It sometimes seems that when someone at Mozilla sneezes, there’s someone somewhere writing about it. From Twitter to the New York Times and everything in between, Mozilla attracts an amazing volume of coverage.
This volume is both good and bad. We don’t have the marketing and pr budgets of the software mega-companies so the press buzz we get organically is wonderful. The downside is that because of the sheer volume of coverage, it’s difficult to follow it all and make sure that Mozilla is being represented fairly.
What Mozilla lacks in marketing and pr budget, however, it more than makes up in the enthusiastic and capable community of participants who have already brought Firefox to 130 million users and made Mozilla a household name.
For the Record (FTR) is a community-driven public relations and press response program that will harness the energy and knowledge of the Mozilla community to 1) catalog all of the online coverage of the Mozilla Project, 2) develop a sustainable team of spokespeople who feel empowered to respond to online coverage, and 3) build a collection of talking points and responses to frequently asked questions.
To start participating today, simply add fortherecord@mozilla.org to your email address-book and forward blog posts or articles about Mozilla projects or products that are a) factually inaccurate or misleading, b) relevant to Mozilla, its products, or the Open Web, but fail to mention Mozilla, or c) thoughtful stories that are factually accurate and favorable, or at least fair about Firefox. Please include a short note explaining why you’ve forwarded the story.
The For the Record team, Mozilla’s marketing team, PR representatives, or various spokespeople will take it from there.
Want to join the For the Record team, and help us further develop the program and write a set of FAQs and other materials that will make it easier for the Mozilla community to better tell the Mozilla story and respond effectively when needed? Well, that’s easy too. Simply subscribe to the mailing list. Please note, unless you’re really interested in analyzing the flow of Mozilla news and helping to distill relevant content into documentation, this probably isn’t the list for you. If, on the other hand, that sounds like great fun, we’d love to have you involved.