The Big Picture — Part 3
Here is the last part of Mike Shaver’s summary of the discussions relating to Mozilla project goals held at the Mozilla Corporation in the spring of 2006. The first part of the summary discusses hopes for what we accomplish; this latter part focuses a bit more on how we do things and life within the Mozilla Corporation. Again, the summary below is Mike’s great work, with some minor edits.
= Major Themes =
- Communication and Openness -
The issues of openness and how things are communicated within the project has been the subject of much heated and prolix discussion since the earliest days of the project, and will likely remain so until the heat death of the universe (or the switch away from CVS, should that come later).
In addition to the important issues of how to balance the project’s principles of openness against security and business requirements for confidentiality, issues of “information overload” have come somewhat more to the fore lately; some important threads in these discussions concerned management of information within the Corporation proper.
For some, the rapid growth from a 10-person team to a 50-person company has led to feelings of exclusion, or a perception that important decisions were being made in “silos” without visibility to or input from a sufficiently broad set of people. One example given was the contrast between the Google and Yahoo search deals: the former was the subject of organization-wide discussion, and feedback was absorbed, but with the latter it many people didn’t feel as engaged or informed. While the Corporation will never “feel like” a 10-person group again, several people felt that more effort needed to be made, especially on the part of management, to make better use of the collection of smart people at the Corporation in significant decision-making, and be more transparent. (Mitchell spoke here for management, agreeing that they needed to improve its communication, and that it was a key goal for the management team in 2006.)
Even short of the non-goals of direct democracy or “management by consensus”, and not just where traditional management direction is concerned, the need to communicate more effectively “up”, “down”, and “across” was raised by many. Finding means for doing that without drowning our co-workers in detail, and other such key tactical issues, remain unsolved.
- Why This? Why Here? -
(This topic was the one that was most tightly focused on the Corporation, rather than on the project in a more holistic sense, perhaps obviously.)
The nature of the Mozilla Corporation is such that people who work here could choose from a wealth of other employment opportunities, which means that our decisions to work here — and stay here — reflect interestingly on the unique character of the Corporation. That was the thesis of the topic, at least, and it seems to have been largely borne out by the discussions.
People’s motivations for joining the Corporation often featured “working on Mozilla full-time” as a prominent piece, and many of the benefits that people cited were particularily related to the Mozilla angle. While the success of the project means that there are a number of places at which a person might enjoy that particular pursuit, it was not always the case, and that there is virtually zero prospect of a person being “transferred off Mozilla” is still a somewhat unique draw for the Corporation today.
The obviously personal nature of people’s motivations make it harder to effectively summarize this area than some others, but nonetheless some common trends emerged:
* Work that positively affects the daily lives of millions of people. (”Hey, I use that!”)
* Smart and passionate co-workers.
* Hard and interesting “technical” problems (including organizational, marketing, etc.).
* An organization that is genuinely focused on a public good, with financial elements clearly and truly secondary to that good.
* A lot of autonomy and trust in choosing work, solving problems, and making decisions.
While nobody would propose that the Corporation or project is perfect, or that we don’t have issues that need addressing, it’s clear that our organization has a lot going for it, and we have reason to be proud of the team and environment we’ve created together.