My first project is to help Mozilla Central/Eastern European communities and raise the awareness of what’s going there in Mozilla project. ) It means that I consider myself as a kind of evangelist, strengthening Mozilla signal in Central and Eastern Europe and on the other hand strengthening the signal from those countries inside Mozilla.

It sounds like he will have a similar community role combining evangelism and technical leadership in internalization and localization there. It seems like a natural progression in his career. He will be continuing his work that was previous volunteering for Mozilla and combining it with a mandate. He is a incredible addition to the Mozilla Corp team!

Zbiggy is a lot of fun to work and hang out with. His energy and passion for open source and helping everyone (around the world) get access to great software and web services is infectious.

I’m not surprised that he studies sociology at university. He really cares about people and tries to improve things on the greatest scales. He is one of my inspirations.

Zbigniew was generous enough to answer some of my questions about his transition over email.

If one has recently read “not-invented-here syndrome in Mozilla” they might be very surprised by you joining Mozilla Corp, except if they really know you. If they know you then they would appreciate the article as your usual candor, and that you were and are as passionate and positive about Mozilla as ever.

This isn’t the first time that Mozilla has considered hiring you and you considering joining their team as an employee, what made the union successful this time?

Tricky question. I can’t say there is a single reason, it’s more that I have grown. I consider any projects as a kind of adventure, a challenge. It has to have the excitement factor, it has to be worth taking, but on the other hand, you have to be mature enough to be a useful part of the team — not the one dangling at the rear of the group. It’s much easier to just stay a volunteer. Mozilla is a unique kind of organization, successfully experimenting with merging corporate business with community and openness to the extend not tested before. It’s unwise to jump in, scream a lot and try to influence the direction of such a huge and tremendous effort, when you don’t feel ready yet. And it’s not worth jumping in to sit down in the corner. So now I feel I can at least whisper something from time to time

Another factor is that Mozilla is reaching the first major creative reorganization since Firefox was accepted as the flagship product. With David Ascher leading a new communication-focused effort, John Lilly taking over the CEO role, stronger investigation of mobile zone and what’s most important, Mozilla 2 project shaping up, there’s a lot of exciting things going to happen I spent the last years volunteering in Mozilla, and, honestly, Flock was the place where much more exciting things were happening for me – as it always happens with pre-1.0 startups. Thanks to the Flock team, I had a chance to participate in the birth of a new web browser, focused on the social web, free to experiment with each and every part of the UI… that was amazing – you should remember that too

So post 1.0 “My World” is much more reliable, and I’m so happy to see that Flock 1.0, Flock 1.1, and Flock 1.2 are all pretty much ready in terms of internationalization without me spending sleepless nights on it

The last factor is the right project. I’m studying sociology, I’m fascinated in how the community works, and while being a member of Mozilla Europe board, I was always pushing in the direction of human social studies on the communities. To understand them better and help them help us So it seems that I managed to get my proposal through

Who will you be reporting to?

I’m extremely proud that Paul Kim, who was always extremely helpful to me, agreed to be my manager Besides that, I am, of course, reporting to, and cooperating with Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, and Jane Finette, who’s Director of European Marketing at MoCo

What new opportunities and challenges ahead are you most excited by?

Everything. I’m diving through Mozilla’s corporate culture, routines, learning new names, I must say a lot has changed in Mozilla since the Firefox 1.0 days. Jane is extremely helpful in guiding me through the first weeks, and, what’s maybe even more important, she’s very patient. Thank you, Jane!

I hope to start blogging much more often about my major project in Mozilla, but first I need to prepare for FOSDEM and do the backlog after my exam session.

No one would question your integrity, but many people appreciated your independence, is there anyone else that will provide your previous perspective straddling the Mozillas?

I’m surrounded by extraordinary people, who’re participating in one of the biggest open projects in the history of the Internet. I know many of them for almost 8 years now. I don’t feel that anything changes here. For last 2 years I’ve been a member of the board in Mozilla Europe, so I don’t feel like I’m getting any new inclusive view.

I also hope that my friends, who know me, will be able to kick my butt if they feel like I’m getting conformist It includes you!

Who will be asking all the interesting questions?

Hey, I can promise there are no brain washes on the way into Mozilla. Noone asks you to sign any chirography and nobody “proofreads” my blog posts. Everything is still the same

I don’t expect my questions to stop appearing, I expect myself to have a bit more influence on causes of those questions. As I mentioned at the beginning. It’s a responsibility. I’m joining people like Axel, Pascal, Seth who’re on the first line of communication with our community. This is a kind of role that requires a lot of pushing here and there to get things working better for outsiders.

Don’t worry, there’s always this kick-in-the-butt or slap-with-the-trout whistleblowing system applied in case of emergency

What will your legacy at Flock be?

Flock can be localized to zillion+one language. And Flock has localizers that are localizing the trunk. If one is in the l10n business, he knows what that means.

Besides, I think I was the initial concept author for what’s now called My World, and there are some other small things that were shaped when I was around. I think I brought the coffee for Chris when he doing some nice mockups – that counts, right?

Have you found any time for working on Bugzilla lately?

Nah. I’m still in the very same point with this: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/gandui/ being quite a good concept IMHO

I’m not going to promise that I’ll find time for this. I won’t work on the dashboard until I feel I have a lot of time for my girl, hobbies, job and life

Zbigniew responses share his usual exuberance, humor, and humility. He is too modest. I remember him championing the My World experience based on Netvibes and similar experiences long ago. It became one of my favorite ideas, and I still am looking forward to a more customizable experience being in Flock, a related experience being part of all web browsers, and tighter integration of widgets in desktop OSs, but I digress.

When I asked Clayton Stark, Flock’s VP of Engineering, who would be filling Zbiggy’s big shoes, he said that the responsibilities would be shared among various folks. He had nothing, but extreme appreciation to his work and contribution at Flock:

Gandalf has been a major contributor to Flock for a very long time, and he has been instrumental in securing localizers to create the long list of language versions we now have. Beyond this, Gandalf has always been an active voice in the evolution of Flock, and a great person to work with. I congratulate him in his official move to Mozilla — in my opinion, Mozilla Europe has lucked out to get such a great person on their team.

Definitely, this is great news for Mozilla. Congratulations Zbigniew! Congratulations Mozilla!

PS. Zbiggy has created a Open Projects community survey. Please take the little time to help him in this project.

Code Rush tells the story of Netscape in 1998 thorough the first quarter of 1999 trying to recover their business after the attacks of the now convicted monopolist Microsoft and to open source the Netscape browser.

Without these actions, we probably won’t have Firefox, I might not be open source employed, and the open source landscape might be very different.

Code Rush gives me a rush!

It is a well done PBS documentary produced and directed by David Winton. In the film, Jamie Zawinski, Michael Toy, Scott Collins, Tara Hernandez, Jim Roskind, Stuart Parmenter, Brendan Eich, Jim Barksdale, and Ellen Ullman are inspirational and all, of course, play themselves.

My copy is recorded from one of the times it aired on PBS. I have watched it numerous times. Unfortunately, like the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank you probably won’t be able to find a copy.

Like any recording of history, it only tells a few of the many people’s stories. People who’s story is missing include Frank Hecker, Mitchell Baker, Mike Shaver, Marc Andreessen, and Terry Weissman. Who else’s Netscape story from that time inspires you?

I don’t think there is an company creating open source software with a greater heritage than Mozilla. Nor do I think there is a greater company that continues to demonstrate that trust is well deserved.

To anyone that has contributed to Netscape, Firefox, JavaScript, Thunderbird, Bugzilla, Tinderbox, Bonsai, Camino, Flock, Songbird, Joost, AllPeers, Nvu, Komodo, and numerous other products, I thank you!

You contribute just from using Firefox, the browser responsible for a better web!

[logo]
Web page of Silkroad Online is optimized under below condition.
Windows Operation Systems ( Microsoft Windows 9X/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 )
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 and above.

Above, is the text on the page I landed when I tried to visit the web site using Firefox on Ubuntu OS. There are no links to the rest of the site. People running Linux (or Macs?) are not allowed to find out about the game? Optimized?

Regardless of others being first to market, or providing a basic solution in the existing context of P2P, Parakey will continue to be much anticipated because of the people involved — I would love to find out who else they have brought on board since starting to hire and how their roadmap is looking?

(The free culture advocate in me is also excited by the promise of the Parakey source code!)

The Why is Internet Explorer unsafe? with its list of “recent security issue” from 2004 needs an update.

Browsehappy suggests use any browse except Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I do not encourage the use of the proprietary browsers Safari and Opera, because I do not think there is a compelling reason not to instead choose the open source Firefox.
I really llke the concept behind browsehappy with its diverse, real, personal testimonials, but with Microsoft’s concentration on security in the last year and the release of Internet Explorer 7, I think security is not currently a persuasive argument though Mozilla is still making phishing one.

Performance currently seems to be an argument for Firefox 2, but here and with phishing the IE team will likely quickly close the gap taking the substance out of the argument.

What are we left with? Again, “most people don’t care about free culture, they want their tools and gadgets to just work”.

I think the strongest arguments for Firefox currently are pretty weak, but I think they are:

• Do you trust the company behind your browser?
• What do your computer savvy friends use? Is it easy to use for everyone?
• Is there a helpful community to provide support if you have problems?

I don’t think inviting bloggers to their San Francisco launch shows that Microsoft gets community. It shows they get marketing. The IE team is doing a great job with their blog, and Microsoft in general with topical blogging. This falls far short of, as CEO of Mozilla Mitchell Baker puts it, “[giving] up some command and control” to their community.
Firefox has some self empowered communities, but I am with Chris Messina in wanting more from Mozilla:

I’d like to see Mozilla stand up and declare the principles, ideas, dreams and ambitions that set it apart and keep its proponents up at night, dreaming of ways to get the story out there to an ever-widening audience. Anything less, and the juggernaut will bowl us over, diminishing the effects of the incredible achievements that have been made in the past two years.

I want Mozilla to give us more than just Firefox and Thunderbird. I want a platform led by these and other great products. I think Chris is correct that Webkit is empowered developers and designers in a way that Mozilla is missing out on.

Initiates like Mozilla Labs are excellent, but Mozilla, like all open source organizations, still has many challenges with fostering a diverse contributing community. I really enjoyed listening to Mike Shaver’s keynote at Seneca’s 5th Annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium; he is a leader in understanding the challenges of open source and his talk discusses the challenges of diversity.

Parakey: a service, a product, a platform to bring life to the web by Firefox wonderboys? A “Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do”? IEEE Spectrum article

Although Blake Ross‘ absoluteness of some of his assertions have bothered me from time to time, he is someone that I respect and admire deeply, along with his partner in improving our computing life, Joe Hewitt. Both have incredible vision, are articulate, and are making it happen.

I have enjoyed the hints, and waited to find out explicitly what they have been working on for the last couple of years, and although they have not sent the email that they have launched, Matt wrote about the IEEE Spectrum article lamely titled “The Firefox Kid” about their secret Parakey.

I am a little startled to find such a digestible article in IEEE Spectrum which I subscribed for years to at one time. David Kushner seems to be a great journalist. Though I did not feel like reading the regurgitated story of Blake and Firefox again, so skip page 2

The article includes tasty content like:

• “The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in one big tangle of actions, service providers, and applications.”
• “Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too.” (Oh baby)
• User interface language JUL (undoubtedly with lessons learned from Boxely)

I wonder if Parakey will succeed in making content creation and presentation easy on the web for you and me and sophisticated designers and developers? The experience and tools more than JULs or technology may decide that. I am optimistic and looking forward to more catalysts to the rebirth of the computer desktop and web applications.

2006-11-21 Update: one question I had that was unanswered was why announce now? Blake answered this question in his post So about that project…, “decided to move forward with a piece in Spectrum to attract engineering talent (we’re hiring)”. A person of my own mind and stomach, he goes on to say that it will be released when it is ready, but before they get too hungry.