Mozilla Europe and Mozilla in Europe

[Tristan Nitot - Mozilla]

This has been communicated to MozCamp Berlin attendees and Mozilla
employees via email, but this should be public, so here it is).

<<
Last week-end at the EU MozCamp in Berlin we shared plans for further
focusing and expanding Mozilla efforts in Europe - and we thought you
might be interested to know what we said.
Mozilla has been widely successful in Europe. The Mozilla Mission
resonates especially well with Europeans. The user base of Firefox and
Thunderbird is very high, and Firefox is a well understood part of
mainstream life.

What many of us don't realize is that we have achieved this success in
Europe with a very complex organizational structure -- in fact, we had
three different organizations, with separate and overlapping online
presences (i.e. mozilla.org , mozilla.com and mozilla-europe.org ).
We've been asking our communities and users to interact with all
three, and we've been trying to keep content updated and synced among
the three.
Then we started the "One Mozilla" program giving the world the
experience of "Mozilla" - the mission and Mozilla programs - not our
organizational structure. We have merged our various websites back
into mozilla.org - www.mozilla.com is no more. Similarly, www.mozilla-europe.org
pages are or will be merged into mozilla.org. Going forward, we are
also looking at integrating innovation work across Labs and Drumbeat
into the mozilla.org structure.

At the same time, we've paved the way for our various communities to
operate as an integrated whole by building out a holistic contributor
engagement program. European localizers, localizers from other
geographies, our international engagement efforts, ReMo, SiGs are all
working together. Along these lines, we've also been looking at our
organizational structure in Europe.

As a result, the Board of Mozilla Europe has come to feel that the
Mozilla Europe association as a separate independent entity is no
longer needed. We discussed this with Mitchell, who was part of
forming Mozilla Europe in the first place (though never a board
member) and she agreed this is the best path forward. It became clear
in this process that over the years, many of the innovations pioneered
by the Mozilla Europe association have been adopted as part of our
global efforts. For example, mozilla-europe.org hosted our first
multi-lingual Mozilla website and created our first structured system
for doing so. Today the model of localized content is woven into
everything we do. And MozCamps themselves are another great example of
European innovations going global.

Streamlining the global Mozilla organization by transferring
initiatives from a regional entity to global team, means that the
ideas incubated in Europe can now be more easily expanded on a global
scale. Integrating Mozilla Europe efforts under the umbrella of the
broader Mozilla organization will allow us to spend less time on
bureaucracy and will give us more time to make awesome things happen.
We will have clear processes around the globe to continue and expand
our presence at local events, to ensure reimbursements and swag orders
are easy and timely. We will have fewer web sites to keep updated –
and thus more time to create compelling content. We will not do less
in Europe, we can do more!

Mozilla Europe did not have paid staff for a number of years. Thus no
staff is affected by the changes that will go into effect between now
and the end of the year.

It is clear that Europe is an integral part of Mozilla. It's not a
regional part or a regional hub, it's part of the core of Mozilla. To
keep the momentum, we are investing in more Mozilla Spaces across
Europe: Paris will be joined by spaces in London and Berlin in 2012.
This means we have more room for volunteer participation as well as
for paid staff. Thus as we work to significantly scale in Europe and
around the world, we will continue to grow this core going forward.


--Mitchell Baker and Tristan Nitot
>>

PS: Tristan is planning to post this to his blog, standblog.org, in
order to have this on planet.mozilla.org, but Tristan's server is
currently down, so this may take a little while to become more public.
If the server takes to long to come back up, it could be posted on
another board member's blog.