Mozilla and Education version 0.2: Potential Projects

by David Humphrey

One of our first goals for Mozilla Education is to make it easier for students and educators to get connected to Mozilla project work, and for the Mozilla community to get project ideas into the hands of new contributors.  We want to be a conduit for communication between academics and the community.  I've been doing this for a number of years now, and we have some informal means for doing it.  However, we want to have this scale to a much larger group of students from many institutions.

Over the past few weeks I've had conversations about this with various community and education people, and gathered the ideas into a set of guidelines for marking bugs "good potential projects."  I've also filed bug 479062 to figure out which new bugzilla keyword to use, and get it added.  Even as I write this I'm still getting good feedback and ideas (for example, should we actually be favouring a wiki over bugzilla so we can better annotate project work, and have it span bugs?), so please keep it coming.

There's a number of ways you can get involved with this effort:

  • Comment on the guidelines and/or in the bug -- we're hoping to formulate something that will be widely useful, not dictate how it needs to happen
  • Start thinking about bugs or other projects that would fit with what we're describing in the guidelines.  We'll want to get those bugs flagged as soon as possible.
  • Once the keyword gets added, help us triage existing bugs and file new bugs using it.  We're going to do some work in the wiki to try and make it obvious to non-bugzilla users that these projects are available
    Also, I'd like to invite you to join us in #education, where we are discussing these and other topics.  Already we've met a bunch of new students and professors, and added a good group of Mozilla community people.  The #education channel is meant to be a landing place for students and educators getting started with Mozilla.  The Mozilla community is also welcome and necessary, as getting started with Mozilla means joining the community.