Behind the scenes at Mozilla HQ

Asa Dotzler is the community coordinator for Mozilla. He joined the Mozilla project team at Netscape in May 2000, after working as a volunteer helping streamline the QA process. He was one of the founding employees of the Mozilla Foundation and works on community and marketing activities. For more information on the history of Firefox and how Dotzler got involved, read our interview with him.

Rafael Ebron is the product marketing manager for the Mozilla Foundation, focusing on Firefox and the Thunderbird email client. He joined the Mozilla Foundation in June 2004, after spending five years working as a product manager at Netscape, according to his personal Web site.

ZDNet UK also met some interns in the Mozilla offices; Dotzler said this is the first year where the foundation has been able to support paid internships. Although anyone can apply for these internships, Dotzler said that people who are already active as volunteers in the Mozilla community are preferred.

"People who are the most active in the community are our first choice. It's the same with the people we've hired — most are people who've already done work for the project. That's how I got hired," he said.

Alex Polvi, an intern from Oregon State University, is working on infrastructure and server administration projects at Mozilla. Polvi was involved in one of the most well known Firefox community marketing activities, when he and a group of friends painted a 7.3m × 7.3m Firefox logo in the middle of the quad at their university campus.

"We used 100 percent earth-friendly materials: cornstarch, kool-aid, and water. Our process involved drawing a large grid with yarn and then chalking outlines for the different areas of paint. We only got talked to by campus police once and they were very understanding," said Polvi in his blog.

Zach Lipton, a high school student, is also working as an intern at Mozilla. He started working as a volunteer on the Mozilla project four years ago when he was 13, making him one of the youngest volunteers involved in the Mozilla community, according to Dotzler.

Blake Ross, the creator of Firefox, also got involved in the Mozilla project early on — he started fixing bugs in the Netscape browser at the age of 15 and at 17 started developing an early version of the Firefox browser with another Netscape programmer David Hyatt.

Unlike Ross, who primarily worked as a programmer, Lipton is focusing on testing and QA work. "At least for the summer I'm trading the school part of my life for the Mozilla part and going to be doing some work on Testrunner, QA, and perhaps something related to Mister [a QA tool]," said Lipton in a blog posting.

Another intern, Blake Kaplan, is working on core mozilla features, including the new HTML Parser.

Asa Dotzler

Rafael Ebron

Alex Polvi

Blake Kaplan

Zach Lipton

ZDNet UK spoke to Asa Dotzler about the rise of Firefox in the enterprise, future marketing campaigns and how the Mozilla Foundation plans to target less tech-savvy consumers. To read the full interview, click here.

To read Dotzler's view of Firefox's and Mozilla's history, click here.