Understanding Mozilla: Communications

I’m running with my “Understanding Mozilla” idea – 5-minute shorts to explain things about the Mozilla project to new or existing participants.

Things at Mozilla change a lot; therefore, altering the presentation to fix bugs or incorporate new material should be easy. Therefore, it makes a lot more sense to use a “voiceover plus” approach, and to build it using Popcorn rather than as a compiled video that has to be re-edited in heavy duty video-editing software each time.

So, each short will be:

  • 5 minutes max
  • Scripted voiceover combined with stills, video and/or overlaid text
  • Script written collaboratively in wiki
  • Constructed using popcorn.js and Popcorn Maker
  • Easily remixable and rebuildable if things change

Here’s a draft script for the first one, on the subject of “Communications”. I expect that as I go through this process I’ll also be able to provide good feedback to the Popcorn team, which is all to the good.

Comments welcome, as are suggestions for future topics.

5 thoughts on “Understanding Mozilla: Communications

  1. The script looks good, and I like the idea to use popcorn to make that thing hackable. I wonder if we could even have voice-tracks in different languages for it? Having it read out in French and Spanish might already expand the coverage we get a great deal.

  2. Yep, we could definitely localize the voice track. Although the viewed resources may still contain English text.

  3. Suggestions:
    1. At the risk of having too much content, I would add wikimo (where we post meeting minutes and lots of other documentation) and Air Mozilla, where we live stream and archive our past presentations
    2. For discussion forums, I think you should list some of the most active forums to guide people to an active place to start. (Push them where the people are.)
    3. Bugzilla can be daunting. How about linking to Johnath’s introductory video? http://blog.johnath.com/2010/02/04/bugzilla-for-humans/
    4. Vidyo, let people know that they can request a guest link if one isn’t posted.

  4. 1. In order to keep it shorter, I am going to arbitrarily say that Etherpad, WikiMo, MDN and so on are collaboration tools rather than communication tools, and deserve their own spot. Air Mozilla is also a one-way channel; although it’s important, I’d need a little more convincing that it fits here.

    2. Suggestions?

    3. Good idea.

    4. OK.

  5. Pingback: “Understanding Mozilla: Communications” v0.1 | Hacking for Christ

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