Volunteer for Mozilla Service Week

Author: Gareth Halfacree
Published: 17th June 2009
Comments (5) Stumble
Volunteer for Mozilla Service Week

The Mozilla Service Week aims to bring people with technology knowledge together with those who can benefit from their help.

Not content with racing up the market share charts with its open-source web browser, the Mozilla Foundation is looking to improve peoples' lot in life with the Mozilla Service Week.

The week – which is scheduled to take place starting on September 14th – looks for people to “step up and make a difference by using the Web to better their community.”

As described on the Mozilla Blog, the aim of the week is to encourage technologically-minded individuals to use their powers for good, helping out charities, non-profits, and people who just need a bit of a helping hand.

As befits a technology company, the Foundation's aims are nicely nerdy: examples given include the wonderfully patronising “teach senior citizens how to use the Web,” along with the more laudable “install a wireless network at a school, create Web how-to materials for a library's computer cluster, refurbish hardware for a local computer centre, [and] help a non-profit update its website or database.”

Mark Surman, executive director of the Foundation, said that it was “inviting people to get involved with Mozilla in an active way, even if they can't code, test or localise. It lets anyone and everyone feel like they are contributing to the cause of building a better internet.”

While the week is a while away yet, the site is already live and looking for volunteers. Although similar in its aims to the UK-oriented IT4Communities technological volunteering service, the Service Week is open to anyone with even a hint of web-related skill – and will be launching worldwide and in a variety of languages as we head towards September.

Can you think of a worthwhile project you'd like to donate your time to for Mozilla Service Week, or is the Foundation just looking for mugs to improve its public image free of charge? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Quote Elton 17th June 2009, 23:00
Cool stuff, and it kills 2 birds wit 1 stone, good PR and helpful to the community. GJ Mozilla, unlike the Geniuses who run Opera...
Quote Phil Rhodes 18th June 2009, 02:23
Nice idea, but the red tape involved in some of those example tasks would be preclusive. Libraries are local-government run, and local governments have famously prickly IT departments which would neither want nor feel able to let Johnny Random Volunteer go poking about their servers. Equally, can you imagine the red tape involved in letting some nerd wander into a school full of other people's kids? The mind boggles.

Sorry, but we're in far too much of a suspicious, unpleasant world for this to work well. Trust is in short supply.
Quote fodder 18th June 2009, 08:29
I ditto that Phil.

My experience of local council run IT is a spine chiling experience. I wasn't allowed to plug anything into the network without it being fully inspected and audited by the IT dept. and have their anti virus put on it. Unfortunately, due to the specialist nature of our software, they didn't understand it and their anti-virus killed it. All that had to be done was exclude one small directory from the AV for it to work. They refused. (I did it without them knowing, so far the world has not ended).

When I did eventually get to plug the server in, I wasn't allowed to configure the network or any settings. However, as they knew nothing about our software, I had to sit next to the guy and talk him through it. A week of my life wasted...
Quote Phil Rhodes 18th June 2009, 13:11
That's pretty much exactly my experience. I was building systems to run digital projection at a council-run cinema - eventually we had to tell them it was a "digital video player" not a computer so they'd leave use the ^%!@ alone.
Quote Elton 18th June 2009, 21:20
I'm glad I never worked for schools.

Those idiots don't even know what a proxy is.
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