asa's blog

The new Spread Firefox is live and visiting http://spreadfirefox.com will take you to the new site. This site will remain here at http://archive-sfx.spreadfirefox.com as an archive of the first two years of Spread Firefox.

Over the coming days and weeks, this site will stop accepting new content and accounts and will become essentially read-only with all of the new Firefox spreading happening at the new site.

We're almost ready to flip the switch, pull the lever, press the shiny big red button!

As you all have been reading here for some time, the new Spread Firefox is an action-oriented, project-based platform. We're transitioning away from a platform dominated by discussion to one that focuses on taking action to spread Firefox.

This means that blogging is going away, to be replaced by projects. Projects are like mini-sites within Spread Firefox that give you the tools to manage specific activities to spread Firefox. Anyone can create one of these projects which come with a discussion forum, a mailing list, a project calendar, a document and image repository, etc.

Those projects that get traction will be featured on the front page of Spread Firefox. Projects that look like they need help getting support can also be featured on the front page.

In addition to Spread Firefox member projects, the Mozilla Marketing team are increasingly running their projects and programs at Spread Firefox. You'll find Mozilla Events, Mozilla Materials and Logos, Stats and Metrics, and more, all running out of Spread Firefox.

You all are encouraged to sign up with projects or programs that interest you and to create projects yourself.

The transition to the new site is going to be happening in a matter of hours. Your bookmarks and the URL http://spreadfirefox.com will take you to the new site. You'll have to re-login but your accounts, including your affiliate points, your private messages, and profiles should all be intact. The old Spread Firefox will be archived at a new URL, probably http://archive.spreadfirefox.com and will, sometime over the next few months be transitioned to a read-only site. We'll post links to the old site as soon as the URLs are updated and we'll keep you updated on the changes to the archive so that you have time to transition any of your documents to the new site or to re-locate your personal blogs.

In addition to the transition to the new platform, we're also going to be introducing you all to a larger team of Spread Firefox leaders, from Mozilla, Glaxstar, and the broader community. I'm still going to be around, but my involvement with the site-wide project will wane and I'll shift my focus to specific projects.

You all are what makes Firefox such a success. You've brought us 130 million Firefox users and helped make Firefox a household name. With Firefox 3 ever-closer at hand, you all will be the ones to take us to 200 million users and beyond. Thanks to all of you for your amazing efforts over the last three years and I look forward to everything you all will accomplish in the next three years.

- Asa

When someone at Mozilla sneezes, there's someone somewhere writing about it. From Twitter to the New York Times and everything in between, Mozilla attracts an amazing volume of coverage.

This volume is both good and bad. We don't have the marketing and pr budgets of the software mega-companies so the press buzz we get organically is wonderful. The downside is that because of the sheer volume of coverage, it's difficult to follow it all and make sure that Mozilla is being represented fairly.

What Mozilla lacks in marketing and pr budget, however, it more than makes up in the enthusiastic and capable community of participants who have already brought Firefox to 130 million users and made Mozilla a household name.

For the Record (FTR) is a community-driven public relations and press response program that will harness the energy and knowledge of the Mozilla community to 1) catalog all of the online coverage of the Mozilla Project, 2) develop a sustainable team of spokespeople who feel empowered to respond to online coverage, and 3) build a collection of talking points and responses to frequently asked questions.

To start participating today, simply add fortherecord@mozilla.org to your email address-book and forward blog posts or articles about Mozilla projects or products that are a) factually inaccurate or misleading, b) relevant to Mozilla, its products, or the Open Web, but fail to mention Mozilla, or c) thoughtful stories that are factually accurate and favorable, or at least fair about Firefox. Please include a short note explaining why you've forwarded the story.

The For the Record team, Mozilla's marketing team, PR representatives, or various spokespeople will take it from there.

Want to join the For the Record team, and help us further develop the program and write a set of FAQs and other materials that will make it easier for in the Mozilla community to better tell the Mozilla story and respond effectively when needed? Well, that's easy too. Simply subscribe to the mailing list. Please note, unless you're really interested analyzing the flow of Mozilla news and helping to distill relevant content into documentation, this probably isn't the list for you. If, on the other hand, that sound like great fun, we'd love to have you involved.

This special, extended, Air Mozilla Live broadcast will feature guests from the Creative Commons, as they get ready to celebrate their 5th anniversary; the Mozilla application team, sharing expertise in extension development; and the Mozilla Mobile Platform team, discussing Mozilla's mobile goals, target platforms, and next steps.

Join us, this Wednesday for our live community discussion and "call-in" show.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Melissa Reeder, Mark Finkle, Dave Townsend, and Christian Sejersen.
When: Wednesday, November 28, from 14:00:00 - 15:30:00 PST (UTC -8.)
Where: View the webcast at air.mozilla.com and participate on IRC, IM, or email.

• IRC: join the discussion on irc.mozilla.org #airmozilla
• IM: instant message your questions to the AIM/YIM/GTalk screenname airmozilla.
• email: send in your questions before and during the show to airmozilla@mozilla.com.

Air Mozilla is now streaming 24/7 with a new live show every month (or as close to that as makes sense.) If you've got ideas for shows, please email us and let us know. Even better, if you're a part of the Mozilla community and you'd like to be interviewed or present on our live broadcast, let us know.

We're making good progress on the next iteration of Spread Firefox and we'd like to expand the number of people participating so today we're opening up the SFX2 beta to everyone here.

You can log in with your same SFX username and password.

The two links you'll want to check out first are Rhian's intro to the new project structure and the project I created for SFX2 beta feedback.

The major change you'll notice right off is that we've rearranged SFX from a site that revolved around blog posts and discussion, to a site that revolves around projects and the tools needed to run those projects.

This is the first pass and we've no doubt got a long ways to go before we have everything we want, but it's been far too long since we refreshed things here and so we'd rather err on the side of opening it up early than find ourselves in the new year without a new SFX.

So, please head over to the SFX2 beta site, poke around, and let us know what's working and what's not.

As some of you know, there's been an effort ongoing for a couple of years to come up with a re-design of the Spread Firefox project. There's a lot of history (too much) to go into all of it, but a while back Ian Hayward posted a call to action for building a new Spread Firefox. His call to action was a response to several complaints about the state of things here and there were about a half-dozen people that took him up on that call to action and have been working on and off for a while to develop a new vision for Spread Firefox.

The new vision was for a site that was focused on action rather than discussion. The Spread Firefox Call to Action team put together a great plan for transitioning Spread Firefox away from a focus on blogging tools to a system designed for the creation and execution of marketing projects and programs. They came up with some really amazing ideas and now we're starting to see the first fruits of that labor.

We don't have everything ready to roll out for a public beta (and a security review of the new code hasn't happened yet so we couldn't even if I wanted to,) but we'd like to invite interested SFX members to come take a look at the first draft of Spread Firefox v.2.

For the technically inclined among you, this new site is still based on Drupal, but we've moved away from the blogging framework to one we've designed for project management. We're using Drupal Organic Groups as the foundation with a number of additional modules and changes -- including the great work of Paul Booker from Glaxstar and Erik Hermans of RainCity.

The new look and feel and the new project-based workflow are really exciting and should be a boon to Spread Firefox revitalization. If all goes well, we'll be ready for a public beta next month and go live soon after that. But we won't stop there. It's been way too long without improvements to SFX and we're not going to let that happen again. One of the early projects I'll be launching at the new SFX will be the development of Spread Firefox v2.1 and v2.3.

If you'd like to help out in early testing with the new site, just email me and I'll give you the address and credentials you need to get in. You can reach me at asa@mozilla.org

- A

update: We'll re-open for more testing after we've digested and fixed the first round of feedback. Stay tuned. I think we can have another alpha in about a week and then a public beta in a couple of weeks.

If you missed the recent Air Mozilla Live broadcasts, you won't be able to participate in the live discussion, but you can still watch or download the videocasts and podcasts.

The last AML broadcast featured Doug Turner on the topic of mobile Mozilla -- including discussions around MiniMo and Project Joey. Videocasts, Part 1 and Part 2, of that program are available now.

For previous episodes, head over to the Air Mozilla Live Videocasts site and view, download, and subscribe today!

And stay tuned to Spread Firefox for more information about this week's Air Mozilla Live broadcast scheduled for Wednesday. We've got some exciting news breaking and, in addition to our regular show, we'll have two very special guests.