A Re-introduction

We began as a group in late 2011 under the moniker “Mozilla Community IT” to help provide resources to our contributor community websites. We sought to answer this key question:

How can we use technology to empower the Community to promote the Mozilla Mission?

As the IT/Operations world has evolved, so have we. In the past year we’ve worked on supporting resources and projects that are more Ops-focused than traditional IT-focused.  So to better understand what we do, we have re-branded ourselves as Mozilla Community Ops.

Our Mission

We are a global team of sysadmins and ops engineers supporting the Mozilla community and, importantly, mentoring and teaching others with practical technical skills in hosting and running production websites and services, configuration management (Puppet/Chef), monitoring/alerting, and on-call pager.

Projects

Our aim, like most modern ops teams, is to provide services others can leverage that will simultaneously help lower the barrier to participation. It shouldn’t require special skills, for instance, to maintain a blog, or to launch and run a web application.

Here are a couple of our current big projects:

Discourse

Our flagship project is the Mozilla Community Discourse instance.

Discourse began as an experiment into finding communication tools better suited to Mozilla’s growing community. It has many features in common with mailing lists – and in fact can be used exclusively through email, just like a mailing list – as well as more social platforms like Google Groups or Yammer.  If you aren’t familiar with Discourse, please check it out.

A couple of the Discourse sites we are hosting:

• https://discourse.mozilla-community.org
• https://guides.mozilla-community.org/

We’ll also be posting about Discourse in more detail in future blog posts, including how we are building and maintaining Discourse instances in Amazon AWS.

Multi-Tenant WordPress

Building and maintaining a website/blog is one of the most challenging and time-consuming elements a local community can undertake. It also often has tangible costs. Web design, WordPress themes design, website deployment and basic server administration and operations are often barriers to entry.

Mozilla Community Ops is currently working on building out a scalable multi-tenant WordPress to manage multiple blogs, as well as make them more secure and more highly available.

We’re also working on some less flashy projects, like monitoring and system health. Keep an eye out for future blog posts on these projects, or ask us about it in our Discourse category. Our Discourse category is also the right place to go if you have any other questions about what we’re up to, or want to join in on the fun. If you want to help, just start a new topic introducing yourself and we’ll help point you in the right direction.

http://ops.mozilla-community.org/welcome-to-the-mozilla-community-ops-blog/