Community spotlight: Paul Booker, Mozilla contributor

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Opensource.com

On opensource.com, community is very important. We want to continue to recognize our community members who contribute in ways other than writing articles--things like rating and commenting, voting in polls, and sharing our collective work on social media. This is the second of our community spotlight posts.

Meet Paul Booker. He's a web developer in Birmingham, England and a contributor to Mozilla. He is a big fan of Drupal and helps edit the about:mozilla newsletter. We hope you enjoy getting to know Paul.

The Basics

Paul Booker

  • Name: Paul Booker
  • Opensource.com username: paulbooker
  • Location: Birmingham, England
    Occupation/Employer/Position:  web developer / Appcoast (Sponsor) /  Mozilla Contributor
  • Open source connection: Helping to keep the (social) web open and distributed
  • Favorite open source tool or application: StatusNet
  • Favorite opensource.com channel: Life

Questions and answers

Open up to us

Hello, my name is Paul and I am from Birmingham, England. I am currently contracted by Appcoast as a web developer to contribute to Mozilla. Initially, back in 2005 we were asked by Mozilla to help out with developing / maintaining their Firefox engagement site spreadfirefox.com and have stayed around to help out with drumbeat.org and a number of other Drupal sites. Recently I have been helping out as editor of the about:mozilla newsletter and looking to deepen our involvement in QA [quality assurance] and support.

What open tools and data help you get things done, and how do they help you?

Drupal has been a great open tool over the years for building community sites, as it allows you to build much of what you need with contributed modules from the Drupal community. And if you need to write custom modules [or] themes, then there is great documentation and community support to help you every step of the way.

What do you wish were more open?

The social web needs to be more open and more like the web. It can't be good for the web if all of our social activities go through Facebook [and] Twitter. Just like email became distributed with AOL talking to CompuServe talking to...etc. we need a federated social web.

What are the biggest challenges to openness that you encounter, either at work or in your life?

The biggest challenges to openness on the web are large corporations seeking monopolies e.g. Facebook, AT&T, etc.

Why choose the open source way?

Because we are all one people and we all should be working for each other and not for the limited interests of a few people.

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Jason Hibbets is a Community Director at Red Hat with the Digital Communities team. He works with the Enable Architect, Enable Sysadmin, Enterprisers Project, and Opensource.com community publications.

2 Comments

A great interview with Paul! So happy to see this.

Thanks for your kind words Bryan :-)

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