Education/Feedback

This page collects feedback received from various people on the Mozilla Education initiative.

November 2009 email survey

In November 2009 Frank Hecker surveyed 18 Mozilla contributors regarding their opinions on the Mozilla Education program and how it should be continued in future; half of the people surveyed responded with comments. The following is a summary of the comments received:

• All of the people surveyed were aware of the participation of Seneca College students in the Mozilla project. However few people were aware that students from other institutions had been or were involved in similar activities, and some people weren't initially aware that particular contributions had been made by students.
• Several people acknowledged the value of the Seneca program in turning out students who could work in areas within the Mozilla project like release engineering that have been traditionally hard to recruit and train for.
• Almost all the respondents acknowledged the value of having students contribute to Mozilla; however several respondents were concerned about the extent to which students could make real contributions in the core Mozilla codebase, and the amount of time and mentoring needed to get them to a point where they could make high quality contributions. (Note that this was particularly with reference to the traditional approach of "find some bugs and have students work on them".)
• Some people expressed interest in having students who could contribute more to core product development (e.g., beyond working on build and release engineering issues). Other people wanted to see involvement by graduate students in more research-oriented areas. A couple of people wanted to see students involved in improving Mozilla's software engineering practices, e.g, around continuous integration, creating better tools for code analysis, etc.
• Almost all respondents were in favor of continuing to fund Mozilla education activities. One person was uncertain what the goals of the Mozilla Education initiative were (as distinct from those of the Seneca program) and was neutral on funding pending clarification on that question. Another person was in favor of continued funding contingent on the Mozilla Education program having more aggressive goals and being actively managed to meet those goals.