Tuna Park

If you clicked on this, it’s quite probable that you want such a thing.  When I joined Mozilla, one of the first items Jane and I discussed was the need to help the community do as much of its own marketing as possible.  One of the most inspiring things about Mozilla is the energy and enthusiasm: it is the antidote to the oft-repeated and jaded view that open source software is only about money: many people want other people to use Firefox because it is good software that is good for them.

Shortly after I joined Mozilla, Alba, who is a good friend of mine, contacted me to tell me she had taken part in the Firefox Download Day world record attempt.  We had never spoken about Firefox before, but I think it’s likely that if Alba is motivated to join that campaign, there are other things should would like to do to spread good software.

Now, in Europe, we are a diverse bunch of people.  Culturally, we tend to consume our own first, American culture second, and other European culture third.  The exception to this is the Russian diaspora in former Eastern Block countries, which partly goes to explain Russia’s impressive showing in the Eurovision Song Contest (with all due respect to the talents of Dima Bilan and Serebro).  But the point is, marketing Mozilla software to these countries requires more than just a translation of talking points.  It requires an understanding the culture.  We held a discussion on this topic at MozillaCamp Europe, and David Ascher made the very strong point that “localising” amounts to far more than translating.

James Surowiecki never watched the Eurovision Song Contest

So for me there are two purposes to creating a guide to Mozilla Community Marketing.  For one thing, Community Marketing is big.  Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.  We need a Hitch Hikers’ Guide to Mozilla Community Marketing: to all the different sites, information, resources, projects and teams that are out there.

And while the stories of disastrous attempts at cross-cultural marketing are typically urban legends (the Chevy Nova sold just fine in Mexico), we need to give people freedom - as much freedom as possible - to market Mozilla software in their way.  In the way that makes sense for where they live, for what they do.  Naturally, this has to be done responsibly: Mozilla needs to make sure anything “official” is accurate and honest, but that does not mean that Mozilla has to control what the community does in marketing.
So, I have two questions to anyone interested in community marketing in Europe and beyond:

• What do you need that you don’t have today?
• What do you have today that is especially effective?

Any thoughts are welcome, as comments here or on email to patrick (at) mozilla.com.

Three delightful days in Paris spent with colleagues and attending the inaugural Mozilla Add-on Workskop flew by (unlike, ironically, the journey there and back).   I spent a very entertaining time meeting William, Brian, Staś (known as Stats to some) and traveling there and back with the other half of Mozilla Eskilstuna, David.  David took the opportunity of being in Paris to avail himself of the latest and greatest in digital photography equipment.  But if, like me, you’re the kind of chap who always leaves his camera in his hotel room, you’ll find these images of Paris taken with a phone camera more to your taste.

William, demonstrating my favourite feature of the iPhone: its ability (thanks to a predictably poor battery life) to transform itself into the world’s most cumbersome mobile phone.

Detail from a beautiful Parisian art nouveau building, just behind and not to be confused with the Pompidou Centre, a less-than-beautiful Parisian modern art building.  More on this fabulous edifice here.

I agree with the sentiment but couldn’t fathom the irony at 7am.

The moon over the Paris Mairie.  There must be over 100 people immortalised in statues on its walls.  To my regret, I recognised about four of the names, and one of those was the wrong Camus.

A blast from my past: a crescent of virginal OpenSolaris CDs at the MAOW.

Use Firefox?  Care about it, but aren’t the kind of person who files bug reports, or writes code?

Well, Firefox in your country, the survey which they’re already calling “not very onerous or intrusive“, is an opportunity to share what you think of Firefox and what could be done to make it better.   If you speak English, Spanish, Polish, German, Brazilian Portuguese or Indonesian, please take the time to answer a few questions if you care about Firefox, and pass it on to anyone else you know who does.  In fact, please do it even if you do file bug reports or write code…

Inspirational stuff from Cory Doctorow about the importance of Firefox in the face of Google Chrome. I think that those who think Chrome is intended to kill Firefox, or that think that Google will somehow do so inadvertently, underestimate the power of community, and of user advocacy.

That the user is paramount may mean to some the ability to block adverts, to others, increasing their security, and to others, simply changing the appearance of their browser. But when this freedom aggregated across a large proportion of users, it means that the Web remains in some sense literally democratic, that is, governed by the choices of people and not of monopolies or oligarchies. This is, after all, only the beginning.