So sad! My internship has come to an end. Thank you so much to everyone who made it possible. OPW, volunteers, other women who came before me, Rosana, Ibai and Rachel of Mozilla, you all can live your lives a little brighter knowing that someone (meaning me) thinks you are the bees knees. It isn’t possible to express how much I learned from the experience. I was able to complete my tool, additionally I wrote a little documentation for L10N, and at the last minute I did a quick analysis of the different tools for managing user support issues on social media channels, this last one was particularly fun. And last minute I volunteered to write some social content for FB and Twitter. Seriously cool!

Here is the tutorial I created “Become a Tech-Writing Ninja” 

This is the button I created that can be modified to be any popup tutorial written in html.

I also wrote 2 articles on modifying and translating the tutorial, they are awaiting editing and approving before they are published.  This post is going to be short because I need to get back to finishing up these little projects. I am a Mozillian now, and I have some contributing to get done.

I am so excited to start applying for jobs (I actually have an interview at Wikimedia on Tuesday – wish me luck!). It was an amazing experience to get to work in the Mozilla SF office with some of the smartest, most creative thinkers I have worked with in my myriad of careers. I wrote in my second blog post about my first week and the rose colored glasses I had about the culture at Mozilla, well they never came off. The warm pink glow over 2 Harrison remains.

As my internship moves along I can see the finish line in my scope and I’m sad! I don’t want to be finished … I’m getting ahead of myself here. The last few weeks have been busy. Continuing work on my tool. I have now got the HTML in a fully localizable format and the CSS and other source files happily hosted on DropBox public files (sorry GitHub but you can’t host readable files why?!?!).  My last hurdle seems to be to figure out how to scale the slides into my popup window … Well there I go getting ahead of myself again. Quick reminder of my project: To create an automated method of providing expressed permission to begin contribution to the Mozilla Support Documentation Knowledge Base.

To do this I decided to create a quick tutorial where I use the existing documentation in a slide format that pops up over the template for writing an article. At the end the contributor gets a badge (still working on that) and hopefully feels like they are fully authorized, validated, patted on the back and ready to contribute! I have had 2 other groups show interest in using my template when it is done, so I will be writing an article on not only how to localize the tutorial but also how to modify the content so it can be used by any other group/alternate topic.

Next up is localization documentation review. My first task is to make sure that all the documentation does not have holes. First thing I noticed is there is no documentation if you are a localizer who wants to review translations. Task no. 1: Write that article. Task no. 2: Create a resource page with links to all the Localization Dashboards for the different languages. Hopefully by Monday. Go fingers go!

And Lastly Crafty! It has been progressing swimmingly. We did a big push to get people interested in making contributor recognition gifts. We made 11 and I got them all mailed out yesterday! It is really gratifying. My antidotal bit on this was presenting Crafty to the Community Building Team’s recognition pathways working group, I shared pictures of the work we had done. One of the tags was for a volunteer in India who was on the call and he was ecstatic to see his recognition gift. I made it for him and I felt really great to feel his excitement. It was really wonderful to feel that sense of the Mozilla Culture of Recognition growing though me! Here is my Mozilla The Recognition group requested a step by step set of instructions so they could take this method of hand made recognition gifts to other offices Here is my blog post on the subject: https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2014/02/19/tag-youre-recognized/

These last 2 weeks have been me just plugging along trying to figure out the best way to create my tutorial. The idea behind it is to have a simple tool that takes all the articles that have been written about how to begin contributing to the Support Mozilla Knowledge Base and put them into an easy to follow along slide show that you read while filling out the template. An automated way for a new contributor to feel a sense of expressed permission to contribute and learn while they are at it! Because learning is good. 

There were a few things I really wanted to incorporate when building this tool. The first was that it be simple and lightweight. I looked at lots of plugins and none were quite right. In the end a few simple lines of Javascript for a popup window were all I wanted. It took a ridiculously long time to figure this out (sorry Mozilla). Next I wanted it to be all HTML5 and easy to localize into other languages. This meant building it on something that was open and accessible to localizers. I decided on Thimble. The localizer could easily use the “Remix” button to translate it into their language. The last thing I wanted to incorporate was entertainment. I like everything to be interesting and funny whenever possible. The tutorial will have a hyperbole and a half style participant that is intermixed n the slides. I am the most curious to speak with the locale leaders and get their opinions on whether the entertainment slides would translate well into their culture and languages. 

Next step, get my git repository up and running. Here we go!

My first week at Mozilla happened to also be the Community Building Team Meet-up in San Francisco. I was able to attend and was amazed at the process of consensus building and creating respectful discourse. We worked on (in a very broad sense) how Mozilla is going to grow and scale into a million Mozillians over the next few years. Over the three days I got to see and participate in the different working groups and meet a lot of staff and volunteers alike.

It was know from early on that I have a knack for all things crafty and I was asked to bring in a small project to do with the group on the breaks. I got to blog about it on the Mozilla Blog. Here is my post: Crafty Blog

I have actually been doing technical things as well, I promise 😉

Mozilla employees had the holiday off, but as an OPW intern, those 2 weeks are a pretty big chunk of my internship so we decided to find a project that I could do working in a void. One of the issues we discussed int he working groups was how to capture more of the interested potential volunteers that visit contributor sites on SUMO (Support Mozilla) site. My mentor suggested that I use my psychology (yes my actual degree, the one I learned about in school for all those years, crazy I know) to pull more of those people in. It ended up creating a small slide presentation that will hopefully be transformed into a quick course that people will take to get them started contributing. As soon as I can figure out a good, localizable platform (email me if you have an idea!!). I am getting closer, but my Javascript skills are minimal so it is taking an unreasonable amount of time, sorry Mozilla.

This coming week we are having the Engagement Team Meet-up in my hometown, so I am really excited about that!

I look forward to posting more details about how my projects are progressing and changing.

Today I learned that beginning December 10 I will be an intern for Mozilla! I may have built Mozilla up in my mind to be the very coolest company a gal could imagine having the honor to work for, correct? I dunno, but I am going to treat it like that for now! When I began to look into this internship I joined the “Community Building” email group and started receiving the team emails (because, you know, Mozilla works in the open, duh). The first few were interesting, talked about schedules, some ideas, some stuff I found interesting some stuff I thought I might learn more about in the future (not because I had no clue what they were saying I swear). Then I got an email entitled “The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community”. I read original blog post and was impressed. However, it was the conversation that followed that blew my mind up. Meritocracy, the role of women in the OSS community, the role of parents, people without free time and opportunity to contribute and more, all discussed by smart (I mean really really smart) people in a kind, respectful, productive way. No amazing decisions were made, nothing changed in the way contributors are recognized or rewarded, but it made this lady turn on a section of her brain that had been gathering dust. Contributing to OSS is something I have always thought was cool, but do it myself? No, no sir, I really don’t have anything to offer, I don’t know where, how, what to start? GitWhat? Huh? But then someone said simply “like begets like” and it hit me. Nope, I’m not ‘like’, I am a mom of 3 kids and I don’t have a CS degree and I have very little to no free time, but that may not be a bad thing. Maybe I have something to offer that hasn’t been offered before and that is a good thing? So I created a GitHub account and started looking at fixes and wikis and learning about repositories. And no I haven’t saved the OSS community with mind bending illumination, but f-it. I’m an intern. An this is my first OPW intern blog post. That’s pretty cool.