Not so long ago Matt Mullenweg talked to the Mozilla employees about WordPress and its community. He mentioned about a map they had set up to show where they all were in the world and I was intrigued to know what such a map would look like for Mozilla. Now I don’t actually have the locations of all the community members, but I can make a decent start by using the locations of all the Mozilla Corporation employees, and with a few scripts and the Google maps API there is something interesting to look at. Click on the image to go to the full interactive view:

The data here is scraped out of Mozilla’s phonebook and some people haven’t entered a full location, so if you’re an employee and think you aren’t in the right place on the map then update your phonebook entry. Also the actual positions are grabbed using Google’s geocode which seems to have some problems so some people are in completely the wrong place at the moment (sorry Igor!).

Might be nice to actually think about doing this for the Mozilla community in general. Not sure how we’d go about gathering the location data for everyone though. Of course the new geolocation support in Firefox 3.5 would make getting the actual location easier, but how do we figure out who should appear on the map and get them all to sign up?