Moz Service Week: give the gift of an open web

A year ago, I wrote a post entitled ‘The Next Million Mozillians‘. I have been obsessed with the question of how we create new ways for people to get involved in the Mozilla community ever since. I believe this kind of large scale community building is essential if we genuinely want to:

Make openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life.

… as we stated in our 2010 goals. If we want people to live, work and play more like the web, we need to give them simple and easy ways to get involved in reaching this goal.

Announced today, Mozilla Service week represents a major step in this direction. The idea is that Mozilla community members will help public benefit organizations by volunteering to do things like:

• Teach a senior citizen how to blog.
• Help a non-profit use social media to reach new supporters.
• Install a wireless network at a school.
• Write an add-on that helps a teacher do her job better.
• Donate hardware for a local computer refurbishing center.

This is an incredible opportunity to do some good in the world — the broad majority of public benefit organizations really need this kind of help. I know as I worked in the non-profit tech space for many years.

Service Week is also important on another level. It invites people to get involved with Mozilla in a concrete way, even if they can’t do things like code, test or localize. It let’s anyone and everyone contribute to the cause of building a better internet. I meet people who want to get involved like this everyday (really!). Service Week is our first significant effort to welcome these people in a big way. I am excited.

The URL to tweet, shout about and click on is: mozillaservice.org. Service Week happens September 14-21, 2009. But you can sign up to volunteer now. And, more importantly, you can tell all you’re friends who’ve wanted to get involved in Mozilla ‘here’s your big chance’.