Email Addresses, mozilla.org and the Mozilla Foundation
A couple of weeks ago I wrote something about my belief that mozilla.org staff membership is different than employment with the Mozilla Foundation. Here’s a concrete example of questions that come up: email addresses. It almost sounds trivial when I write it. But email addresses are often a statement of identity or relationship and so they turn out not to be trivial. I believe that membership in mozilla.org staff is not a decision that should be made by the Mozilla Foundation. And a hiring decision by the Mozilla Foundation should not automatically convey mozilla.org staff membership.
When we set up the Foundation a set of key contributors became employees. Some of these people were mozilla.org staff members (Asa, Myk Leaf, Brendan, me) of long tenure. Others were key contributors who had previously been employed to contribute their work product to the Mozilla project but weren’t officially chartered to speak for the Mozilla project or guide its general policies — jst, dbaron, Ben Goodger, Scott Macgregor, Chris Hofmann. (If this sounds obtuse or too “inside” to be understandable, please take a look at the Mozilla Roles and Responsibilities doc which lays out the role of mozilla.org staff in our past incarnation.)
It’s pretty hard to argue that this latter group of folks haven’t been “speaking for the Mozilla project” or guiding policy or determining releases or doing the myriad of things that mozilla.org staff has historically been chartered to do. Even so, we didn’t have a policy for what mozilla.org staff meant vis-