Looking back over dozens of online and over-beer conversations, it’s clear the Mozilla Foundation can play an important role in the world. This role is not to oversee or second guess the people producing Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, XUL and other …

Mitchell and others recently posted about the Mozilla community as a series of concentric circles. These posts make it clear that being a part of a community like Mozilla (or not) isn’t a binary switch. Rather, people have varying degrees of involveme…

Barrier of Knowledge
(to adapt a quote from Douglas Adams)
“Mozilla is a big project… . Really big. So vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big you won’t believe it. So I won’t bother wasting your time trying to convince you how vastly hugely fantastically mind-bogglingly hugely enormous it is.”
As soon as you scratch the surface, you realize there’s a lot going on…and that it’s not “just” a browser that’s being developed, or “just” a mail client. This is really overwhelming, and I think it’s a culture shock to new contributors. There’s enough going on that it’s easy to lose awareness of the big picture… and easy to never even see the big picture to begin with. Finding out who to talk to, how to do stuff, etc is a huge barrier to becoming more than a spectator in this community.

Barrier of Attitudes
“I don’t have time.” “RESOLVED WONTFIX” “RESOLVED INVALID”
I don’t think anyone would deliberately push a newcomer aside, but sometimes (and I’ve been guilty of it too), the culture of geeks (or hackers, or gurus, or whatever term you want to use that day) is abrasive. When someone comes to a geek and says “It doesn’t work.” without explaining what doesn’t work… there’s implied hostility. Things start off on a bad foot right away. I’m not sure that this can be helped any more than we’re already doing, but it’s certainly one thing that can chase someone away from a community.

Barrier of Ability
“I’m a doctor Jim, not a …”
This is the one we can’t help quite so much. A person’s own skills and abilities are going to define what roles they can take in a community. That said, we can make sure that we point those people who want to help towards somewhere they’ll be useful.

Gerv: The ‘user community’ -> ‘community of interest’ path you’ve drawn in your comment is a good one. Adding this level of granularity makes for something much more doable than my consumer -> contributor path, at least to start. Mozilla could do a fun video campaign about why the open, participatory web matters. Or something around the Manifesto. Or an alliance of people and projects promoting the open web. Who knows? In any case, I agree with you that at least some of the Foundation’s resources and effort would be well used in helping people along this path.