One of the great “side effects” of Mozilla Service Week is the number of organizations that share our belief in the importance of the Web who have stepped forward to participate in Mozilla Service Week and help individuals and organizations. Here is a sampling:
CiviCRM, an open source and free constituent relationship management solution, has donated 100 hours to help organizations with CiviCRM. They’ll help organizations with both short term support (phone conference consultation, CiviCRM installation, etc) and then three selected organizations with CiviCRM customization installations. Find out how to take advantage of CiviCRM’s services here.
Creative Commons which focuses on increasing and sharing the creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing, is hosting a series of online office hours next week. Join if you’re interested in learning how to use CC, publish your CC work and more.
Grassroots.org which provides non-profit organizations with free valuable technologies and resources to increase their efficiency and productivity is hosting an online workshop next week. Come learn about their free services!
Mahiti Infotech is a social enterprise based in Bangalore, India. Mahiti works with organizations, including non-profits, to help them deploy Free and Open Source Software. Mahiti has donated 200 hours to Mozilla Service Week and is offering to help any non-profit in India migrate to FOSS, including email and operating systems, free of charge! Sign up here.
Thanks all for joining us in Mozilla Service Week. I challenge other software companies and organizations to step up and offer up your services next week as well!
As mentioned earlier, Mozilla Service Week has partnered with OneWebDay to celebrate the Web and wrap up our week of service. Learn more about OneWebDay from Chelsea Novak‘s blog post below:
OneWebDay is a chance to reflect on how amazing the Web is and to think about how we can move it forward, making it awesome for everyone. It’s held annually on September 22, landing it on a Tuesday this year.
The web has a profound effect on how we live and work. As a OneWebDay partner, Mozilla and Mozilla Service Week want you take action, volunteer your time and help keep the Web awesome. Mozilla Service Week was created with the goal of helping not-for-profit organizations in need. OneWebDay is a great opportunity to extend those good deeds to anyone who could use a hand experiencing a better web. Everyone can help, the only requirement is to simply love the web.
So do you want to be counted amongst the millions of people who love the web and find their lives enriched by the way the web allows you to share, communicate, work or play? The ways you can contribute are only limited by your imagination, but we have a few suggestions to help you out if you’re pressed for time:
Donate to OneWebDay. OneWebDay is organized by one, full-time, staff member and an army of volunteers. With your support, OneWebDay activities can be expanded to include more international locales and improved with better resources.
Take action and perform an Internet Health Check. One of the ways Mozilla is supporting OneWebDay is by suggesting activities that are easy to do and make the Web better. Perform an Internet Health Check by updating less technically-savvy users to a modern browser. At the same time, update plugins like Flash, Java and Quicktime and help others keep their computers and the Internet healthy.
Organize or attend a OneWebDay Event in your town! There will be OneWebDay parties, rallies and service activities taking place all over the world. If you don’t see one happening near you, organize your own. Have a look at what we’re planning here in Toronto if you need further inspiration (a party, a screening and a drop off for older computers for people in need).
Donate your Twitter or Facebook status on September 22 and follow @owd on Twitter. It’s easy to do and can have more impact than you know.
Some other great ideas have cropped up in the comments of Mark’s OneWebDay blog post as well as some fun ways to show your OneWebDay love around your school or office.
Start getting ready. OneWebDay is less than three weeks away!
Today the Mozilla mobile team announced the availability of Fennec Alpha 3 for Windows Mobile. The release brings lots of great features and fixes, including improved start time, panning, compositor work, and support for a wider range of screen resolutions. For more details, see Brad Lassey’s blog post, excerpted below, or see the release notes or a cab installer here.
The first thing you’ll notice is the improved start up time. Brian Crowder took Vladimir Vukicevic’s original dabblings for Firefox on Windows CE and produced a cross platform fast start daemon for Mozilla… One caveat is that this faster start up time doesn’t take effect until after you reboot your phone (hey, this is Windows after all).
The next thing you’ll probably notice is the much improved panning. We’ve implemented a tile cache rendering system (much like you see on Google maps) that allows us to cache previously rendered content and avoid duplicating the work. This has also allowed us to switch over to native scrolling surfaces which has greatly improved panning performance. Roy Frostig goes into much greater detail on this in his blog post on the tile cache.
Also helping out panning performance has been Robert O’Callahan’s compositor work, which reduces the amount of native widgets we have to deal with when rendering or scrolling and a change to keep track of the invalidated regions ourselves rather than rely on the system do it.
As for what’s next, Brad notes:
There is plenty more work to do (after all this is an Alpha release), but in writing this blog post I realize just how much progress we’ve made since Alpha 2. I hope you’ll give it a try, put it through its paces and enjoy. Oh, and file bug reports.
We just launched a big new feature on the Mozilla Creative Collective: design challenges. The idea is to give our creative community the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to Mozilla by focusing everyone’s efforts on a particular topic. We’ll be hosting these design challenges roughly once a month, and we’re kicking things off with Firefox Goes Mobile.
The goal of the Firefox Goes Mobile challenge is to create the official promotional emblem of the mobile version of Firefox (which is getting closer and closer to release). The winning image will be used on everything from websites like mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.org to schwag like t-shirts and stickers, so if you’re a designer it’s a great way to get involved and make a big impact on a really important project.
To sum up, we’re asking you to abstractly represent mobile-themed concepts like convenience, connectivity and innovation in a simple, yet easily understandable graphic…basically telling the mobile story with a single image. Not an easy task, but of course that’s why it’s called a challenge! There are more details about what we’re looking for on the Firefox Goes Mobile page, so if you’re thinking about getting involved definitely read through those first.
The submission period lasts until September 30th (with voting extended through October 7th)…we can’t wait to see what the Mozilla community comes up with!
The Add-ons team is hosting a meetup in Chicago, IL on September 29th! For more details, see the AMO blog post, cross-posted below:
If you’re in Chi-town, this will be a great opportunity to get to familiar with add-on development and have an opportunity to share your ideas with the AMO team.
The full details of the event are up on the Mozilla wiki:
We’re now just 11 days from the start of Mozilla Service Week and momentum continues to build! The community has stepped up to pledge over 7,300 hours of service and our localization community just rolled out the Korean, Polish and Shqipversions of mozillaservice.org. We also now have volunteer opportunities posted in 79 countries. Great work everyone!
While showing people how to better use the Web is fun, throwing in a challenge or a little competition makes it even more fun! We’ve set up “service challenges” or dares on PledgeBank to inspire more participation:
Social Media Seminars: Put your experience on Facebook & twitter to good use and teach NPOs how to connect with their community, donors and the general public – for free! We’re calling for at least 50 of these sessions!
Host your own Web Q&A session: Channel your inner Lucy from Charlie Brown and set up shop at a library, coffee shop and Internet cafe. Offer to answer questions and show folks how to use the Web. We’ve even created a flyer for you to attach to your computer showing you’re a volunteer. Help us rally 100 people to do this!
Conduct Internet Health Checks: Volunteer your time and perform Internet Health Checks on computers owned by people or organizations that need your help to be safe online. Just follow four easy steps to make sure your friends, classmates, a NPO, etc are safe on the Web. We’d love for at least 100 people to sign up!
