I set up a Planet Mozilla twitter feed a while back that does nothing more complicated than twitter every time a new post hits Planet. Having been following it for a while, I find that I have a more comprehensive and up-to-date ambient awareness of what’s going on around the project. Where I used to have to take the time to look at and read through a long list of feeds in my feed reader, I now just get quick infoblips through the twitter feed. I like it quite a bit, and it seems to be working well. You can follow it here, if you’re interested:

http://twitter.com/planetmozilla

For those of you who are as addicted to Twitter as I am, I’ve cobbled together an experimental Twitter feed that tweets every new item that appears in the Planet Mozilla web feed in (close to) real time.

Follow along @planetmozilla.

Ever miss an issue of the about:mozilla newsletter and find yourself cursing my name because you couldn’t find the archives? Curse no more! I finally dug around the Mailchimp knowledge base and figured out how to auto-generate a full list of every issue of about:mozilla ever published.

I’ve added the archives to the about:mozilla weblog, on their very own Newsletters archives page. The blog itself hasn’t been in use for quite some time, but I’m re-evaluating that now and there will likely be activity there again soon.

The about:mozilla newsletter needs to evolve. It launched about 14 months ago and hasn’t changed at all in that time while the Mozilla project has continued to grow and expand. Based on the feedback I’ve received from a few people, I’m proposing that the newsletter morph from a “light and quick overview of a handful of interesting items” to a “full-blown newspaper for Mozilla project contributors”.

This is going to involve a lot more research and editorial work, and it could end up being longer, but it will have better structure and organization making it easier to skim and digest. As something targeted at project contributors, I think it will be more useful overall.

The following static sections were suggested:

Firefox
* Feature development, major changes, demos, etc.

Labs and add-ons
* Labs, labs projects, AMO, add-on news (Firebug, etc)

Other products and projects
* Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, etc.

Upcoming releases
* Shortform list of all known/announced upcoming releases

Security notes
* Quicklist of recent security issues and information

Infrastructure and IT
* All project-infrastructure related news - upcoming planned outages, upgrades, changes, etc. Bugzilla, tinderbox, graphserver, etc.

Project coordination
* Upcoming bugdays, testdays, l10n events/deadlines, community marketing events, etc.

Events and conferences
* Devdays, barcamps, meetups, labs nights, Mozilla-involved conferences, etc. Bullet-pointy.

Meetings and meeting notes
* Standard reminder about the Community Calendar and all the goodness that resides there. Link to meeting notes blog + rss feed.

In the media
* Recent important media mentions or other PR-related things of interest

Mozilla
* MoCo/MoFo/MoMo related news. EC stuff, goals setting, education program, governance, awards, etc.

Etcetera/Miscellaneous
* Anything else that’s interesting enough to include.

What do you think? Good idea? Terrible idea? Do the proposed sections cover everything? Are there other things that would be useful in a weekly project newsletter? What else could/should be included?

I really want this newsletter to be as useful as possible for our project contributors, so your feedback is really important. Please leave your comments here or email me privately at deb-at-mozilla-dot-com. Thanks!

The Mozilla Labs team is launching a grand experiment towards rethinking, redesigning, and redeploying the Labs website, and we need your help. All the details are over on the Labs weblog, and you can join the discussion in the Labs forums.

This is going to be a fun and crazy project, and everyone is welcome and encouraged to take part. We want to build something amazing, and we need your help figuring out what that is, what it looks like, and how it all fits together.

If you run a public Mozilla Project meeting of any description, please take the time to add it to (or update its information in) the Mozilla Community Calendar. Even if you’re pretty sure the calendar information is correct for your meeting, I’d appreciate it if you could take a few minutes and verify that. Thanks!

about:mozilla is a blog and weekly newsletter that focuses on the major news items related to the Mozilla Project. These news items can really be about any aspect of the Project, ranging from development news and schedules through marketing and community events. For an idea of what sort of news we cover, just check out the blog or the past issues.

We’re looking for help. Do you follow or are you involved in a particular part of the Mozilla Project? Do you think there’s news and information about that part of the Project that deserves to be included in the about:mozilla blog and newsletter? If so, please send a note to about-mozilla at mozilla.com. Ideally you will include a snappy headline, a short version of the story you’re submitting (a few sentences is sufficient, really — the newsletter needs to be short and to the point), and at least one link where readers can get more information.

One thing I am hearing consistently in posts about the Summit is that there just wasn’t enough time to meet everyone we wanted to meet. This holds true for me, but even if the conference had gone for another three days (and however many additional disasters that would have entailed), there still wouldn’t have been enough time.

This is the painful dichotomy of working with a distributed community, I guess. The global nature of our community means that we get to work with some of the best and brightest people working on the Web anywhere in the world. The global nature of our community, however, also means that we very rarely have an opportunity to meet face-to-face and talk about things in person. When we do, it’s incredible — this Summit was just mind-blowing in that it gave so many of us a chance to meet people we’ve been working with remotely for years. Online collaboration is great, of course, and is an astonishingly powerful tool that allows us to do what we do, but there’s something deeper you get from in-person meetings. Finally seeing the faces and hearing the voices of long-time friends is…something. I’m not sure how even to describe it. But it’s valuable. Immeasurably so.

I’m already looking forward to the next Summit, whenever and wherever it ends up being. I also think I will try to travel more (if I can) — more conferences, more visits, more chances to meet other Mozillians face-to-face and to talk about things. I have so many ideas swimming around my head from just three days of chatting with folks — making it a regular thing can only be even more generative, creative, and energizing.

I’m going to write a longer post about the awesomeness that has been the Mozilla Summit 2008 later (so many stories to tell), but today had a special highlight. I finally got to meet himorin (aka. Shimono) after working with him on Mozilla Developer Center for a long time. I had originally thought he wasn’t able to make it to the Summit, so was absolutely thrilled when we were introduced. Himorin has been a driving force behind MDC since its inception, and it was an incredible honour to finally have a chance to meet him and to thank him face-to-face. MDC would not be the project it is today without his help and enthusiasm, particularly in the early days when we were still trying to figure out what a collaborative developer documentation resource should look like.

I’ve had a chance to meet lots of other folks as well, and have had tons of great, inspiring, and amazingly energizing conversations over the past three days. Being in a room with 400 brilliant, dedicated, passionate, and incredibly hard-working Mozillians is humbling. I am astonishingly lucky to be part of this community. So, even though there were bears, and a rockslide that blocked the road, and a power outage, and even snow in July — this has been the best Summit ever.

Some eight months ago the Evangelism team started publishing the about:mozilla newsletter. We’re now expanding the scope of that project a little, while also streamlining the newsletter’s production, by introducing the new about:mozilla weblog.

How are the newsletter and weblog related? Essentially, anything that ends up in the newsletter will be on the weblog first, but not everything on the weblog will end up in the newsletter. So, the weblog is a slightly higher-volume stream of news that is updated (more or less) daily, and the newsletter is a weekly publication of the week’s highlights from the weblog.

What does this mean for you, the reader and potential content submitter? Not much. The newsletters will continue to be published as they currently are, in the locations they’re currently in. The about:mozilla weblog will not be syndicated to Planet — most of the content is already on Planet to start with — so it won’t be further inflating the volume of traffic there.

Submitting stories for about:mozilla

We could always, always use more content for about:mozilla, and if you would like to submit items, please send them to about-mozilla[at]mozilla.com at any time. Where possible, please include a headline, one or two short paragraphs of content, and at least one URL where readers can find more information. Don’t worry too much about formatting, the editorial staff can take care of that part.

We could use your help

We could always use help with news gathering, writing, and editorial tasks, so if you are interested in getting involved with the newsletter and weblog, please ping me in IRC (”dria” on irc.mozilla.org), or email (deb[at]mozilla.com). This is a great and fun way to get involved with the Mozilla project if you’re not a programmer, so send a note if you’d like to help out.