Three months ago Mozilla Education started a project to actively look for student projects. Each morning I get email from bugzilla with the list of newly added student-project bugs (I got 11 this morning). As I write this we have 61 potential projects. I'm hoping to have that hit 100 before the end of June, and here's why.
Mark blogged a month ago with a map of the students we know about who are working on Mozilla, and where they are. Since then, James and I have been trying to keep it up to date, and today it looks like this:
Over the past few weeks, we've gotten to know more students from Romania, Serbia, Pakistan, India, Morocco, and the US. When they show up, they come with energy and interest, and in most cases they are looking to start working on something--they need a project. Each one of them has different interests and skill levels.
It's fine for us to say to them, "there are lots of things you could do with Mozilla." But that's not why they've reached out and made the connection: they already know that's true and want to become part of the project. What we need in order to help them get to the next step is a list of projects that is both deep and wide.
Right now, if a student looks at the list of student-project bugs, he or she is able to choose from:
- 12 Bugzilla projects
- 13 "Core" projects
- 3 Firefox front-end projects
- 15 Thunderbird or SeaMonkey projects
- 5 Mozilla Web Site projects
There are other miscelaneous ones too. It's not a bad start. But it's also not enough, and I would argue, not necessarily a true reflection of the "width" of Mozilla. There's lots of stuff not on this list, and some things which are there are underrepresented.
So I want to encourage you to spend a few minutes looking at your bug lists and project ideas. In order to break 100 by the end of June, we need you to be part of this. School is out in most parts of the world, and over the summer and fall, profs and students will be planning for their next courses. We need to be ready to take part in that, not scrambling to find projects once it's in full swing.