Do You Want A Better Web? Become a WebFWD Scout!

WebFWD, Mozilla’s accelerator and incubator program, is looking for awesome scouts around the world to help us find the most amazing open source projects. WebFWD Scouts are our eyes and ears on the ground, pointing us to entrepreneurs and developers with the skills and ideas to make the world a better place. As a scout, you become a key participant in the wider WebFWD team and community.

Intrigued?

Here’s the low-down: We’re looking for people on all seven continents (well – six, as Antarctica might be a stretch) who are well-connected in their communities, active in tech events and meetups, and know people who know people… In a word, you are a connector. You see interesting stuff all the time and other people seek you out for your opinion. And perhaps most importantly, you are driven by a desire to make the Web a better place.

As a WebFWD Scout, you’ll seek out projects which align with the WebFWD framework: Open Source, Open Web, Social Entrepreneurship. At Mozilla, we have a strong current focus on apps that enable a personalized web experience with the user in control, and we are actively seeking projects with a penchant for mobile first.

When you find something you believe is a great fit, you simply get in touch with us. Together, we’ll review the prospective project in more detail.

Ready to sign up?

Sign up here and let’s get to work scouting the world for the best WebFWD projects!

We launched WebFWD knowing that the supply of compelling Open Source projects in support of our mission was plentiful across the globe. Our latest round of Fellows + 1 new Friend of WebFWD demonstrate this well, constituting 4 new countries joining our project.

We’re thrilled to welcome the following teams to WebFWD and keen to see who else will be appearing this quarter (remember, our admissions are rolling, so apply today!):

New WebFWD Fellows

The following teams are participating in our six-month program, receiving mentorship, infrastructure resources and ongoing coaching and help from the Mozilla network:

Meemoo (Finland) a web application that encourages remixing and experimentation with web media. A Meemoo composition is a graph of modules and the wires that connect them. Modules are HTML pages that can live anywhere online, using any web technology. Wires represent how the modules send messages to each other. Compositions will be sharable on a community site. All compositions and modules will be forkable in the Open Source spirit of creative collaboration.

Synbiota (UK + Canada) is building a bio-lab in a browser. Synthetic Biology promises to revolutionize the world in ways we have yet to imagine. Synbiota is working towards this revolution by providing powerful, accessible and open Web tools for synthetic biology design.

Verese (Greece) lets you keep a running tally of how much you owe your friends when you go out to restaurants, bars, etc. Built from day one as a mobile web app, Verese mixes in a fresh interface with some the best tools and standards of the web development world such as jQuery Mobile, Django and HTML5. Using an open API, Verese is making transactions with your friends simple.

New Friend of WebFWD

In addition to our 3 existing Teens In Tech teams, we’re delighted to bring the following team from the UK on board as a Friend of WebFWD:

Propelly (UK) allows you to earn from your creativity by offering you a platform to sell your files/digital products with a single link.

Only two short months ago we launched WebFWD – Mozilla’s accelerator and incubator program for Open Innovation and the open Web. Today we are proud and very happy to announce our first two Fellows – and as a bonus three projects which came through our partnership with Teens in Tech into our “Friends of WebFWD” program.

Fellows:

# OpenPhoto

The Idea: OpenPhoto is an Open Source photo sharing platform which gives users complete ownership and portability of their photos. Users’ photos, tags and comments are seamlessly stored into personally owned cloud services owned by themselves. Whatever they want to do or wherever they want to go their photos are free to go with them.

The Team: Jaisen Mathai, Patrick Santana, Patrick Boos, Florian Menevis, Preet Jassi, Klaus Komenda, Kitt Hodsden, Peter Sankauskas, John Fabrizio and Gareth Greenaway

Learn more at TheOpenPhotoProject.com

# CASH Music

The Idea: CASH Music is a nonprofit organization focussed on artist sustainability through education and open technology. We’ve worked directly with artists and independent labels to build a free and open platform that can be downloaded and used to promote, distribute, and sell music.

The Team: Jesse von Doom,
Maggie Vail and Jonathan “Duke” Leto

Learn more at CASHMusic.org

As part of our Teens in Tech program:

# Bubbls

The Idea: Bubbls is a social platform that helps young adults plan events and hangouts. We’re a website and mobile app.

The Team: James Maa, Matthew Miller and Matt Plant

Learn more at Bubbls.com

# Codulous

The Idea: Codulous is an online code editor that makes it really easy to code on the go.

The Team: Raphie Palefsky-Smith, Andrew Amis, Kai Tamkun and Marc Laugharn

Learn more at Codulo.us

# MySchoolHelp

The Idea: MySchoolHelp is a place where high school students can find and share notes from their school.

The Team: Ben Lang, Jake Essman, Amanda Aizuss and Nick Donelly

Learn more at MySchoolHelp.com

What’s Next?

The teams are currently getting set up in our system (we use Yammer for inter-team communication), get matched with their mentors and soon we’ll start our first workshops. And as this is the first iteration of our program, we expect to learn at least as much from our teams than they (hopefully) will learn from us.

Stay tuned for updates from the teams and our progress. This is the beginning of a very interesting journey!

P.S.: We are also continuously evaluating new projects – so, don’t be shy and apply here. And join our forum if you have questions or would like to discuss the program, enterpreneurship in the vein of Open Source and Open Innovation.

Lean Startup Methodology Meets Open Source

A conversation about how the lean startup methodology propagated by Eric Ries et al. can and should be used in the context of Open Source projects. Many promising Open Source projects get stalled due to lack of focus, lack of customer-centric thinking and too much “scratching my own itch”-ism. Applying the battle-proven techniques of lean startups can help bring better Open Source projects to the world – and make the world a better place. Pascal and Ash respectively bring deep experience in Open Source/ Open Innovation and lean startup practices and will argue their hearts out – for better Open Source projects.

Vote for this panel here

Fast CSS: how browsers lay out Web pages

This session explains the basic concepts in browser implementations of core Web document technologies (HTML, XHTML, CSS, and SVG), explains their general performance characteristics and how they interact with Javascript, and explains common optimizations (such as coalescing changes) that browsers make. Rather than presenting specific techniques authors can use, the goal is to build understanding of the performance characteristics of the Web platform so authors can have ideas of what things are likely to be fast or slow, and what types of changes they can experiment with to improve the performance of their Web pages.

Vote for this panel here

Open-Web, Open-News: Reporters & Developers Remix

We’re experiencing the birth of a new era: Legacy news organizations are beginning the process of moving beyond their print and broadcast past, while new, all-web reporting outfits begin to chart a path into a new future. In the process, exciting new discussions of how the culture of the open web intersects with the culture of the newsroom are growing ever more frequent. All of this has kicked off a wave of innovation throughout the journalism space that has seen leaps forward in real-time reporting, data visualization, back-end technology, and much more. But it’s nothing compared to the innovations to come. Recognizing the many opportunities to facilitate community and empower webmakers to build real tools, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership was formed in 2011. It has kicked off a year of design challenges that culminated in placing technology fellows in some of the world’s best newsrooms, charged with creating code for new kinds of news. As the partnership enters its second year, this conversation will address the broad implications of this new kind of collaboration: How do we work together to innovate in the news space? How do we bring the best practices of both disciplines to bear on the other? How do we broaden the scope, spread the code, and create real impact?

Vote for this panel here

To see all Mozilla submissions in the SxSW PanelPicker click here.

Thank you & see you at SxSW!

Codenamed “BetaFarm” for now (the name will change soon), the new site is an effort to put supported projects from Mozilla Labs and the Mozilla Foundation under a single roof. The site is powered by the same engine that drives Drumbeat.org, with lots of improvements under the hood.

The goal: make it easy for anyone to find, follow and contribute to Mozilla projects. It’s a work in progress, and we want to give you an early opportunity to try it and give us some feedback.

A bit of background: You told us you want a site that helps you participate and stay informed. And that the current Mozilla Labs site doesn’t make that easy enough. We also heard that it can be hard to find all of the innovation projects across different parts of Mozilla, and that it takes too many clicks and searches to find a way to get involved. We all share the same mission — what’s most important is that people can easily find our projects and pitch in.

That’s where we’re hoping BetaFarm can help address some of what we heard from you. But we want to know what you think. Visit the site at beta.mozillalabs.com and sign up — you can use Mozilla Browser ID to create an account. There you can follow projects, sign up for events, and find links and information to participate in projects. And please tell us what you think using the feedback tab.

Thank you for your commitment, your time, and your interest in Mozilla.

Pascal Finette on behalf of the Mozilla Labs crew

PS – A huge thank you to the talented Paul Osman, Ross Bruniges, Andy Chung, Havi Hoffman, Ryan Merkley, and the rest of the team who have done spectacular work to get us here.

Since we launched Mozilla’s WebFWD accelerator program four short weeks ago we spoke with numerous people who either applied, were thinking about applying or who contacted us with questions and suggestions. One common comment we heard over and over again was: “The Bootcamp is great but I would like to have a longer-term, slightly less high-touch engagement with you”.

So this is what we’re introducing today. In addition to the 4-week Bootcamp we are launching a 6-month Fellow program. As a WebFWD fellow you will receive mentorship from key Mozillians, our awesome mentors, attend workshops on topics such as scalability, security, marketing & community building, learn how to run your project based on the lean startup methodology, become part of the WebFWD community and much more.

As the Fellow program does not require your physical presence in one of our offices you can literally apply from anywhere in the world.

We are extremely excited about this extension of our original WebFWD idea and look forward working with you!

Read more about the Fellow program as well as our Bootcamp on the WebFWD website, apply here and follow us on Twitter for last-minute updates.

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This is a cross-posting from the WebFWD blog

The first Coffee FWD will be Friday July 15th from 9:30am at Red Rock Cafe in Mountain View, CA: http://coffeefwd.eventbrite.com/

Spread the word & join us!

How

We’ll host small teams at Mozilla’s global offices for four weeks at a time, giving them access to our people, tools and resources, so they can focus on building. We’re looking for playful, useful, original problem-solving applications and tools that make the Web a better place.

During the four week program, teams will work in-house alongside the Mozilla crew. You’ll receive mentorship and guidance from some of the brightest people around, allowing you to focus on bringing your product idea to life.

At the end of four weeks, you’ll have a minimum viable product ready to go out on the Open Web. And together we can decide on how to take this product forward.

What we offer

• The opportunity to work alongside the Mozilla crew in one of our offices
• Access to key Mozilla personnel, introductions to interesting people and industry leaders
• Regular mentorship sessions with experts on technology, scalability, security, marketing, community, and business strategy
• Financial support during the program
• Help with IT infrastructure (servers, software, etc.)
• A great coworking experience with plenty of fun & awesomeness!

What we look for

• The product fits into one of the predefined problem areas
• The product is developed with the traits that are important for the open Web
• The team has at least the kernel of a product (i.e. some working code, not only an idea)

The program runs on a rolling submission schedule with the first spots opening in August. Head over to the Mozilla Labs Web FWD site for more information and submit your application.

Come join Mozilla and over 300 interns and engineers from the Silicon Valley for a memorable hacking session at the Computer History Museum. Mozilla’s first annual WSOH (World Series of Hack) will take place on July 21st-22nd!

Why WSOH? Well, our interns asked for a hacking session, we listened, and decided to go big. Why? Because it’s a unique opportunity for interns from different universities, countries, and cultural backgrounds to work together to build something awesome. It’s summer in The Valley, might as well be hacking.

We have a few ideas for themes ranging from building your own browser extension, to experimenting with HTML5 , or perhaps building data visualizations. Mozilla’s mission is all about making the Web better, and we want you to be part of it. Final themes will be available on Github by July 10th and we will be sending updates to those who’ve registered.

Sounds exciting to you? Can’t wait to get started? Well, RSVP today and come join us for an awesome hacking night. As always, we’ll provide plenty of food, caffeine, snacks, music, prizes, entertainment, games, and internet-famous engineers from across the land to guide you along the way.

Oh, and the chance to show off your project in front of a great panel of judges!

Agenda:
6:30pm – Museum doors open (START)
6:30pm – 7:00pm – Team Forming (3-4 interns per team)
7:30pm – So it Begins
7:30am – Pencils Up
8:00am – Projects Show & Tell

For now: spread the word, invite your friends and come build your own piece of Computer History!

Twitter: On July 21st, join Mozilla at the Computer History Museum and be ready to hack. More info here: http://wsoh.eventbrite.com #WSOH

Facebook event page: http://on.fb.me/mozwsoh

RSVP on eventbrite @ http://wsoh.eventbrite.com/

Any questions? Please email julie@mozilla.com

On their trip to the Silicon Valley they also stopped by the Mozilla offices and gave the following talk about Marble Run, the technology behind it and how they built it over an extended Christmas break.

Enjoy!