Ciao from Italy – An Introduction to Mozilla Italia

My name is Giuliano Masseroni (aka jooliaan) and I’m currently the president of Mozilla Italia.
To tell you a little about myself, I’m a 44-year old Italian chemist working with the Italian R&D Lab of a Dutch international chemical company called Akzo Nobel researching and developing new paints and application systems for the restoration of historical buildings. You’re probably wondering how I got involved with Mozilla. As you can see I’m not an IT guy, I’m just a chemist who loves everything about computers and the Internet. 

Around 4 years ago while reading an article in an Italian monthly computer magazine, I found a copy of a new browser then called Firebird (today it’s Firefox!) and decided to give it a try.  The browser was in English so I started to frequent MozillaZine Forums in order to receive some support and to learn how to use the browser as well as possible.
One day I asked why such a great browser couldn’t be available in Italian and somebody surprised me with saying that it was available even in Italian and gave me the link to the Italian support forum called “Moz does IT” at that time.

That was a watershed moment in my life: I met the people who would get me involved with volunteering for Mozilla.

Since the Italian community was quickly growing up, all together we decided to found a non-profit association dedicated only to our voluntary work and called it Mozilla Italia.

The goal of Mozilla Italia is the localization or translation of all Mozilla Products and Projects in our language, giving support to them through our forums, evangelizing web standards and spreading Firefox and the other Mozilla software around Italy.

As head of Mozilla Italia, I’ve had the chance to help build up many specialized teams to meet the growing needs of our activities and coordinate them to promote Mozilla software and its mission over Italy.  At the same time, the job has become so much more!

I found sponsors which helped us to cover part of our hosting expenses.  I’ve also helped recruit volunteers who are willing to lend our dedicated team a hand with QA to ensure we’re in time for releasing the Italian localization of Mozilla applications when requested.

Moreover, with three other Mozilla Italia members, I founded eXtenZilla which is the official Italian portal dedicated to the localization of the extensions into the Italian language. Also, eXtenZilla offers support to the Italian extension users and developers through its dedicated forums.

Also, I am often requested to answer the questions of many online dailies wishing to know more about Firefox, other Mozilla applications and related news or special events.

Since I get to work with the most important online and offline media as part of Mozilla Italia, I have been able to accomplish an agreement with ANSA (the main Italian Press Agency).  This has allowed Mozilla to use the ansa.it RSS feed as a Live Bookmark for the Italian version of Firefox 2.0 and above.

This constant dedication has paid off.  During the last 4 years, in fact, I’ve seen our forum users increase from 200 to more than 17,000 and our website has now an average of 650,000 single hits per month.

As part of Mozilla Italia, I’ve been interviewed by two different well known Italian radio stations around the Firefox 2 launch parties and just recently, I got the chance to help another founder of Mozilla Italia be interviewed in Rome by RAI3 (one our three National TV stations), for a TV show episode on Open Source software.

The year 2007 has been a wonderful year for Mozilla Italia and me, in fact in April, we had our first “official appearance” as Mozilla Italia at a three-day event called “Fa’ la cosa giusta” (Do the right thing) in Milan, that had something like 30,000 visitors, to make Firefox and Thunderbird better known in our country (see this photo set).

On a personal note, this year I was able to take advantage of the Mozilla Community Program managed by Seth Bindernagel. I was given a laptop by the Community Program to help me with my Mozilla volunteer work .  For the last two years I had been using my girlfriend’s PC when she wasn’t using it as a freelance translator. (By the way, I was so lucky to have met her all because she translated PlugInDoc in Italian, and she requested me to review her translation!!! I love her and I must thank Mozilla for that!!!).

Last but not least, the most exciting news is that a few days ago our efforts as the Italian Community have been rewarded by a visit from Tristan Nitot (President and Founder of Mozilla Europe) officially representing Mozilla. A dedicated press meeting has been organized for this event. Many journalists came to Milan especially to interview Tristan and me about the role of Mozilla in Italy and worldwide. Tristan and I met also with some of the most influential Italian bloggers during a very successful dinner where a lot of questions were answered and everybody felt really comfortable.

Summarizing, I can say that as an Italian Mozilla volunteer I really enjoy the opportunity to work in the international Mozilla environment. Sharing knowledge and suggestions allows me to be more and more open-minded and greatly improves my ability to build interpersonal relationships.

Please drop me a line at giuliano[dot]masseroni[at]mozillaitalia[dot]org or post a comment if you’d like to learn more about Mozilla Italia or to join us!