Quite a while ago now I generated a map showing where all the Mozilla employees are in the world. A few of the new folks on my team reminded me of it and when I showed it to them they wanted to know when I was going to get around to updating it. Challenge accepted! Back then the Mozilla phone book was available as a static html page so scraping it for the locations was easy. Now the phonebook is a prettier webapp so the same technique doesn’t quite work. Instead I ended up writing a simple add-on to pull the main phonebook tree then do requests for the json data for each employee, dumping them to a file on disk. Then some manipulation of the original scripts led to great success. Click through for a full zoomable map.

One of the criticisms I heard the last time I did this was that it didn’t contain any information about the rest of the community. I’ll say basically the same thing that I said then. Get me the data and I’ll gladly put it on a map for all to see, but right now I don’t know where to find that information. I think this is something that Mozillians could do but I’m not sure what the chances are of getting everyone in the directory to add that info to their profile. I think this information is still useful even without the community as it demonstrates how global we are (and in some cases aren’t!) as a company.