Happy New Year to everyone (better late than never!).

What better way to start 2011 than to make a big and important announcement. Indeed, my good friend and colleague Mary Colvig announced on her blog the creation of a new Contributor Engagement team at Mozilla, which she will lead, and which I feel incredibly privileged to be a part of. Here is Mary's note, on behalf of the entire team:

"We wanted to share some updates on how we're hoping to continue to be more effective and grow as a global community in 2011. As we discussed at the Summit and All Hands, one of the ways we're looking to do this is by building stronger relationships across the project. For example, focusing on our over 400 million end-users and creating new, meaningful ways for people to become Mozilla stakeholders and participants. We've been working towards this goal with the formation of a User Engagement team led by Jane Finette and our upcoming Join Us program http://commonspace.wordpress.com/20.... And at the same time, we've been building out our Developer Engagement team led by Stormy Peters that aims to connect with web developers to support and promote the adoption of open web standards through the Mozilla Developer Network https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US.... As we touched on at the All Hands in December, we've also formed a new Contributor Engagement group that will focus on further empowering and supporting Mozillians - individuals that passionately support, champion and contribute to the Mozilla project. The new team includes David Boswell, Mary Colvig, Gen Kanai, Amie Tyrrel and William Quiviger.

Building relationships with community will still be something we all participate in, but our specific focus is:

  • Make it easier for us to to find and communicate with each other.
  • Provide new opportunities and "on ramps" for participation.
  • Work across teams (both expertise and regions) to help bring even more people into the Mozilla community and foster them.
  • Create and update shared resources to make contributing to Mozilla even better.
  • And more!"

Community is the backbone of the Mozilla Project and it's incredibly humbling to be part of this community and work to support and strengthen it. We've accomplished a lot, but there's still so much to do, so many opportunities and challenges on the horizon. I encourage everyone interested in the Mozilla project in one way or the other to share your thoughts, suggestions, ideas and questions here.

2011, here we come!

(Photo: Sonny flexing Mozilla muscle)