Posts Tagged with “discussion”

Information flow between leaders and individual contributors is critical to an effective organization. The ability to better understand the needs of the organization, to gather input across different domains, getting other perspectives before we make a decision and change management, help create a clueful and informed organisation.

This quarter we are piloting a number of untypical discussion sessions between leaders and individuals across Mozilla, whereby leaders will engage with participants who are not usually in their domain. There are hypotheses we’d like to test.  One is that cross-team, multiple-level discussion and information flow will: prevent us from being blind-sided, increase our shared understanding, and empower people to participate and lead in productive ways.  A second hypothesis is that there is an appetite for this type of discussion and some templates and structure would make it easier for people to know how to approach it.

We have 9 leaders who have agreed to host a discussion session this quarter, and we’re currently in the process of inviting participants from across the organization. Currently, there are 4 types of discussions we’ve identified that could take place, there are likely more:

• Pulse (“Taking the Pulse”) – allow a leader to quickly test an idea and/or get insights from the wider community about the current state of Mozilla, or their domain area.
• Ideation – to generate insights from a targeted and diverse group of participants.
• Decision – to ask for feedback regarding a decision from a broad group of people beyond the typical domain to ensure they are not blind-sided, and to provide key diverse input.
• Change Management – creates a shared understanding for a decision already made.

If these sessions prove useful, we may create a useful toolkit for leadership on how to run disperse discussion sessions, and gather input from across Mozilla. And in addition, create a toolkit for individual contributors for understanding and contributing to important topics across Mozilla.

We’ll plan to share more updates next month.

Probably our last such discussion before the goals are done. I plan to focus on the revisions I’ve posted over the last few days. Today on Air Mozilla at 12:30 p.m. Pacific Time. You can tune in by logging in to air.mozilla.com, and IRC discussion will take place at #airmozilla.

I’m going to consolidate the feedback received to date on the 2010 goals and create a new version in the next couple of days. I will do a brown bag Tuesday, December 16 at 12:30 Pacific Time (8:30 p.m. GMT) for final feedback. We’ll stream the discussion on Air Mozilla and moderated chat is available on #brownbag. We’ve had a lot of discussion so there may not be a lot of interest in this session. That’s fine. Also great if there is. The next version is likely to be very close to final, if not the final version itself. So if you have any thoughts you haven’t expressed, please do so asap.

We started a conversation a while back about two year product and technology goals. I’d like to return to that discussion. It’s clear that a blog post and comments is a hard way to discuss a complex and nuance topics like this. Here are some techniques we’ll try to get broad input.

Multiple discussions, multiple constituencies.

Mozilla has many groups of people who work together on particular aspects of Mozilla products, technology, adoption and mission. These groups are a natural setting for discussing the overall goals of the Mozilla project, and what motivates people to contribute. With that in mind, we’re planning a set of discussions to give more people a chance to participate comfortably. Some of these will be face-to-face meetings; others will be online discussions.

Listed below are the people I know of so far who will be organizing discussions on 2010 goals among particular parts of the Mozilla community.

• Tristan Nitot — European community at MozCamp in Barcalona in late October
• Guillermo Movia — spanish-speaking Latin American communities
• Marcio Galli — Brazilian community
• Takita-san (Chibi) — Japanese community at Mozilla Developer Day in Tokyo on November 16
• Seth Bindernagel — localization communities
• Jay Patel — campus reps
• David Tenser — SUMO community (probably as part of Support Firefox Day activities).

If you know of additional constituencies where such discussions would be valuable please let me know, and consider volunteering to work with me to make such discussions happen 🙂 And if you want to participate in one of the groups above but don’t know how to reach the identified person, let me know.

General discussions

I previously noted that I would organize specific times for general face-to-face / Air Mozilla / irc discussions for the various topics in the goals. I’m working on a schedule for that now. I expect that people who know me or are accustomed to dialing into Mozilla meetings — Monday meetings, Gecko meetings, Firefox and Thunderbird meetings — are the most likely to participate in these meetings. All are welcome. I recognize that it can be intimidating to participate in these as a contributor who doesn’t know many people personally. If that’s the case, please feel free to listen, and of course to join any of the group discussions above (or propose your own).

About ten days ago I published a proposed set of product and technology goals for the next two years. It’s a bit hard to talk about the topic in one big chunk. There are some very thoughtful comments to my last post that I want to discuss, but if feels a bit fragmented to do that through blog comments. (Many thanks to those who’ve responded).

To address this I’m going to break the discussion into smaller pieces. I’ll put them here, and also in the mozilla.org Governance newsgroup where it’s sometimes easier to have a discussion. You can also participate through the mozilla.governance Google Group. I’ll seed the discussions with some questions, context and with the comments that have been made so far.

We’ve set up an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel called #2010goals; I’ll hang out there as much as possible for the next few weeks. Anyone interested in the topic is more than welcome to do the same, to look for me or just for discussions. I’m traveling this coming week and expect to be frantically busy, so this week may not fiind me in #2010goals much, but there are other interested folks to look for. I expect the channel will be used most as the discussions peak.

We’ll also try having a series of phone/ video group discussions. We’ll definitely do some from Mountain View in the California timezone. We may do some in other timezones as well, I haven’t looked into arranging this yet.

John has a post today about how some people impute revenue motives to everything we do. In his case John made a statement about how one of Apple’s business practices is bad for the overall security and health of the Internet. (In this case the practice is to encourage consumers to download and install new software by identifying it as an “update” to software the person already has on his or her machine.)

Some of the reactions address the actual issue. But there’s also a set of responses along the lines of: ‘All Lilly really cares about is using Firefox to make money from Google, and all this talk of what’s good for the Internet is just a smokescreen for protecting the revenue stream from Google.’ (This is not an actual quote, it’s my description of a set of responses.) I’m coming to wonder if any statement or action we take that is controversial or based on mission with get this response. I’ve had this experience myself when discussing a number of topics.

Periodically I’ll be in a discussion about Mozilla’s plans for something and people respond by saying “Oh, that’s because Google cares about [fill in the blank] and your revenue comes from Google.” On several occasions I’ve been utterly dumb-founded and speechless because I have never even thought of Google in relation to the discussion. (I’d give some examples but I am concerned that we’ll end up rehashing old issues. )

But much of the world is driven by money and all sorts of people say they have different or additional motivations. So suspicion may be warranted. At Mozilla we can only do what John notes — keep pursuing the mission, keep demonstrating by our actions that our mission is the critical piece, and being authentic.

A separate problem is that a focus on money makes it easy to miss other, important topics. In this case the question is: what happens if consumers stop accepting security upgrades because they don’t trust the other software that comes along with it? That’s a disaster for all of us. That’s the question John is raising and it’s an important question to consider. Those commentators who dismiss this topic because Mozilla competes with commercial offerings and generates revenue miss this point. If the commentators you turn to dismiss everything for this reason, then I’ll hope you’ll add some additional commentators to your resource list.

I almost called this “Rich Internet Discussions” or RID to match the craze for Rich Internet Applications. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it, and that’s probably better 🙂

I mentioned in my last post a few of the things I want to concentrate on in the near future: the standards, hybrid organizations, the relationship of people to the content we create online. Each of these requires a discussion, or many discussions. I’m looking for a format for encouraging such discussions. I don’t think blog posts are the right format; I’m wondering what other things people are using that are effective.

Blogs are great for getting a sense of the web. But a discussion among many people that extends over time and over many blogs is really hard to follow or even to find if one isn’t in the middle of it. I’d also like to use a format that is less identified with any one person that a blog, and is easier to find, follow and mutually develop ideas. Newsgroups are a traditional method. But I’d like to use a system that assumes only a Web browser. Today we often use forums, as Mozilla Labs is doing.

Do you think forums are a good approach? Do you have other ideas? Do you know of sites that you think promote good, thoughtful discussions? If so, I’d love to know.

There is a lot of content in the comments to my Thunderbird and email post. I’m going to try to respond to general themes, although not every post specifically. I’m going to start by addressing the themes in separate messages; I think that will make it easier to get to clarity.

The themes I see so far are:

1. Google is involved somehow.
2. Thunderbird and the Mozilla mission.
3. Feature thoughts about Thunderbird.
4. Why can’t Thunderbird and Firefox both prosper inside the Mozilla Corporation?
5. Is Mozilla exclusively focused on Firefox?
6. Revenue is the determining factor.

There may be other themes that appear or that I’ve missed with this first pass. Or two may show up as part of the same message, I’m not sure yet since I haven’t written them. But these are the topics I know now that I want to address.

Do you think email is important part of Internet life? Are you interested in seeing something interesting and exciting happen in the mail space? Believe that Thunderbird provides a much-needed option for open source email alternatives and want to see it get more attention on its own? Long to see something more innovative than Thunderbird in the mail space happen?

So does Mozilla.

Are you someone who could contribute to such an effort? Do you have expertise and a desire to be involved in an innovative mail effort and/or a focused Thunderbird effort? If so, Mozilla would like to hear from you.

Thunderbird

Mozilla has been supporting Thunderbird as a product since the beginning of the Foundation. The result is a good, solid product that provides an open alternative for desktop mail. However, the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn’t support Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus -– delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services -– is the correct priority. At the same time, the Thunderbird team is extremely dedicated and competent, and we all want to see them do as much as possible with Thunderbird.

We have concluded that we should find a new organizational approach for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.

Mozilla is exploring the options for an organization specifically focused on serving Thunderbird users. A separate organization focused on Thunderbird will both be able to move independently and will need to do so to deepen community and user involvement. We’re not yet sure what this organization will look like. We’ve thought about a new Mozilla Foundation subsidiary. We’ve thought about a setting where Thunderbird is released as a community project much like SeaMonkey, and a small services and consulting company is formed by the Thunderbird developers to continue development and care for Thunderbird users. Many open source projects use this model, it could be simpler and more effective than a Mozilla Foundation subsidiary.

We don’t know the best answer yet. And we don’t expect to without a broad public discussion, which we hope this message will trigger. Some suggestions for making sure Mozilla is aware of your comments are at the end of this post.

Broader Mail Initiative

We would also like to find contributors committed to creating and implementing a new vision of mail. We would like to have a roadmap that brings wild innovation, increasing richness and fundamental improvements to the mail. And equally importantly, we would like to find people with relevant expertise who would join with Mozilla to make something happen.

If we can see a path to an innovative mail initiative in addition to supporting existing Thunderbird users, then we are interested in doing so. If we find the best way to improve mail is incremental development of Thunderbird as already planned, then we’ve learned something extremely valuable as well.

Mozilla has a range of resources -– funds, code, etc. — that can be applied to this problem. We’re looking for people with expertise, vision and leadership capabilities. If you are such a person, or know of such people, please let us know.

Discussion

If you’re interested in these topics, let us know. The web is great at distributed discussions, let’s see what we think about mail. Post trackbacks to your blog posts here; I’ll moderate them in quickly. If you want to make absolutely sure that Mozilla can find your stuff easily, feel free to head to the wiki and list yourself and the location of your comments. Or leave your comments on the wiki.

It’s time to create the full search committee for the Foundation Executive Director position. I previously posted key requirements. I’ve included them again below, along with some criteria our executive recruiter has found to be important in the past.

If you are interested in being part of the search committee and believe you meet (at least most of) the criteria, please contact me. If you know of someone you would like to see be part of the search committee other than yourself, please let me know. In other words, nominations and self-nominations are welcome.

I thought about creating a clear process for nomination and selection, but decided we can (hopefully) start informally and create process as we go. The one process point that I will start with is that if you contact me privately, or nominate someone else privately, I won’t make those names public until the named person is OK with this. If you have strong thoughts regarding the process, you can post them here as comments or in the governance newsgroup (available via newsreader or mailing list, or via the browser).

So please don’t self censor based on shyness, or on your employer.

Everyone should have:

• Deep understanding of the project and our culture.
• Ability to communicate the needs of the organization.
• History of “doing” things within Mozilla.
• Broad respect from chunks of the Mozilla community.
• Ability to internalize different perspectives.
• Ability to work collaboratively, incorporating other perspectives.
• High discretion, including perhaps willingness to agree to confidentiality obligations (we need to figure out how to treat candidates properly). However this is handled, we need a complete commitment to confidentiality.
• Commitment to speaking with one voice as a committee.
• Ability to be a liaison between the search committee and the Mozilla community.
• High degree of flexibility.
• Commitment of 15-20 hours for meetings and interviews.
• Good people assessment skills.
• Comfortable / excited about the focus of the job.

The group as a whole should have:

• At least one very good scribe.
• People with different background and focus areas for the project, (not everyone can be a Firefox only person; there should be one or more people who can articulate what it’s like to be on a non-Fx project) and views about staying broad.