I was reading Mitchell's post about communities the other day, and I thought that really, building a community is an art. It's not only an art, it's something that make Free and Open Source Software very different (and in many cases, superior), to its proprietary counterpart. In Europe, speaking so many different languages makes building a big community more challenging than in other parts of the world. Mozilla Europe, as the official representative of Mozilla Foundation in Europe, has been founded in order to overcome these challenges.

This is why we have been working hard for almost a year in order to build the following:

  • Professional-looking, standards-compliant web site (in both content and design);
  • Reliable hosting (we now are about to move to our own, dedicated, big-iron server);
  • Multilingual content management system (now including automated updates for new releases and news backend);
  • Legal structure, recognized by Mozilla Foundation as the first international affiliate (needed for dealing appropriately with trademark issues);
  • Solid community (several thousand people have asked to become Mozilla Europe members, and our member management application is just about to be released to the public);
  • Efficient team, with various talented, long-time Mozilla developers, including good PR knowledge;
  • European Mozilla Developers Meeting in Brussels, last February.

Many people, in most European countries, want to promote Mozilla in their language. This is great news! This is why we want to share with them our experience and our infrastructure. I see many advantages to work together:

  • We will demonstrate our unity and our strength, showing how serious and organized we are. This means that we will have more impact when discussing with the press, enterprises and European governments;
  • The users will benefit from better, more reliable services;
  • Potential users will not be confused to have multiple places claiming to be "Mozilla Site" in their language;
  • Our energy will be spent on helping the users and the project, rather than recoding / rewriting / redesigning stuff;
  • Simplified trademark management for all of us (so that we avoid the trademark management nightmare);

So, what is needed in order to reach our goal?

  • A web site localization manager for each language, in charge of publishing localized content. He/she must be able to edit valid XHTML with a text editor;
  • A small number of translators/proofreaders to help with the person mentioned above (at least one proofreader per language);
  • A few people to manage / moderate the forums for Mozilla 1.x, Firefox, Thunderbird and Camino, and other various topics. Such people would know quite well the products and answer user questions;
  • A few people to manage and moderate user-support mailing lists, same profile as above.

In this list of profiles, I did not mention product localizers, on purpose. In fact, they should already be working with the Mozilla Localization Project (on which Mozilla Europe members work actively).

We also plan to launch forums in various languages so that users have a place to ask for community-based support. In the future, Mozilla Europe may want to offer to host other services (wiki-based FAQ, Mozilla-related blogs?), but it's too early to discuss this.

If you want to help Mozilla and Firefox in your country/language, please consider joining us. Together, we will make a much better job (and more impact at the same time) than if we battle unorganized or, even worse, if we compete against each other.

In order to join Mozilla Europe to help or discuss our approach, please contact Pascal Chevrel and me through a list we have set up via Biggercommunity (at) lists.mozilla-europe (dot) org (there is no need to subscribe to be able to post on the list).