Not so long ago Matt Mullenweg talked to the Mozilla employees about WordPress and its community. He mentioned about a map they had set up to show where they all were in the world and I was intrigued to know what such a map would look like for Mozilla. Now I don’t actually have the locations of all the community members, but I can make a decent start by using the locations of all the Mozilla Corporation employees, and with a few scripts and the Google maps API there is something interesting to look at. Click on the image to go to the full interactive view:
The data here is scraped out of Mozilla’s phonebook and some people haven’t entered a full location, so if you’re an employee and think you aren’t in the right place on the map then update your phonebook entry. Also the actual positions are grabbed using Google’s geocode which seems to have some problems so some people are in completely the wrong place at the moment (sorry Igor!).
Might be nice to actually think about doing this for the Mozilla community in general. Not sure how we’d go about gathering the location data for everyone though. Of course the new geolocation support in Firefox 3.5 would make getting the actual location easier, but how do we figure out who should appear on the map and get them all to sign up?
Quite a while ago, Gerv started a map on Frappr, initially just for localizers, but then expanded to include the entire community: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2005/12/put_yourself_on_frappr_1.html
The UI on Frappr seems to continue to go downhill; I think it looked much better and was more useful/usable in 2005….
To get the Mozilla community, one way would be to allow people to add themselves.
We could get subsets of the Mozilla community, for example it might be nice to see where the campus reps are.
How about extending this to the mozilla contributors as well, like myself?
How to get in contact with the mozilla employees in my country?
Nice map. Would be nicer to see the entire community. There are addresses in the committer’s agreements, but that would require some manual work.
It seems like you added our (the Danish l10n team’s) website to the pop-up for the Copenhagen office. That does not seem right, even through we have visited the office a couple of times.
Very cool map. This is something that would be great to have on the Mozilla CRM that Jay is working on:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_CRM
Community members could add their own profile and indicate if they want their location published or not and then the map could pull information from the CRM site.
Who is the one lone employee in northern Saskatchewan?
Fantastic! This is a great foundation for what I’m sure will grow into a great and expansive project. Integrating this with the Mozilla CRM is a great idea.
James, he isn’t really there, it’s just that some people have put their country down as their city in the phonebook.
I think this map – while impressive – should be open to Mozilla community members. It makes me a bit uncomfortable to publish it while de facto preventing community members to put themselves on the map. Mozilla isn’t relevant without the community, and making public a tool open only to employees is a bit embarrassing to me.
I understand that there is a reason why the map is showing only employees (the LDAP service does not keep track of community members), but we should fix this quickly, or at least announce that we want to work on something that will enable community members to put themselves on the map.
While this isn’t the full Mozilla community: the support (SUMO) community has a map at http://bit.ly/sumomap So you can see even subsets of our whole community are nicely distributed around the world.