Email Groups Of Mozillians

Ever wanted to send email to all Mozillians in a region, or the results of some other mozillians.org search? Perhaps if you are thinking of launching a local initiative?

Mozillians doesn’t have that feature, but now you can. If you install my handy Greasemonkey user script in your browser, every page of Mozillians search results will have an “Email All” button at the top. It will also have an “Email Vouched” button, because it seems the search will let you search for only unvouched Mozillians, but not for only vouched Mozillians :-|. So the code does the filtering for you. It should work in all UI languages, but bug reports are welcome.

Once you have the Greasemonkey addon installed, click here to install the user script.

(Note that Mozillians does search results page fetching on demand, so if you want to email everyone matched to a search, make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page first and make sure it has loaded them all.)

Launching Local Initiatives

There are few things more disheartening than to be ignored.

Mozilla has appointed Mozilla Reps to be “official representatives of Mozilla in their region/locale“. The Reps program is a collection of some of our most passionate and valued community members. If we then start initiatives in an area without looping them in, then we are effectively saying, even if we don’t mean to, that their position is unnecessary. And if we loop them in only when we need something, we are then saying that they are only as important as what we can get out of them.

I would like to suggest that involving the local community, in particular the Reps, in local initiatives is simply the Right Thing To Do, independent of whether they can be actively helpful (although often they can). If being the official representative of Mozilla in a region is to mean anything, surely it must mean that they find out about things that are going to happen on their patch.

So here’s my suggested rule of thumb:

Mozilla should not announce new initiatives in a particular region of the world without first informing, and ideally involving, the community leaders in that region.

And if we see this not happening, we should politely ask why.

If you are planning an initiative and wondering how to go about this, then there are at least three avenues:

  • Regional Discussion Forum – if there’s a discussion forum for that region, whatever you can say in public should be said here. If there are things you can’t say in public, like the names of particular un-announced partners, then say as much as you can and give a contact name for interested Mozillians to follow up.
  • Mozillians – search the Mozilla Community Directory for the name of the country or region. Each profile has an associated email address.
  • Reps – visit the reps list, click the hammer and spanner to bring down the advanced options, then pick a country from the middle dropdown. Each rep has contact details on their individual page.

Summer of Code 2012 Outcomes

Every year since it began, Mozilla has been invited to take part in the Google Summer of Code. For the first few years, I wrote a summary of outcomes a few months after the close of the program. Recently, I’ve not had time to do so, but this year I’m back on the wagon.

I’m pleased to say that this year’s Summer of Code was extremely successful. Of the 18 projects (50% more than last year – many thanks, Google!), 17 were successful, and in the case of the other one, an unsuccessful applicant stepped in to complete the work for the love of the code. Now that’s dedication.

I’ve produced a table which lists the 17 successful projects, their original goals, what actually happened, and where you can find the code they wrote. So if there was a project you were following, you can find out what happened to it. The projects ranged widely across Mozilla-related activities, from Firefox to MDN, Instantbird to OpenBadges. Without wanting to upset anyone I don’t mention, particular highlights for me include native support for webapps on Linux in desktop Firefox, an addon to allow users to specify a Content Security Policy for particular sites, and some other improvements to Firefox and Thunderbird which (thanks to our rapid release process) are already shipping and making people’s lives better.

Thanks must go to all the students who took part, to the mentors who took time out to look after them, and to Google for funding and administering the program.

Saving The Project From Itself

No one wakes up in the morning and says to himself: “Today I’m going to cynically manipulate procedural forms in order to be an irritating obstructionist.” Instead, such actions are often preceded by a semi-paranoid feeling of being shut out of group interactions and decisions. The person feels he is not being taken seriously, or (in the more severe cases) that there is almost a conspiracy against him—that the other project members have decided to form an exclusive club, of which he is not a member. This then justifies, in his mind, taking rules literally and engaging in a formal manipulation of the project’s procedures, in order to make everyone else take him seriously. In extreme cases, the person can even believe that he is fighting a lonely battle to save the project from itself.

— Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software

Bugzilla API 1.2 Released

I am proud to announce the release of version 1.2 of the Bugzilla REST API. This maintenance release has a bug fix or two, and some features useful to the admins of Bugzillas which BzAPI is pointed at.

The installation of BzAPI 1.0 on api-dev.bugzilla.mozilla.org will go away in 4 weeks, on 19th December. There is a limit to the number of old versions we can support on the server, particularly as the older ones can put a larger load on Bugzilla. Please use either the /1.2 or the /latest endpoints. Now that BzAPI has been stable for some time, tools which earlier rejected using the /latest endpoint may want to reconsider.

File bugs | Feedback and discussion

Google Calendar, and Meetings in UTC: The ‘Rekjavik Trick’

Google Calendar is great; I’m a big fan. A little while back, it acquired timezone support for events. More recently, it acquired split timezone support (start and end in different timezones), which is awesome for flights. And there’s a drop-down list of all the countries in the world with all of their applicable timezones. Surely that must be comprehensive, right?

Well, yes and no. I attend one meeting which is scheduled in UTC. There seems to be no entry in the massive timezone list for this. If you say you are in London (GMT+00:00), then your event will obey the UK DST rules, which means it won’t actually be in UTC during the summer.

However, there is a workaround. There is one country in the world which uses UTC and no DST – Iceland. So, if you want to have a meeting whose time is set year-round in UTC, then tell Google Calendar you are holding it in Rekjavik.

(It would be nice if Google would add an explicity “UTC” option to their massive timezones list, but this will do for now.)

Open Discussion?

The Mozilla Manifesto says:

8. Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability, and trust.

People occasionally assert that a particular major decision made at Mozilla was, or was not, made in a sufficiently transparent, community-based and participatory manner. Defining “transparent, community-based and participatory” is complicated, but here’s a good rule of thumb I would like to assert:

If there’s a Mozilla public discussion forum covering the particular area of the project in question, and nothing was said in it, then that major decision has not been made in an transparent, community-based and participatory manner.

For all their flaws (and our efforts to fix them) the discussion forums (a.k.a. “mailing lists”, “newsgroups”) are the primary public, asynchronous, multiple participant, archived communications mechanism for the Mozilla project, and they are where communities gather around areas of interest. Those are the people who need to hear about what’s going on.

If there is no forum for your area of the project, and there is a part of our community which needs a home, ask for one to be created (pick “Standard Discussion Forum”).