Today the BigBlueButton project graduates from the Mozilla WebFWD program. You can watch our graduation ceremony on Air Mozilla (broadcast starts at 4PM PDT).
The goals for the WebFWD program are “to help open source innovators create businesses that change the world’. We were amongst the first class for WebFWD, along with other projects such as Cash Music, BuddyCloud, Open Photo, and Entropy Wave (see WebFWD portfolio for a full list).
We benefited from two summits, in which Mozilla flew developers from the BigBlueButton project to Mountain View, CA. At each summit, we had presentations from the Mozilla team on improving usability, building an open source community, creating a scalable product, open source business models, and more. All very relevant to our project.
We benefited from weekly conference calls with the team in which we reviewed objectives, got advice, and, most importantly, build strong relationships with the other WebFWD teams.
We benefited from a six weeks of intensive on-line courses, complete with assignments and peer reviews. WebFWD provided a structured learning environment.
We benefited from external presenters, hosted by WebFWD, that gave talks relevant to open source projects.
But most of all we benefited from the WebFWD team itself, especially from Diane Bisgeier and Pascal Finette, who took a strong interest in all the open source projects in WebFWD and invested much of their time and effort in helping us out.
Mozilla is a great organization, and WebFWD is an awesome program. Through WebFWD, Moilla is actively helping other open source projects become successful and move the web forward. We feel honoured to have been a part of WebFWD.
From the perspective of the BigBlueButton project, we believe there is a lot of social benefit (and entrepreneurial oppportunity) to create an open source web conferencing system. Mozilla’s WebFWD program has certainly helped us achieve that goal.
