Defining the problem

As we have seen in recent weeks, Spread Firefox has been in rapid

decline. The quality of the posts have gone down and the overall purpose
of the site has been questioned on a number of occasions by some of the
more vocal participants.

In addition to that, Spread Firefox's relevance has been challenged by a

number of member-created projects that directly compete with our
purpose, notably Robin Monk's nascent MozillaNetwork project and
me.at.work's Mozilla Materials Wiki. While these are the most visible so
far, not only is likely that more sites will spring up over time, but the
energy, e
ort and time dedicated to them will directly diminish the
ecacy, focus and popularity of Spread Firefox.

Stating our goals

What needs to happen in the next six months is an appraisal (and
documentation) of what we have achieved so far, what mistakes or
omissions we've made and what we can do to correct, learn from and
educate others about the most significant findings.

The most crucial thing that we can do is to move away from a top-down,
campaign-driven "organization" to become a resource for empowering
individuals with tools that help them to be successful, encourages deep
participation in the community and promotes cross-pollination between
parts of the MozillaUniverse that rarely connect.

Spread Firefox should become:

• more member and project focused
• a resource for planning, staging, and launching "spreading" projects
• community-driven, with spotlighted projects and community initiatives
• a place for teams to meetup, coordinate and share their work publicly
• a recruitment tool for new and existing projects
• a funnel for designers, artists, interface designers, writers and other
"liberal arts types" into the MozillaUniverse
• a resource for Mozilla-related marketing materials, both ocial and
user-submitted
• more fun and yet also more age-appropriate; do we want to be hip with
13-year-old boys, 30-year-old females or some other demographic?
• more internationally focused, with ties to MozillaLocalizers and
MozillaEurope
Spread Firefox should o
er:
• localizable marketing materials
• localizable artwork
• country-specific aliate program
• the ability for members to start their own projects/teams
• access to a large network of volunteers
• a strong sense of community
• integration with the rest of the MozillaNetwork

Agenda
In order to accomplish these goals, over the next 3-6 months, we will
need to:

• Upgrade to Drupal 4.6

• Build out functionality in the project module to support teamwork
• Create an "downloadable advocacy kit" that includes things like artwork,
marketing materials and related messaging resources
• Establish a distributed identity/account system to support SSO
• Build out technical infrastructure (hosting infrastructure, redundancy
and backend support)
• Refine aliate program: better spam control, point exchange program
(or tiered gifts... 1000 points gets you a plush doll, etc), more
opportunities to earn points
• Create reputation/participation system that leverages participation
across entire MozillaUniverse
• Implement drupal spam control
• Refine SFX's documentation, action techniques & ideas
• Improve forum, gallery, etc design
• Increase number of roles on SFX (moderators++)
• Make promoting posts easier/more sensible
• Add avatars to posts
• Improve my page: my toolkit/action launching point (work with
MusicForAmerica)
• Integrate feeds from MozillaUniverse on SFX homepage
• Widen promotion e
orts to beyond Firefox (even if we don't change the
name or at spreadthunderbird.com)
• Monthly Mozilla messaging push
• Add featured projects to sidebar, list of active and new projects
• Create system for integrating external tools that people may already be
using
• RSS feeds from Basecamp?
• Work with Drupal to develop CCK
• Work with Drupal to improve performance
• Add Mozilla wiki integration
• Make better use of mailing lists
• Establish MozillaUN bi-weekly/monthly meetings
• Better coordinate marketing e
orts
• Look to Polish localizers group for ideas on organizing
(MozillaMeetups)
• Translation of SFX content
• More internationally focused campaigns working with MozillaEurope

Etc & Ephemera

MozillaLocalizers

Part of our work on SFX will have the secondary e
ect of giving us tools
to support localization teams around the world. In particular, things that
we take for granted (primarily hosting and bandwidth) are very hard to
find, in addition to the needs for well-implemented technical
infrastructure.

If Mozilla can provide a specific and robust toolset for language projects,
international adoption would be much improved. This toolset would be
hosted in a sister Drupal install found at MozillaLocalizers.com. It would
be designed very similar to SpreadFirefox except that it would focus on
translation and localization tools, as opposed to marketing and
promotional tools.

MozillaEurope would be primarily responsible for the administration of

the site.

MozillaEurope

MozillaEurope is anxious to see more support for their work from Mozilla
proper and SpreadFirefox. In particular, many visitors to SFX are not
native english speakers or are looking for localized versions of
mozilla.org. We need to address this need and MozillaEurope should take
on the responsibility for this work once we create the tools to support
their e
orts.

In addition, more needs to be done to coordinate promotional e
orts and

planning "across the pond" and around the world. For example, the Dutch
advert campaign is over a month old and it looks as though they are not
going to meet their goal. Had they better coordinated with us (as
opposed to starting an independent project) their success would have
been more likely.

Similarly, other independent projects are going to continue to pop up

with the absense of obvious support for the international community. It is
my belief that Mozilla's longterm success depends greatly on this
community and that we should embrace it more visible ways on SFX.

MozillaNetwork

This should be the name for the interwoven network of sites that
represent Mozilla's online footprint. It would include SFX and mozilla.org
but also sites like MozDev, UMO, mozillazine and others.

This would be analogous to O'Rielly's network of sites or C|Net's family of

sites.

Thus the fact that there is an "o
cial" network should be made more
apparent; o
cial sites should share design elements (as mozilla.org and
SFX do now) and also place a higher priority on coordinating branding,
messaging and chain of command.

Furthermore, some guidelines on publishing, licensing and trademark

usage should spread out across the process for adding or removing sites
from the network should be spelled out. For example, there should be
processes for bringing localization projects into the network, whether
that's having a certain quota of active members or a certain percentage of
work accomplished. Mozilla should also strive to register as many domain
names as reasonably feasible to accommodate the addition of such sites.

Mozilla Developer's Network

I only recently found out about the DevMoProject, but apparently Mozilla
has hired someone to coordinate the creation of a Mozilla Developer's
Network, almost identical to the project that Robin Monks has begun to
organize. Although the description of the project appears to be more like
MSDN for Mozilla, nevertheless, the similarities between this project and
Robin's are unmistakable.

In any case, better coordination, planning and communication needs to

happen between these emergent communities lest we will end up not
only reinventing the wheel countless times, but squandering our
volunteer resources, creating confusion for the public (and our
volunteers) and risk alienating people who are already doing good work
that would be rendered futile if Mozilla continued its work while ignoring
their significant contributions.

Technology selection

Since SFX is already using Drupal, it makes sense to standardize Mozilla

on one platform. There have been numerous suggestions that Mozilla
need to build its own CMS platform, most recently from Robin himself. I
believe that this is a waste of e
ort and a distraction from our primary
goals. Drupal is a stable, robust and fairly mature system; further, it is
very well built for extensibility and with some shouldering from Mozilla,
could become the platform of our dreams.

There seems very little benefit in trying to reinvent a CMS solution again,
as it's already been tried on a number of occassions. As it is, both
MozillaEurope and a number of other sites in the network are using
cludged solutions that are simply not cut out for the task of community
building.

Rather than starting from scratch, we should leverage the countless hours
that Drupal developers have invested in the platform and add to it.

In addition, the next version of Drupal will see significant changes in the
flexibility of its node/content system. Mozilla should increase its
participation in the Drupal community multi-fold in order for these
changes to support its goals.

On top of that, Drupal already supports a very convenient distributed

authentication method and I have recently endeavored to enhance the
power, robustness and utility of this system by working with a good
cross-section of stakeholders.