Foundation:Planning:Education2010

This page is a draft plan for Mozilla Education in 2010. For background see the 2009 plan, 2009 progress report and feedback, and Frank Hecker's blog post.

Mozilla Education is a Mozilla initiative (under Mozilla Foundation auspices) to help grow a new generation of Mozilla contributors by working with students and educators around the world; it is based on and grows out of efforts at Seneca College and elsewhere. Mozilla Education is part of a larger movement (exemplified by the "teaching open source" project) to promote the teaching of free software and open source technologies and development practices in academic settings. Mozilla Education also connects with an even larger movement to promote participatory, student-led learning based on open educational resources.

During 2010 we want to focus on continuing and expanding activities that have shown past success and expanding them in a scalable way. The two major objectives are to

• help attract and grow potential core Mozilla contributors through a combination of
  • Seneca-style efforts to integrate teaching of Mozilla technologies and practices into academic curriculums
  • efforts to encourage Mozilla-related senior projects and independent study, for those schools not amenable to more intensive Mozilla-related instruction
• help attract and grow other contributors through a combination of
  • cross-school and (where appropriate) cross-disciplinary projects that leverage and build on Mozilla-related technologies (or technologies of interest to Mozilla)
  • (optionally) one or more design challenges modeled on and supplementing related efforts by Mozilla Labs and others

A final objective is to provide a central portal for links to Mozilla-related information of potential interest to students and educators.

Attracting and growing core Mozilla contributors

The following activities are proposed for 2010 in pursuit of the objective of growing full-time core Mozilla contributors (i.e., people who are good candidates for employment at the Mozilla Corporation or Mozilla Messaging):

• Continue to promote the Seneca approach to schools that are most likely to be receptive to it, and in particular try to target schools interested in teaching topics like quality assurance through automated testing, continuous integration, and other software engineering practices needed in large-scale projects like Mozilla. The set of targeted educators and institutions includes those in the Mozilla Education contacts list.
• For research-focused institutions, reach out to and encourage professors to have students do Mozilla-related senior projects and independent study, either based on self-generated ideas or based on tasks previously identified as being good student projects. The overall approach will be modeled on that taken by Greg Wilson of the University of Toronto in his undergraduate capstone open source projects (UCOSP) initiative.

We will also use the Mozilla Education web site to promote student internship opportunities at the Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Messaging.

Attracting other Mozilla contributors

The following activities are proposed for 2010 in pursuit of the objective of engaging students to contribute outside the context of the core Mozilla codebase:

• Sponsor at least three projects in 2010 that can each serve as a focus for engaging larger groups of students:
  • continuation of the Processing for the Web project
  • a new project around tools for analyzing and/or rewriting code, leveraging existing work by Taras Glek and others (e.g., Dehydra and Pork) and done in loose cooperation with the GCC project or others
  • at least one other new project in an area yet to be determined.
• Start at least one new Mozilla Education design challenge project in 2010, if (and only if) there is a suitable problem (e.g., one that doesn’t overlap with planned Mozilla Labs challenges) and funding can be found.

We will also use the Mozilla Education web site to cross-promote Mozilla Labs design challenges to the students involved in Mozilla Education activities, and will work with Labs and others to promote Mozilla Education projects to others in the Mozilla community.