered a new age where we see more companies, and organizations being more transparent, and working in the open to gain customer feedback. We have a cacophony of user shared experiences, photos, videos, all open for us to dually consume and add to. There are more opportunities to get involved with your favorite *whatever it might be*, information (or your identity) can be passed from one place to another often seamlessly.

So – its not stretch to say, we are living in the most open environment we have ever seen (unfortunately, I am only able to refer to the developed world here). We have come along way!

But… its important not to forget, whilst we make these huge advances forward in being open, there is much more work to be done, and still much more work to maintain these levels of openness. Terms are one thing, but making sure open, stays open is quite another. And its easy to take this for granted, especially when it comes to the Web.

Open means different things to different people, and Seth’s list surely demonstrates this in today’s world (also see a bunch of dictionary terms below**). But one thing is certain, what ever open means to you – you will want to preserve it!

**The dictionary entry for the term ‘open’ (taken from the

1 allowing access, passage, or a view through an empty space; not closed or blocked up

2 [ attrib. ] exposed to the air or to view; not covered

3 [ predic. ] (of a store, place of entertainment, etc.) officially admitting customers or visitors; available for business

4 (of a person) frank and communicative; not given to deception or concealment

“Crowd” Book Recommendations

For several months now – I’ve been meaning to add a post regarding a few books I’ve recently read.

Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe

Jeff Howe coined the term ‘crowd sourcing’ in a Wired article in 2006 – he then went on to expand his theory into this book.  Crowdsourcing sets out the method by which the ‘power of the many can be harnessed together on the internet to build and to innovate’. Howe does a good job of explaining how all this has been made possible by technological advancement, mixed with social and economic change. Throughout many examples he illustrates how crowdsourcing is becoming and will become ever more present in our daily lives, whether we realize it or not.

It’s a good easy read, and if you are a Mozillian – much of this will seem like second nature too you, but its still worth a read (and the examples outside of software are interesting).

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff

This was more of a typical business book, but gave more than I expected. The style of the book was written to the business manager trying to make sense of our brave new world e.g. think of a corporate company trying to get with the 21st century — Facebook, Web 2.0, Flickr, sharing content etc. It was amusing to read at times and the authors from Forrester Research had certainly done their homework. At times, I have to admit, it was a little cringe worthy; but on the whole I was delighted to see a book written to help businesses get to grips and think carefully about the new path of the social web. Having more people understand the freedom of sharing content and the power of collaboration – can only be a good thing. Its something open source has known all about for a very long time. There’s not a lot of point reading this to glean more about how to work in this environment if you are already working in open source, however, if you want to get a taste how the business world views what we live and breathe every day, then it has some pretty interesting tidbits.

The Lego Group example on “how to energize an existing community”, Pages 145-147) made great reading.

Mozilla Community Marketing call today

Join us for our open Community Marketing call today – March 25 at 10am PST / 5pm UTC.

• Dial-in: +1.650.903.0800, followed by 92# and then 7391#
• Toll-free: +1.800.707.2533, followed by 369# and then 7391#

(The toll-free number works with Skype and some other VOIP services from outside the US.)

For those that can’t make the call or want to participate online, join us in #marketing on IRC (for an easy way to login, visit the CMT IRC page).

Here’s the agenda:

• Firefox 3.5:
  • Update
  • Launch team
• Personas
  • http://www.spreadfirefox.com/personas
• Testimonials
• Mozilla Foundation Update:
  • Site design
• CMG:
  • Public Speaking
• Spread Firefox:
  • Update
  • QA:  https://spreadfirefox.authstage.mozilla.com/
  • Roadmap
• Events update
• Round table updates
• Marketing incubator – any ideas to discuss?

Look forward to see you there!

Mozilla Community Marketing call today

Join us for our open Community Marketing call today – March 11 at 10am PST / 5pm UTC.
Call information:
Dial in  +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#.

For those that can’t make the call or want to participate online, join us in #marketing on IRC (for an easy way to login, visit the CMT IRC page).

Here’s the agenda:

1) Announcements

2) Mozilla Labs:
- Overview
- How to get involved

3) Firefox 3.1 ->  Firefox 3.5:
- Update on timing
- Launch team

4) Marketing idea incubator
- Public Displays of Firefox
- Holi update
- Easter promotion

5) Affiliate Buttons:
- How to create one

6) Community Marketing Guide
- MozCamps Explained

7) Quick events update

Look forward to see you there!