How I got involved in Mozilla

Billet

Following David Boswell's suggestion to share our Mozilla stories, here is mine :)

I think my first community involvement was early 2000 when I started helping people on usenet having technical problems creating web pages for Netscape 4. I was not a very technical person at that time (I had studied business and languages, computing was just a hobby) but I was very excited by the transformation of Netscape into an open source project and was regularly testing the Mx builds (which most of the time just crashed a few seconds after launch ;) )

At that time, there was very few resources on the web about Mozilla and none in French. Since I was always answering the same questions on usenet, I started working on a FAQ in 2001 about Mozilla Suite (and later Netscape 7) which became the first (actually the only for a few years) semi-technical resource about Mozilla in French (a copy is still online here http://www.chevrel.org/fr/faq/).

From 2001 to 2003, I broadened my community involvement by translating my FAQ into Spanish, opening blogs about Mozilla in French and Spanish, translating documentation through the mozFR project and getting involved in the Tech Evangelism program that Bob Clary had started. In 2003, after chatting with Spanish Free Software advocates on IRC, I created the first Mozilla web forums in Spanish on the web, copying largely the format that mozillazine.org had chosen. A couple of months later, with many people from the community we had created the first Spanish-speaking portal about the Mozilla project, called MozillaES (which still exists).

Netscape was being shut down and it was clear to me that we had to strenghten Mozilla from the community side as there was no guarantee that the just created Mozilla Foundation would survive alone with just a dozen employees.

At the end of 2003, Tristan (that I knew from Usenet) contacted me to talk about the possibility of creating a European not for profit organization that would promote Mozilla and would help build a European community around the Mozilla project. This is how a bunch of Mozilla supporters created Mozilla Europe that we later presented to the larger FLOSS European community at Fosdem 2004. I quickly focused on what I was doing best, community building, and started working on bringing volunteers into translating the website into multiple languages (27), organizing/participating in events in Europe with the help of Mozilla Foundation (~20 events per year), building an internship program, guerilla marketing, PR... We also hosted firstrun/whatsnew pages for all of Firefox locales (not just European ones) for a couple of years so as to help Mozilla which was not ready for that. In parallel, I was also pursuing my involvement into other areas of the project, from writing simple extensions for Firefox and Thunderbird, working on promoting Mozilla by all means (creating multilingual Firefox download buttons, reporting bugs in bugzilla, organizing events, talking to the Spanish press...) to writing a book about Firefox and Thunderbird.

Early 2006, Paul kim, marketing director at Mozilla corporation contacted me to work on first fixing then managing the localization of Mozilla web properties, build a community of localizers around it and continue my work as a Mozilla spokeperson for Spain (basically replicate what I had done as a volunteer in Europe but as paid staff and full time, cool isn't it ;) ). Firefox 2.0 was planned for the end of the year in 40+ locales and was the first release fully localized both on the product and web sides.

I still hold this position and I also continue my community involvement, both at a personal level (like writing patches for the Linux version of Firefox, building collaboration  with other Libre software projects, empowering clever people to build cool Mozilla resources such as Mozilla Hispano, BonjourMozilla, MozFR, the European Community Blog...) and at the professional level help release Firefox, Thunderbird and all of our other projects in 80+ languages across the world.

If you want to contact me:

Commentaires

1. Le mardi 18 octobre 2011, 00:52 par David Boswell

Thanks for sharing your story.

2. Le jeudi 3 novembre 2011, 08:46 par reduc

Joli parcours. Si tu pouvais passer le message, on attend de pied ferme une version de mobile firefox moins gourmande en ressources et plus rapide :-) (Sur android ca rame dingue) :-))

3. Le jeudi 3 novembre 2011, 09:34 par Pascal

@reduc

On y travaille, pense qu'il y a seulement 2 ans on avait même pas de navigateur mobile et toute l'industrie disait qu'il était impossible que Firefox puisse être porté en une version mobile ;)

Les Nightly builds sont déjà bien plus abouties (en tous cas sur ma tablette c'est devenu mon navigateur par défaut).

4. Le lundi 14 novembre 2011, 09:47 par Eroan

Enfin ! J'attends avec impatience la suite ;)