What is Mozilla for a contributor?

Reading about the current happenings at Mozilla headquarters, I ask myself, "do this matter to me as a contributor to the Mozilla project sitting on the other side of the world?". Below are more questions that came to my mind and what I think about it:

"what is Mozilla for me"
To me, Mozilla is a community, a movement, where a group of people who are together to support the mission. To take this mission forward there are products/projects like Firefox, Webmaker and other. As a project, Mozilla has made big impact in building a better web for all. For a movement of this scale to run, there is a need of people who can work on full time on it, that is where I see the company/staff as part of the community. The staff, the company are there to support the community, the mission and not the other way around.

"why I contribute"  

As a community member living 8500 miles away from where the Mozilla headquarters is based, and the rest of the community spread across the world, the only reason for contributing to the project is because of the community and its mission. This is the most diverse global community that I got to be part of. There are probably several number of things to agree and disagree among us(the community members) outside of the Mozilla cause, but that is not why we are in the community.

'Many Voices, One Mozilla'
At Mozilla, our goal is to reach Million Mozillians. If we want to reach this goal, we should not lose focus of who we are.  If there is anyone that we should listen to, it is our community and our users/ share holders. For Mozilla to be relevant for next 100 years and do good, it should be about the community and its mission.

An encounter with Mahatma Gandhi during Mozilla Summit 2013

As a contributor for the Mozilla project, I was invited to participate at Mozilla Summit that happened in California recently. There is a LOT to get excited and share about Mozilla Summit. You can find many experiences shared on the Web, to share a few, you may read it from here, here, here, here and here. In this post I will share a short personal anecdote that happened with me during the summit.

My cousin brother, Goutham got into a flight to US at the same time I got into a flight to back home in 2010. Knowing that I will be in Bay area that weekend, Goutham came all the way from LA to meet me. We had a quick chat on Friday night, he invited me to a party that he and his friends were hosting at San Francisco on Saturday.

While most of the community members went to Great America after dinner, I took a short nap and then went to San Francisco around 11.00 PM, one of Goutham's friend came to pickup. The party was at Ferry building with Bay Bridge as the backdrop, it was quite a view. We had good fun till late AM. The car was parked on the other side of the road, while we were walking past the Ferry plaza, there I saw the statue of Mahatma Gandhi.

Gandhi Statue at San Francisco Ferry Terminal

Photo courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashish_tibrewal/2444451003/ 

Staring at the statue, thinking of the kind of impact he had made on the world, it was a short moment of introspection. 'Will I be able to make an impact?'  

Next day, it was a grand closure of the fantastic summit. At this time something amazing was announced - Mozilla is building a monument in front of the Mozilla San Francisco office and it will be filled with names of all the contributors of the project.

Proposed Monument to Mozillians outside Mozilla's San Francisco office

To me, this tells the impact a community has made and the individuals as part of a community. In this fast paced world, how often do we get to improve peoples lives through little contributions? how often do we get to make an positive impact through our work, big or small? This monument is a representation of a movement.

"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history." - Mahatma Gandhi

UPDATE:

In-front of the yet to be unveiled monument..

Community Catalyst

In my nearly 5 years of contributions to Mozilla, one thing remained at the core is community. When I first came across the Mozilla community, at that time open source or why internet matters was not something that I would care, nor the friends, people around me locally. Coming from a place where the first question people ask is "what do you get?". It was difficult for me to understand why one would spend their time and energy spreading the word about a company and go beyond their way to do things. The people I saw were doing it for fun, for themselves. One thing that caught me was the passion with which this group of people are working towards something, may be something big.

Recently I participated at Webmaker Reps Training Days. Around 40 Mozilla Reps from across the world came together to participate in the Training days. On the first day we participated at Hive Athens event. After the lunch the reps had free time, most went for a walk in the city. Me and a few reps remained at the Hive event.

Those of us who were at the venue, after the event we were making arrangements in the next hall for the next day training session. We were moving tables, screens, chairs, speakers to this new hall. At this time I met, Luis Sanchez from Mexico. When asked Luis if he knew Ricardo Meza from Mexico, he said yes. Luis started telling about Ricardo that he was the one who started the Mozilla Mexico community and did many outreach work. I told Luis that Ricardo was one of the Mozillian's who inspired me while getting started in the community and also helped as a guide.

Coming from a non open source background, I did not had any role models to look up to in this area. The only people who motivated me to be in the community were the community members itself. Ricardo Meza was doing all fancy Mozilla events, with huge audience at big conference halls, large banners, wearing Mozilla t-shirt all the time. The Mexico community had a cool website, there were several activities going on.

Ricardo Meza at Campus Party, Mexico

The thought was like "will i be able to do things like this one day?" At that time, I was not even close to the thinking of what these community members were able to do. May be now a bit close. Now, once in a while when a community member say that they look-up to me/ my activity, I welcome the fact and understand what it means, encouraging them to be the same, one day to experience it. This is a community cycle that I believe in. 

Luis and me continued the conversation, the later part of the conversation reminded me of my roots in the community.
Luis showed the Firefox lanyard that he was wearing and said: "Ricardo introduced me to the Mozilla community, this lanyard is given to me by Ricardo".
I asked: "do you mean you got your first lanyard from Ricardo?",
Luis: "yes and this is the one given by Ricardo.., around 4-5 years ago.."

For a moment I went silent.

I asked, "is this like sentiment?"
Luis: "yes".

Asked if I can take a picture of him, to which this is the pose he gave:

Luis Sanchez, Mexico

Then he took a picture of me saying 'hi' to show it back to Ricardo.

Vineel saying 'hi' to Ricardo

There is this belongingness and shared emotion that enables transfer of values through effective communication that is behind the strong community. This is one of the layers that I experienced with the Mozilla community recently. What layers of the community have you experienced? Who are the people who inspired you in the community? What do you think is the catalyst behind the strong community? What is your favorite community story? I'm sure there are stories like this everywhere in the community, I'd love to read yours.

Your Browser in Your Language!

The rate of innovation on the web is incredible. Mozilla has been at the forefront of this innovation and has been doing so in an open, participatory manner. Firefox is designed for standard compliance, performance, and portability. Mozilla Localization Project, abbreviated as MLP, tries to help and ease the availability of mozilla.org products toward different world cultures and languages through the support of the open source community.

Localized to over 80 locales, Firefox is available in the native language to over 97% of the worldwide Internet population! But how exactly does Mozilla succeed in having impact and how does its
volunteer driven culture complete the picture?

Living inside the Open Source community of mozilla.org, MLP couldn't be anything else than volunteers driven. If you think one of these products should be available in your language and that helps a large group of people how they experience the web, you're probably the best person to make it happen. Or the right person to help direct the people already working on this task.

You can start following the steps described in "How to localize Mozilla" to get in touch with our community. The document focuses on Mozilla based products, containing the basic steps to start a new localization project and how to let us know you're working on it.

I am honoured to be among those who were invited to amazing Mozilla Summit'10, due to my involvement with the Student Reps program and as a Community member. Awesomely it was during my internship at Mozilla! It was a situation of double joy for me :)

Mozilla Summit was an experience of personal, technical, creative and inspiring all at once. There were around 600 Mozillians: hackers, localizers, testers, marketers, and the individuals formerly known as 'users' like me. Mozilla Summit Science Fair, where representatives from over forty countries in attendance showcased their local communities and cultures.

Imagine, how great it would be to capture the essence of this diverse community and their cultures that are what Mozilla is. I discussed the idea with Mary Colvig, my mentor and the team  just a couple of days before the summit and this turned out to be one of my projects during the internship! We had less time to actually shoot the video person by person as most of the schedules were fixed and people were moving for participating at various sessions. The representatives at the fair were unaware of that we will be visiting them to make a video shoot. It was random and we tried to cover as much as we can. It was amazing to talk to each community member.

Many thanks to Mary Colvig for encouraging the idea & Rainer Cvillink, the media person for his patience in time to shoot, edit and give a beautiful outcome of the video. 

And finally, 

The video 'Your Browser in Your Language', was published in the Mozilla Annual Report!

Mozilla Community meet @ Ameerpet

Date: 19th july 3.0pm,ameerpet,A.P. INDIA

We started with  discussing each others favorite features of Firefox,

*Cbrao said that he is unable to open multiple Gmail accounts at the same time in Firefox, where as he can do so in IE8, using the 'Start a new session' feature. Veeven told him that he can use multiple profiles. (But, afterwards by Googling, he said found Gmail Manager.)

*veeven talked about the awsomebar and recent improvements like restricting the matches to bookmarks (*) and to tagged (+), etc.

* Manish enquired about a way to install/uninstall add-ons without restaring Firefox. Veeven told him that the Jetpacks can meet that requirement.

*Me & Sireesh proposed to start a community website for Firefox users in Andhra Pradesh. Manish suggested it would be better we conduct meetups about all free software's.

A gathering about Firefox without talking on Add-ons? Never.  We spoke about our favorite add-ons.

here are few:

* Aardvark: you can use it to clean up (remove ads, or other things on the that you do not need on) a web page before printing

* Tree Style Tab: organizes tabs in a tree structure. If you open multiple tabs by clicking on links on a page, all those tabs become children of the tab that you opened them from

* S3 Firefox Organizer: Helps you manage your files on Amazon S3

* FlashGot: use your external download manager in place of Firefox's

* Zotero: helps you manage your research sources

* Weave: a service from Mozilla. Sync your bookmarks, browsing history, and saved passwords.

* Indic Input Extension: type in Indian languages

* Window Resizer: resize your browser window to standard resolution sizes

* Firebug: debugging tool for HTML, CSS and JavaScirpt

* FoxyProxy: Use multiple internet connections? Make your life easy.

* FoxClocks: Have current time of multiple locations on your status bar or toolbar.

* DownThemAll: a download manager cum accelerator for your Firefox

* Cooliris: browse photos and videos on the web or on your computer

* Padma: read Indian language local newspapers in Unicode

link to gallery : http://picasaweb.google.com/pindivineelreddy/LaunchPartyCommunityMeetAmeerpet#

Spotlight Success party @ My home.:D

I was featured as the 'community spotlight' in the homepage of Spread Firefox for all my contributions as a Student rep / volunteer for Mozilla!
Also i was the First community member to be featured on that NEW SFX website :)

Party Time...!!!!!

The New spread Firefox...coming soon.!

Inspiring community members...

Ricardo Meza,Mexico.
he is working in Firefox Mexican Spanish localization.

" Mozilla-Mexico.sf.net "

*****

Issa M,Jordan.
One of the member behind open source/Mozilla club at Jordan university of science and technology..(JUST..)

' http://www.just.edu.jo/opensource/mozillaclub '

*****

Clauber ,Brazil.
Presently helping ubiquity project.A member of Rockband :)

' http://clauber.coffeebreakers.org '

*****

Danishka Navin, Sri Lanka.
He is working on a lot of projects and an active open source enthusiast.

'http://www.danishkanavin.blogspot.com '

*****

Guillermo Movia, Argentina.
he is with the localization team,started translating Mozilla suite several years ago.also work relating code and css.

' http://www.mozilla-ar.org '

*****

I am glad that i got to know them.:)

Networking and friends

I got to know many wonderful people and be friend with them. They are from various parts of the world:  Jordon, Brazil, Argentina, Sri Lanka, New Mexico, California, China, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, west Indies, Paris and more!!!
Some are professional Open source developers, some supporters, some creative people and some leaders.  Its amazing to meet like minded passionate people and learn from them.