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Milestone: Mozilla Antarctica brings community to all 7 continents

5 responses

February 7, 2012: The creation of the Mozilla Antarctica community site brings Mozilla to all seven continents

2012_mozantartica

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5 comments on “Milestone: Mozilla Antarctica brings community to all 7 continents”

  1. Pierros Papadeas wrote on

    It all started as a joke 🙂 I remember it was during a session in MozCamp Europe 2011 that I was doodling with our dino head and the Antarctica flag. David Boswell happened to notice it and the crazy idea was born and stuck to our heads. We *needed* to setup a community in Antarctica!
    Mozillians are everywhere and all it took was a couple of people asking around if we knew anyone in Antarctica, and there you have it: We were able to set up a small community of people that where either there or have been there. The power of Mozillians on such edgy and crazy ideas, still blows my mind away 🙂

    1. dboswell wrote on

      Like Pierros said, we were hanging out at the end of MozCamp Berlin and the idea came up there.

      I had recently worked on creating some pages showing the locations of Mozilla communities around the world and had an idea to have an easter egg for communities at the North and South pole that people could come across as they explored the map.

      http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/local/

      We were talking about this with other people there and it turned out that Anthony Ricaud had a friend who just got back from a research trip in Antarctica. He reached out to him and he was interested in helping and things just gathered momentum from there and a lot of people pitched in to make this happen..

      After the site went live, it got some attention inside as well as outside Mozilla. It was cool to see Ars Technica do an article about it:

      http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/mozilla-antarctica-community-site-launched-by-coolest-firefox-fans/

  2. Paul Booker wrote on

    I didn’t contribute much to this project. I do know the other guys worked hard on this and did a great job 🙂

  3. Soumya Deb wrote on

    I recall David reaching out with MozCamp EU 2011 update to me & leo; and it had a call for help setup the Mozilla Antarctica community (#704319). Needless to say, it was so damn cool (well, literally!) that I hopped in rightaway.

    Jan co-ordinated with the project, Leo was helping with the technical bits & Baptiste Denaeyer was the activist fighting for Antarctica on several agenda (& preparing to voice ’em through the portal).

    We had plans for releasing the portal (& thus, initiate the community) by the holidays of 2011, but due to the migration from Tomer Cohen’s Mozilla Israel theme to the official “One Mozilla Blog” theme, it was postponed to new year 2012. Due to the fact that One Mozilla Blog theme wasn’t ready, we had to wait & work on it (and make a community branded version).

    Meanwhile, browsing through teh interwebz for a better/suitable release date, I found that 7th February (1821) is the date of first documented human landing on Antarctica (by John Davis, near Cape Charles, in West Antarctica). Which made so much sense, that we waited a couple of more weeks (even though we were ready with the foot-on-the-pedal) to release the portal & start the “coolest-Mozilla-community-ever” on 7th February, 2012!

    The acceptance was booming – I recall Jan bouncing in joy with the website’s analytics stats & social-media feedback in hand.

    Well, now that Firefox has a home at the land of the Tuxes, I think it’d be great to go there sometimes & say “hi!” 😉

  4. Leo McArdle wrote on

    Ah, the Antarctic community!

    It feels like the community was set up an age ago, but maybe that’s my brain confusing time and the childlike wonder and excitement at setting up a community such a huge distance away, in such a remote location.

    At times it felt like we were setting up a community not on Earth, but in space, on another planet.

    Speaking of space, where’s the ISS Mozilla community? Astronauts must get their pictures of cats somehow, and what browser would they use but Firefox?!