about:mozilla is a weekly round-up of news and contribution opportunities. Here’s what’s happening this week.

WebKit: An Objective View
If you love reading online news websites, you’ve probably stumbled across something like this: “Oh no, Opera will move from Presto to WebKit!”. While this seems to be pretty alarming, it’s hard to have an objective view on this. But luckily, Robert Nyman and Rob Hawkes wrote an objective blog post, in which they explain what WebKit actually means, how new features get into it and what it actually means that Opera moves to WebKit.

Summer of Code 2013

Google Summer of Code (“SoC”) is an annual program that pays students to work on free software projects over the summer. This program has already led to some great results: Tilt for example also used to be a SoC project. Mozilla has been invited to participate in SoC each year since the program began in 2005, and for this year, we are already collecting interesting 8-week tasks. If you can think of one that you might be able to guide a student through, read Gervase Markham’s blog post to find out how to propose your idea.

SUMO in 2013: Firefox for Android
David Tenser’s series of blog posts continues and this week, it’s all about Firefox Android and SUMO. The goals can be summarized in three words: Community, mobilization and, oh, community! One of the aims is to allow contributors to help others on their mobile while for example waiting for the bus to arrive in the morning. But this year, SUMO will also aim at some other things: Read David Tenser’s blog post to find out how we can enable fully community-driven self-service support for Firefox for Android.

Creating a Mozilla workshop
In her latest blog post, Lukas Blakk describes how she organized a Mozilla workshop for beginners that consisted of hacking on mobile HTML5 games. After a few lunch time meetings, she drove to Redwood City with 20 laptops and 15 Firefox OS test devices. At Dare 2B Digital, an annual conference for 300 young women, the future webmakers have created customizations to their matching game. More importantly, they’ve earned first-hand experience with the power of creating web apps that can run on any web-enabled device. Read Lukas Blakk’s blog post to see the results and find out what’s next.

Contribute Form for Everyone
In the last few months, our contributors and developers worked hard on improving the Mozilla.org contribute page‘s functionality in terms of localization. The outcome is mind blowing: You can now translate the site, make it respond automatically and embed the “Want to help?” form on any website. Read Rubén Martín’s blog post to find out why this is important, how it works for you and what the next steps are.

Photo of the Week

Because we got such a great response from our last wallpaper giveaway, we thought we’d do it again. Download the Firefox for Android wallpaper for free.

Meet Some Mozillians
Mozilla says bonjour to Lucas Rocha, Claire Clarista and Mozilla Bangladesh. Read more about how they contribute to Mozilla.

Upcoming events
* February 21 – Zürich, Switzerland: Mozcoffee Switzerland
* February 21 – In over 10 cities in Mexico: Translathon
* February 22 – Los Angeles, US: SCALE 11x
* February 23 – Cambridge, MA: LibrePlanet
* February 23, Manado, Indonesia: MozKopDarManado
* See more in our weekly event guide about:events or find more events on the Mozilla Community Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

about:mozilla is a weekly round-up of news and contribution opportunities. Here’s what’s happening this week.

Firefox Flicks Returns
Last year, our global video competition Firefox Flicks, which aims to tell people the Firefox story, was a huge success. More than a thousand filmmakers submitted hundreds of entries from all over the world. And this year, Firefox Flicks is going to return and we are giving you the chance again to win prizes. This year’s theme “Get Mobilized” is about enabling more people to take advantage of the full power of the open web – no matter where they are. So go and get some inspiration (and get your camera and clapperboard ready!).

Announcing the Firefox OS Developer Preview Phone

Many developers who code apps for Firefox OS, Mozilla’s upcoming mobile operating system, have to test their apps in a rather inconvenient way: In a simulator on their computer. But now, we are proud to announce something that will make them cheer: A Firefox OS Developer Preview Phone. These well-equipped phones, which are meant to be used by developers, make the mobile web more accessible to more people. More importantly, they give coders the chance to create and test apps, powered by the openness, simplicity and freedom of Firefox OS.

A Learning Standard for Web Literacy
Doug Belshaw, Badges & Skills Lead of Mozilla, has published a series of blog posts about getting closer to a Web Literacy standard. Mozilla is working with the community to define a new standard for Web Literacy, and anyone can be involved. From our starting point, we’ll start charting learning pathways. This open learning standard will mark the areas as important, co-ordinate efforts, and improve the experience for the learner.

HTML5 Support for MP3 and MP4
If you love listening to music, you probably stumbled across an MP3 audio file on the Internet before. Unfortunately, Firefox wasn’t able to play it on its own and needed a third-party plugin’s help. Now, this problem belongs to the past: Our contributors and developers are working on making it able to play MP4 videos and MP3 audio files in HTML5. If you are using Windows 7, you can already test this feature in a Firefox Nightly build.

SUMO in 2013
If you ever happen to have any problems with Firefox, Thunderbird or other Mozilla products, SUMO will be there for you. David Tenser, who is responsible for this global and open source support platform, announced the overarching mission for 2013: Delighting the users. It means going above and beyond and providing support that is better than they expected, it means making sure everyone visiting SUMO will get an answer to their question. Read his blog post to find out how to achieve this goal.

Photos of the Week

Top: Mozilla is officially the most trusted Internet company in privacy. Hooray! Bottom: The first Firefox Donuts ever.

Upcoming events
* February 15, Ilfov, Romania: OSOM EvolutiON
* February 15, West Mifflin, US: Introducing the IT Field
* February 16, Manila, Philippines: Junior Form Function & Class
* February 19, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Mozilla Intro at Sarajevo
* Find more events on the Mozilla Community Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!