Mozilla

Atul Varma of Mozilla Labs has a great post up, “Kids and the Open Web” where he advocates having the Mozilla Drumbeat initiative explicitly include some messaging around the value of an open web for children: What if promotional materials for the Open Web focused on how it makes lives better for children who are budding hackers? Lots of adults aren’t tech savvy, but they know that their kids are, and if we can prove that the Open Web is better for their kids, and that they can make their kids’ lives better by choosing a standards-compliant browser, maybe they will. ...

In the few remaining minutes before Firefox 3.5 storms its way around the world, I wanted to highlight two Firefox-related accessibility projects that are just getting under way, courtesy of special funding from the Mozilla Corporation. Both projects address key goals in the proposed Mozilla accessibility strategy. The first is a project by the Paciello Group to continue work they’ve previously been doing under Mozilla Foundation funding to make the Firebug developer tool more accessible, with a particular focus on the Firebug releases intended for use with Firefox 3.5. This work is complementary with related Firebug work by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (funded by the Mozilla Foundation), with the overall goal being to integrate accessibility for web applications into the standard tools used by web developers (i.e., Firebug), as opposed to having accessibility testing confined to special accessibility-focused tools used by only a small subset of developers. ...

My apologies for not passing this on earlier: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain, is organizing a three-month course on Mozilla technologies in cooperation with the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Europe. The course is almost completely on-line, but it includes a one-week face-to-face “sprint” session in Madrid in July; students are welcome to apply for financial help with travel costs for the Madrid portion of the course. The course is open to international students and will be taught in English. You can find further information—including a course outline, important dates, FAQ, and a forum—at mozilla.libresoft.es. The deadline for applications has been extended to June 20, so get your applications in soon! ...

For today’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call at 11 am EDT / 8 am PDT / 1500 UTC we’ll be talking about a proposed multi-disciplinary multi-school “meta-project” to move the Processing programming language to the open web. (Processing is currently Java-based, though there is a JavaScript port in progress). I’ll also be glad to answer any questions people might have about the SoftHum workshop that I attended last week and blogged about.

I was at Drexel University in Philadelphia last Thursday and Friday participating in the SoftHum Workshop on Involving Students in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Projects (to use its official name). I was there representing Mozilla, and in particular to talk about our Mozilla Education initiative; I was one of the folks invited to provide the open source project perspective, along with Greg Dekoenigsberg of Red Hat and the Fedora Project and Darius Jazayeri of the OpenMRS project. ...