Planet Mozilla Blog

Reposted from mozilla.governance.

Thanks to everyone that’s participated in the discussions here. It’s helped greatly to inform our early decisions and get us rolling.

Robert Accettura voices what I think a lot of us are coming around to realizing:

For the record, it’s great to see so much discussion about what was originally somewhat of a small thing in the community. It says two things in my mind:

1. Blogging has a very positive impact in development, and is very well regarded by all readers, and participants.
2. People get a much better understanding for the “behind the scenes” and “when not behind the computer” in developers lives.
3. People really enjoy it. I know I do.

[insert cute remark about that being three things, not two, and then segue to the roadmap.]

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Here’s a quick dump of our plans for Planet Mozilla. I’ve broken it down into long-term, medium-term, and short-term. The long-term plans are more about the vision of the project rather than specific goals or tasks. The nearer-term stuff is a bit more concrete.

Long Term

1. Planet Mozilla will be a lively hub of news, opinion, and knowledge and a resource for anyone interested in Mozilla.
2. Planet should include feeds from everyone in the Mozilla Community willing to participate and it should evolve in real time with the community.
3. Usability should improve for both the Web and feed versions as the technology allows.

Medium Term

1. Offer at least two feeds at Planet Mozilla. One feed will be inclusive of whatever content community members offer. A second feed will offer, by methods still to be determined, only or mostly Mozilla-related content.
2. Update the Planet software and the theme for the Web version.
3. Finalize a policy for the operation of Planet Mozilla.

Short Term

1. Redress of grievances. (in process. file bugs if you were wronged in and need us to right things.)
2. Set up better communication channels. (mostly done)

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Here’s a second draft of the “policy” for how the Planet Mozilla team will manage the service. Some are placeholders and we need to work on the language.

I. All active Mozilla Community members* are eligible for inclusion in a Planet Mozilla feed.
II. All changes to Planet Mozilla require either review from two members of the Planet Team.
III. Blog owners will be notified before any changes are made to their feed at Planet Mozilla.
IV. All changes made to Planet Mozilla will be announced at the Planet Mozilla Blog.
V. [We probably need to have something here about disclaimers of liability for content.]
VI. We will strive for diversity in the make-up of the Planet Mozilla Module Owner and Peers.

* active Mozilla Community members include anyone who is contributing to any Mozilla-hosted projects. This includes, but is not limited to, code contributors, policy wonks, qa and testing folks, marketing contributors, localization teams, user support people, documentation contributors, project management people, toolsmiths, and regular forum, irc, and newsgroup participants.

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The plans for Planet Mozilla are really just about making it the best possible resource for our community. I’m happy to have feedback there, especially on the medium-term goals. There’s probably a lot more that could be added to the policy part, too, but I think we should approach this with, as Deb phrased it, a “let’s see what happens” style of policy rather than trying to figure it all out before moving to make things better.

Again, thanks for all of the great feedback. Keep it coming.

- A (on behalf of the Planet Mozilla team)

Today I “Won’tFixed” bug 288856. The part of this bug that applies to Planet Mozilla would have required that either the Planet Mozilla maintainers censor posts from contributor feeds or require that the contributors self-censor. Even though the Planet Mozilla policy doc is still in draft (at mozilla.governance,) it’s already clear that neither of those are going to happen, hence the Won’tFix as it relates to the Planet Mozilla resource.

- A

Welcome to the Planet Mozilla Blog. This is the home of the Planet Mozilla team. We’ll be posting here from time to time to let you all know about changes we’re making to planet.mozilla.org.

Our goal is to keep you all informed about new feed additions or other changes to Planet Mozilla. If we add a new feed, we’ll post a notice and probably make a short introduction. If we remove a feed, we’ll let you all know so that you can pick it up directly if it’s something you want to continue following.

In addition to subtractions and additions, we’ll also be talking about Planet Mozilla policy. We’ve enabled comments here and we invite you all to participate. If you think we’re doing a great job, we’d love to hear it. If you think we could improve, well, we’ll read those posts too. Just kidding, we’ll read and respond to as much as we can.

Please don’t, however, use this blog as a place to request specific additions or subtractions to Planet Mozilla. For that, we’ve set up a Bugzilla Component called “planet.mozilla.org” in the Websites Product. Post your requests for changes there and we’ll get to them as soon as possible.

Oh, and I almost forgot to introduce the team. I’m Asa and I’m the Module Owner for Planet Mozilla. Joining me as Module Peers are Robert Accettura, Deb Richardson, and J. Paul Reed. We’re the decision making team for Planet Mozilla but this is your service and we’re here to make it better for the entire Mozilla community so please use this blog to let us know how we can do that.

- A