Part of the issue may be people associating Mozilla as an open source project, as you mention. The project started out as a code-focused effort, but has grown beyond that — so much so that I don’t think ‘open source’ really fits.

I think we’re much closer in many ways now to non-profits like the Red Cross that aren’t in the open source space at all than we are to Linux, Apache or other open source projects. So do we want to use ‘open source’ to describe ourselves any more?

That might seem like a small semantic difference, but I think it does create a mindset for people when they think about how they might be able to get involved. I’d be interested in working together to try different ways to talk about how people can get involved to see if we can find better ways to help people understand what they could do.

And here’s one brainstormed idea for how to bring volunteer writers on board: Now that the brand toolkit is out, you can ask people to audit the content spread across the 200+ Mozilla sites and track changes they suggest making to make our story clearer and more consistent.

David

Also, you can quit fretting about ending sentences with prepositions. It’s OK, really: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/ending-prepositions.aspx

And I predict Mozilla will soon be calling it “Firefox 2011.3 which is currently in the Aurora channel” to sidestep all the wailing and gnashing about too many changes/no major features/not what I expected/too much churn. They’re time-based releases, give them time-based versions.

Here’s some thoughts I had after giving an interview about Firefox 5 in Polish: the Polish word for ‘channel’ didn’t really click, so I went for ‘layers’, to distinguish from ‘versions.’

I think layers can be understood as layers of stability, or protection. Release channel is well protected, while nightly is almost naked.

Also, I really like the verb 'Mozilla-fy.' I think that much of the localization is in fact Mozillafying the local messaging and not localizing the 'official' Mozilla messaging. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but I believe that going forward this is how we will scale, empower the community and stay relevant to the end users.