At Mozilla we foster a healthy ecosystem of communities that promote the ability to freely access, modify and distribute software and creative works. These ecosystems create a digital commons; a shared space, shared resources or network of ideas, applications and products that are free to use.

Much like a park is a vital ecosystem for collaboration, recreation, conservation and commerce, the values of park ring very true within the open source software moment. Take a look back at Firefox release history and you’ll see that previous versions of have been named after parks like Gran Paradiso (Italy), Bon Echo (Canada) and Shiretoko (Japan). Mozilla community members in Japan were so honoured to have Firefox 3.5 code-named after their UNSECO world heritage site park, Shiretoko, that they created Discover Shiretoko to celebrate the park as an important part of their national heritage and to celebrate Firefox and its role in creating a better Internet.

There is a story here to be told about the history of Mozilla and of Firefox and at the same time, we have an opportunity to use the shared values we have with these parks to do some good.

The newest pre-release code name for Firefox is Namoroka, named for a park in the northwest section of Madagascar. Famous for its Karst topography (or Tsingy as it is described in Malagasy), Namoroka is full of caves, canyons and natural swimming pools. Namoroka is also home to eight species of lemur.

Since we’re very fond of things tailed and furry at Mozilla, we’ve decided to celebrate the release of Firefox 3.6 by raising money to protect lemurs in Namoroka park and throughout Madagascar.

As a nation Madagascar is struggling to improve the quality of life for its rapidly growing human population and at the same time is struggling to find a way to preserve the forests and wildlife that remains.

To help, Mozilla is teaming up with the Madagascar Fauna Group (MFG) to help Madagascar through this challenging time. The MFG has been working on conservation in Madagascar for more than 20 years, addressing the environmental and social issues that are leading to deforestation and the trapping of lemurs.

The money we raise for this project will be used to help the MFG improve its website and online fundraising activities, connecting them with like-minded contributors and donors around the world. This donation will also support conservation and education programs on the island. By enhancing their presence within the web ecosystem, we can help them protect the natural ecosystem of Madagascar.

Later this week we will be launching the donation page for this first of our parks projects. If you’re interested in getting involved in the parks project over all, David has started discussing some ideas on his blog. Please let us know what you think about it, and when the page launches next week, please pass the word on.

The OneWebDay poster contest came to a close last Friday. We got in a bunch of really fun entries and saw some great interpretations of the “I <3 the web” message. After a few days of voting, there were two clear favourites:

The choice is yours
We don’t want to hold anyone back from expressing their love for the web, so we’ve created a page where you can download your poster entry of choice. That said, special kudos to the folks at The Movement and to Sudhir Nair for designing the most popular entries!

Once you’ve chosen your poster, the instructions are simple:

• Print or display your poster
• Take a photo with your poster
• Upload your photo to flickr or website of your choosing and tag it with #owdposter
• Visit the Mozilla OneWebDay poster page to submit your pic for the 2009 photo contest

We’re looking for creative entries here. I’ll be in New York City on OneWebDay, so I’m hoping to find something or someone awesome to take my “I  <3 the Web” with and something that tops what I’ve already done in the Mozilla Toronto office. I can’t wait to see what other people come up with.

If you read Mark Surman’s post about a OneWebDay poster on Monday and are have some artistic skills running through your veins, we invite you to design the OneWebDay 2009 poster for Mozilla.

The instructions are simple. Be as creative as you like, we just ask that you include the following elements:

• The Mozilla and OneWebDay logos (logos can be found on the Mozilla Foundation wiki)
• The words “I Love the Web” or “I <3 the Web”
• The URL www.mozilla.org/onewebday
• Text that encourages someone to steal, copy and repost the poster.

If you want to get double bonus creative points, feel free to make space in your design for people to add their own elements or messages. We’d like to create an “official” poster, but also leave it open for people to remix it, hack it and make it an easy expression of their love for the web.

OneWebDay is on September 22. To give us time to get the winning design out there, we’re asking artists to submit their designs by Friday, September 11. You can either submit them by e-mail or submit them to the Mozilla Creative Collective, tagged with “onewebday” or e-mail them to me at chelseaATmozillafoundation.org.

Not only will the winning design have the glory of having their art plastered all over cubicles, workspaces, local stores, coffee shops, community centres and libraries, but we’ll also send some Mozilla swag your way.

Please help us out. Mark is threatening to design it himself if the community can’t come up with something. He’s threatening to use Wingdings to do it. And we all know that OneWebDay deserves much better than WingDings.

OneWebDay is a chance to reflect on how amazing the web is and to think about how we can move it forward, making it awesome for everyone. It’s held annually on September 22, landing it on a Tuesday this year.

The web has a profound effect on how we live and work. As a OneWebDay partner, Mozilla and Mozilla Service Week want you take action, volunteer your time and help keep the Web awesome. Mozilla Service Week was created with the goal of helping not-for-profit organizations in need. OneWebDay is a great opportunity to extend those good deeds to anyone who could use a hand experiencing a better web. Everyone can help, the only requirement is to simply love the web.

So do you want to be counted amongst the millions of people who love the web and find their lives enriched by the way the web allows you to share, communicate, work or play? The ways you can contribute are only limited by your imagination, but we have a few suggestions to help you out if you’re pressed for time:

• Donate to OneWebDay. OneWebDay is organized by one, full-time, staff member and an army of volunteers. With your support, OneWebDay activities can be expanded to include more international locales and improved with better resources.
• Take action and perform an Internet Health Check. One of the ways Mozilla is supporting OneWebDay is by suggesting activities that are easy to do and make the Web better. Perform an Internet Health Check by updating less technically-savvy users to a modern browser. At the same time, update plugins like Flash, Java and Quicktime and help others keep their computers and the Internet healthy.
• Organize or attend a OneWebDay Event in your town! There will be OneWebDay parties, rallies and service activities taking place all over the world. If you don’t see one happening near you, organize your own. Have a look at what we’re planning here in Toronto if you need further inspiration (a party, a screening and a drop off for older computers for people in need).
• Donate your Twitter or Facebook status on September 22 and follow @owd on Twitter. It’s easy to do and can have more impact than you know.

Some other great ideas have cropped up in the comments of Mark’s OneWebDay blog post as well as some fun ways to show your OneWebDay love around your school or office.

Start getting ready. OneWebDay is just over three weeks away!

As promised, we have put together another action template for Mozilla Service Week. The Digital Marketing Template was created to help Service Week volunteers get not-for-profit organizations set up with a preliminary social media marketing framework.

With each passing year, social media is proving to be a powerful communications and marketing tool. With its ability to directly connect with community, donors and the general public, social media has a lot of potential for people working in the not-for-profit sector. With traditional marketing budgets in the millions of dollars and increasing challenges of getting PR coverage, social media can be an effective tool for savvy users.

Many social media tools can be integrated into existing marketing and communications plans. As part of Mozilla Service Week, you can help not-for-profits use the tools of social media to share content with their audience and, at the same time, engage in dialogue with them like never before.

This template lays out the basic principles of social media as well as starting points for using the more popular social networks and platforms. We’ve also included a link to an excellent social media tutorial that Mary Colvig of Mozilla Marketing has put together for her Service Week activities, which explores some of how Mozilla uses social media as a part of its marketing strategy.

As always, feedback is always welcome and if you’ve developed an action template of your own, let us know and we can add it to the collection. Look for the next Service Week action template next week.

As mentioned in yesterday’s Mozilla Service Week post, we’re putting together a series of action templates to make making the web better quick, simple and easy. The first template we’re launching is the Internet Health Checkup. This is an action that can be done as part of pledged hours during Mozilla Service Week and as part of OneWebDay celebrations (we’ll be blogging more about Mozilla and OneWebDay later this week).

As Mark Surman discussed on his blog, privacy and security are issues that face everyone on the Web, whether they know it or not.  A primary example of this is the huge number of people using the Internet that do not understand that browsing the Web with an old browser or out-of-date plugins is dangerous both to the person using that compter and to other people using the web.

With this in mind, the primary goal of the Internet Health Checkup is to get technically savvy people, like Mozilla community members and Service Week volunteers, to update Service Week beneficiaries from Internet Explorer 6 to a modern browser. If that’s all we do, then it’s a big win for the health of the Internet. But we’re Mozilla and we have this thing for doing more, so we’re suggesting four simple things to make the web better:

1. Get hip to the 21st century: Update to a modern browser and stop using IE6
2. Safe can be fun: Update plugins like Flash, Java and Quicktime
3. Set it on autopilot: Set up browsers and plugins for auto-updates where possible
4. Teach them to fish: Do some education around the importance of browser and plugin updates

That last task is a pretty big deal. You have an opportunity to demystify aspects of the Internet that can be downright scary to the average user. Even taking 15 additional minutes to help people lean more or learn enough to be able use the Internet with confidence will make a big difference in how they experience the web.

We have provided resources for volunteers to update browsers an plugins on Windows, Mac and Linux systems. We have extensive instructions on how to install or update Firefox from the Mozilla Support site. For other modern browsers we have linked to the best update/install instructions available. We’ll also have a printable checklist for you to use while performing the Health Checkup up shortly.

And caveat. If you’re performing an Internet Health Check at a larger organization, make sure to check with the IT department. They may have some problems with updating to a modern browser at the enterprise lever. If that’s the case, please report back to us when you report back on your pledged service week hours that you tried to perform a check and what the obstacles were that prevented you from completing it.

We will be launching additional templates in the coming weeks, but if you have feedback on the Internet Health Checkup or a Service Week template of your own to add to the collection please leave a comment below or e-mail me at chelseaATmozillafoundation.org.

It’s just under a month to Mozilla Service Week, a chance for members of the Mozilla community to volunteer their time and their skills to non-for-profit organizations and people around the world. Which means, it’s time to saddle up and make a difference.

So how do you do your part? To start, register for Mozilla Service Week and pledge your hours. Then start looking for something to do by searching our partner sites (Idealist & betterplace.org) for a volunteer opportunity near you. If you have the time and the means, you can run sprints on web development projects, clean up infected machines at schools and libraries or install a wireless network. If you already know who you’d like to help and how, you can tell us your story and inspire other people looking for ways to help.

If you’re short on time or inspiration, we’re putting together a series of templated activities to make it really easy for you. Tomorrow, I’ll show you around the Internet Health Checkup, a checklist you can use to make the web safer for not-for-profit organizations, friends, family and anyone else you feel kindness towards.

In coming weeks we’ll be putting together other easy-to-do activities that you can use to help Service Week beneficiaries in areas like digital marketing and data portability. So stay tuned!

But wait! There’s more! As Service Week nears you can also help us spread the word and reach potential volunteers. You can:

• Blog about Mozilla Service Week and what you hope to do
• Tweet, add a Twibbon or update your Facebook status.  We’re using the hashtag:  #mozservice09.  Details can be found here
• Join and invite your friends to the Service Week Facebook event
• Digg our post: http://digg.com/tech_news/The_Mozilla_Blog_Mozilla_Service_Week
• Place an affiliate button on your blog

Join us and make a difference by helping people and organizations use something you love – the Web! For more details join our online workshop tomorrow, August 19th at 9 a.m. PDT. Otherwise, check out the Service Week FAQ.

While some might think that the new job didn’t start until I walked through the doors of the Mozilla office, I found my work started early my first day at US customs when the agent, upon asking who I worked for and what I did for them, asked very directly “Why does a company that makes so much money need to fundraise?” Her question is valid, one I’ve heard before, expect to hear again and will be answering with increasing articulation in the coming months.

The short answer I gave the agent is that I work for the Mozilla Foundation and that seemed to satisfy her enough to let me through. I didn’t think she needed to know the history of Mozilla, how it was a foundation first, how the mission of Mozilla Company and Foundation is, in fact, a social mission and how the Foundation supports the mission through grants, governance, promotion and as a steward for the open web.

I suppose I could have told her that I’m not just raising money for Mozilla. I’m not just raising money for Firefox, Thunderbird or the supercool things going on in Mozilla Labs. I’m raising money for the Mozilla mission so that we can grant money and raise awareness for other groups like OneWebDay so they can promote and protect the open web.

I thought that the next time I went to Mountain View I would tell the customs agents about some of the ideas brewing for telling the community and the public at large about the kinds of open source projects going on out there and how I’d like to make it even easier for people of all levels of technical proficiency to heart the open web.

Instead, I encountered the very same customs agent today when I went for my Nexus interview. She remembered me and remembered that I was a fundraiser and marketer for Mozilla. Most interestingly she told me that my occupation had been entered into the system incorrectly. She told me that I had been listed as a “Fun Raiser” which, when you think about Mozilla and our community really isn’t that far off the mark.

Now it’s just a question of what photo goes with that for the back of my business cards.

Before I started this job, someone told me that getting acclimatized at Mozilla was a lot like drinking from a fire hose. After my first month, I have to say the analogy rings very true. As such, I’ve spent the last month doing my best version of a sponge

Mozilla is at an interesting moment in it’s evolution. As you may have read on  Mark Surman’s blog, the Foundation is continuing to refine what it does and where we go from here. It makes for a very exciting time for people who do what I do; which is find more exciting ways for people inside and outside of the Mozilla community to be engaged in the Mozilla Mission.

While not everyone has the technical skills to contribute to the development of the technology that Mozilla creates to make the web better, there are many simple actions you can take to be a part of what’s going on. Much of what we’ll be doing at the Mozilla Foundation in the coming months will be about helping to defining those actions (besides downloading Firefox; which if you haven’t done, you should really do) and make it fun and easy to be a part of a better web.

A lot of this last month has been spent articulating these new strategies for engagement as well as laying the foundation for a management system for donations that come into Mozilla.

Now that I’m up and running, I’ll be communicating more about some of our upcoming plans for creating action and engagement for the Mozilla community and the next million Mozillans. As always, please feel free to leave comments and questions along the way.

Chelsea

Welcome all. This is the blog where I will be discussing ideas and plans for engagment and fundraising for the Mozilla Foundation. I don’t start for a few weeks yet, but look for things to get up and running in early July, 2009.

Chelsea