484416 - Design an interactive timeline of Mozilla's history

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 690821

(www.mozilla.org :: Information Architecture & UX, defect)

Description

[David Boswell]

The current Timeline page is not very compelling. Creating a visual timeline that people can interact with would make this information more compelling and could also allow us to expand the amount of historical information we are tracking (and could allow people to add their own information). This could also be an opportunity to use some web standards in interesting ways (SVG, SMIL, video tag...).  Marking with student-project keyword since this could be an interesting project for someone in design school and/or someone learning web development.

Comment 1

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

There's an interesting one at http://www.recovery.gov/ that doesn't use Flash. Might be worth checking it out.

Comment 2

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Closing old Mozilla.org website bugs due to them not being relevant to the new Python-based Bedrock system. Re-open if this is a critical bug and should be resolved on the new system too.

Comment 3

[Samuel Sidler (:ss)]

Chris More: I'm sure you strongly investigated the feasibility of this bug and decided that creating an interactive timeline of Mozilla's history was not in the best interests of Mozilla, the company and the community. I, however, disagree. So I'm reopening. Perhaps the module owner for the website should make this decision.

Comment 4

[Chris More [:cmore]]

My team is building the interactive "State of Mozilla" page this year per bug 769007 as an infographic. This will be on the new Bedrock system and it could be used to build one for all the Mozilla timeline. I automatically closed all bugs with no assignee and no comments since March of 2011.

Comment 5

[Samuel Sidler (:ss)]

(In reply to Chris More [:cmore] from comment #4)
> I automatically closed all bugs with no assignee and no comments since March
> of 2011.

That sounds reasonable, but changing the backend of a website doesn't change all the content (necessarily) or make stale RFEs no longer valid. I'd say 90% of the bugs you closed were either not closed properly or should not have been closed at all.

I'm looking forward to seeing that infographic for 2011 and hopefully for all of Mozilla's history.

Comment 6

[David Boswell]

At the Coding Contribute Group meeting today we were talking about how an interactive timeline of contributions could be a great way to recognize people who get involved with Mozilla.

Seif mentioned that he had done something similar for GNOME by creating an activity log that showed the history of files.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1D95YR3aVE

I also recently saw that Pierros is integrating a timeline visualization into the Reps portal based on Timeline JS.

http://timeline.verite.co/

I think having a page where we could explicitly link a contributor's history with Mozilla's history and Mozilla's mission would be a very compelling way to recognize people, so I'm interested in trying to revive this discussion.

http://timeline.verite.co/

Comment 7

[Kohei]

I think this is still relevant.

Comment 8

[David Boswell]

Yes, this is still relevant.  Leading up to the Summit, we posted a series of 25 history milestones and invited people to share their stories about each and we have some interesting content to use for an interactive history page.  More details about those milestones are at:

https://blog.mozilla.org/community/category/history/