Posts Tagged with “community”

I will be heading back to Brazil very shortly. From April 14 to 16 I will be in Rio de Janeiro to participate in the World Economic Forum on Latin America, and after that I will head to São Paulo to connect with our Latin American community.

On April 17 I’ll be visiting a LAN house with Bruno Magrani, who works with our Portuguese-speaking community, as well as Guillermo Movia, who works with our Spanish-speaking community members. April 18 will be devoted to a day-long meeting with Mozilla’s Latin American community leaders on the general direction of the Mozilla Project in Latin America, the individual projects people have been working on, and probably some strategizing for FISL. I’m  looking forward to these discussions immensely and to catching up again with some of the folks I met last year.

I’m also very interested to meet new contributors to Mozilla and those interested in creating an open, participatory web whether or not Mozilla has been your focus.  If you are interested in attending this meeting in São Paolo, please contact Bruno (bmagrani at mozilla dot com) or Alix Franquet (alix at mozilla dot com).

Late in July we got together close to 400 extremely active Mozilla contributors for a face to face gathering known as the Firefox Plus Summit. This gathering was partly acknowledgment and celebration of our work so far, and mostly preparation for the future. The Summit has caused me to reflect on the future of Mozilla. In short, that future is bright.

The overriding reason for this is the strength and vibrancy of the Mozilla community. We’re growing, we’re effective and we’re expanding the types of activities that live within Mozilla. The Summit made this very clear.

There are other reasons as well. Mozilla combines the abstract goals of Internet openness, participation and decentralized decision-making with the concrete task of building great products. This combination is working. It attracts people to Mozilla, and it gives us a way of building products that reflects the Internet itself. The values of the project bring meaning and guide the way we do things. The software allows us to make those values tangible, and put their manifestations in the hands of millions of people.

Another important element is the financial resources Mozilla enjoys. We’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income. We’re also learning more all the time about how to use Mozilla’s financial resources to help contributors through infrastructure, new programs, and new types of support from employees.

Finally, the quality of our technology, products and innovation also holds great promise. In the few weeks since the Summit we’ve already seen a new approach to vastly improving JavaScript performance, the launch of “Snowl,” the introduction of the browser concept series, developer releases for Thunderbird, and video moving into the browser via Firefox 3.1. There’s much more coming.

We have large challenges ahead of us, there’s no question of that. There are many ways in which Internet life could become closed, manipulated and decidedly unpleasant. And Mozilla itself is not perfect. Many improvements are possible in how we work and what we accomplish. To be effective we’ll need to do our best, and then do even better.

Our challenges are real, our opportunities are real, and our strength is real.

Put those together, and the future is bright.

One of the great things about Mozilla is that periodically I’ll be thinking about how to get something done and then I’ll look up and find someone else has already done it, and often gone further with the idea than I would have. Dave Eaves’ post today about “The challenge of Mozilla’s magnetism” is an example. I’ve been thinking about this all weekend, writing a post in my head. But now I don’t need to, Dave’s got just about everything I was thinking about already pulled into something coherent. The first three-quarters of the post are almost exactly what I was thinking — particularly the reasons for the pull of Mozilla to so many people and the need to balance that with what strengthens our current communities.

Personally, it’s much better to hear this from Dave than to see it written by me. That’s because once it’s clear that a set of people wanting Mozilla to do more also understand the precious nature of our current communities and how strengthening them must be central, then it’s much easier to be open and responsive to ideas for expanding.

The last paragraph — a suggestion about the minimum plan Mozilla should build and execute to work with others who care about the open Internet — is really helpful. It seems so obvious when written this way — of course Mozilla should do this. We may in fact be able to do more, but we don’t need to wait to figure out how much more to get started.

In a post last week I talked about concentric circles of community, noting that I actually think of Mozilla as concentric spheres of community. That’s because each community (practice, action, interest, user) is made up of many different sub-groups.

For example, the Community of Practice is that set of people who are sharing resources and using a bunch of Mozilla practices together to achieve a result. Within this group we can find many different kinds of activities. We might think of subsets based on the project, such as the Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Camino, Bugzilla, or Calendar communities of practice. We might think of subsets based on activity — the localization, quality assurance, coding, website, design, UI, support, infrastructure communities or practice. We might think of subsets based on language or locale.

There are so many dimensions to Mozilla communities that I think we need (at least!) three dimensions to have a working model. To help with this, there is now a wiki page for discussion of the Mozilla community to see if something other than blog comments is better for a long term discussion.

I’ve come to think of Mozilla, or “the Mozilla community” as a set of concentric circles of communities. Actually, I’m thinking of Mozilla as concentric spheres of community, but I’m going to stick to circles for this post.

For me the ability to be more precise about “community” is important in thinking about what Mozilla is, what more we might do, what the Mozilla Foundation might do, what the essence of Mozilla is that we want to be very careful about changing, and which areas we should try to go wild in and try lots and lots of new things.

I’m going to borrow a set of terms from the Wikipedia discussion of “community.” There’s some risk in this because these terms may have academic background and meanings associated with them. But I need some set of terms and this seems a better start than just making them up.

Specifically, I’m thinking of 4 concentric groups: a Community of Practice, a Community of Action, a Community of Interest and our User Community.

I’m very interested in whether people living and working Mozilla feel these distinctions describe the different communities in which you participate and with which you interact. Let me know!

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Community

According to Wikipedia, the word “community” is “derived from the Latin communitas (meaning the same), which is in turn derived from communis, which means “common, public, shared by all or many.”

Community of Practice

At the heart of the Mozilla world is a set of people who share many things. We share code. We share goals. We share a set of values (the Mozilla Manifesto). We share specific means of collaboration (from Bugzilla to IRC to wikis), information repositories (source, documentation, website), a decision-making structure (module ownership), and a clear set of basic rights (the Mozilla Public License). We share activities — distributed creation and adoption of specific products that promote choice, innovation, transparency and participation in Internet life.

That’s a fair amount to share. So on my own I’d add some adjectives and describe this as a dense or cohesive community. But rather than make up adjectives I’m going to borrow the term “Community of Practice.” Wikipedia describes this as “social learning that occurs and shared sociocultural practices that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals.”  I like this definition because it is not focused on a particular group or activity. We have many different types of activities that are part of this Community of Practice.

Community of Action

The next concentric circle is a set of people who take action to move the Mozilla mission forward but do so in more open-ended ways. For this set I’m adopting the term Community of Action. The people in this group may share our values, our goals, our decision-making processes for example, but develop their own ways of collaborating and their own sets of activities.

Wikipedia describes these as “structurally more open” and possessing both “some of the characteristics of communities, such as the development of a common language and mutual learning in the course of action . . .  [and] characteristics typical of more associative social relationships, such as the “voluntary” nature of association and the importance of “common goals” in directing collective activity.”

I see the boundary between this and our Communities of Practice as fluid. Sometimes these activities become so important and scale to such a size that they become more formalized. In this case some of the spontaneity may be exchanged for additional resources, scale and better integration into the core.  The long term history of localization is an example. In the early 2000′s localization of Mozilla products was extremely distributed, with many different groups working on their own. Today internationalization and localization are a fundamental aspect of the core of what we do; deep into our Community of Practice.

Community of Interest

Beyond this there’s a set of people who aren’t actively involved in creating Mozilla artifacts but are very supportive of our product or our mission. This group my not share our means of collaboration, our decision-making structure or our basic statement of rights. But they share in goals (sometimes general goals; sometimes  specific goals), in the use of the code, and they may share the activities of finding and helping others use our code.

Loosely borrowing from Wikipedia again, I’d call this the Mozilla’s Community of Interest: “A Community of interest is a community of people who share a common interest or passion. These people exchange ideas and thoughts about the given passion, but may know (or care) little about each other outside of this area.”

User Community

An ever larger circle is the set of people who use our products. Some of these people are also in earlier concentric circles. But a number are not. They use Firefox because it’s a great product that meets their needs. Maybe do not know that Firefox is created as a public benefit asset; many know little to nothing about the way Mozilla operates or the goals that motivate the Communities of Practice, Action and Interest. I’m calling this our User Community. This is not a Wikipedia term; I’ve added it because it’s important to us. This group of people gives our efforts weight and effect, helping us move the Internet towards greater openness.

All of Mozilla exists within broader contexts, such as the open source world or the Internet space, etc. That’s a lot to say there. But for now I’d like to get some shared terms for the Mozilla communities. This will help us figure out what parts of the Mozilla community we’re talking about or trying to address in different circumstances.

I’m very interested in whether these circles and the labels is useful in thinking about the Mozilla community. Any form of feedback welcome — here, email, talkback, twitter, you name it.