If you have read my About Me page, then you already know that I am a Mozilla Firefox Campus Rep. What is a Campus Rep? Well, I am the face of Mozilla on campus. In my own words, I see the title as liaison between Mozilla Corp and the students, faculty and staff on campus. My job is to talk about and show off Firefox because, yes, there is a safer alternative to Internet Explorer. As an avid computer user, I’ve seen, used, tested, and have many opinions about different web browsers. I’ll make sure I post my opinions about them here as it’s always a good idea to have insight to alternatives.
Why did I decide to become a campus rep? After all, I could have easily left the job to someone else or even the internet to take care of. Well, my answer is simple. I’ve been using Firefox since late 2004 (the version 1.0 release) and since then it has been my browser of choice. Back in high school, when I was working for my district’s technology department, I brought up that the district should switch over to Firefox due to the quickness, security, and several other issues. Originally I got shot down because the district finally migrated over from Netscape Navigator/Communicator several years ago when the migration started. It was at that time I discovered a wonderful app called Firefox Portable, which is a modified version of Firefox that doesn’t required to be installed anywhere. Just start it up and it runs. Plugins, themes, bookmarks. Everything is there, wherever I went. I installed it in my network account home directory so that way it followed me in the district.
I took steps to show other people that it was small enough to put on their flash drives and that way it was always accessible: at school or home. It took off and just about everyone I knew started using it. This lead to Firefox finally being installed on all computers in the district. Teachers learned about it and wanted it – and not just the computer teachers: math, social studies, English… just about every department wanted it.
By the time I graduated high school two years ago, a Firefox logo was on the desktop of every computer right next to the Internet Explorer icon. Success. It took several years, but the goal was reached. This is why I became a campus rep. I can reach even more people by holding Firefox seminars and presentations and setting up booths and doing marketing around the city. I have thought about signing up to be a regional campus rep as this would put me in charge of all the schools in the region but I figured I’d start small. I was the “campus rep” for my high school so I’ll start small here. Although it would be cool to coordinate events between all the Central Florida schools, but that’s another blog post!
