Posts Tagged with “people”

The Mozilla Foundation has enormous opportunities in front of it. These include building on the success of the Mozilla project to date, extending the understanding of our community-based development processes, and articulating the vision of the Internet that motivates us. The Mozilla Foundation is in the fortunate position of being limited not by opportunity, but by capacity.

So I’m very pleased to report that the Mozilla Foundation has added two additional Board members to increase our capacity to act effectively: Bob Lisbonne and Carl Malamud. Bob and Carl join Mitch Kapor, Brendan Eich, Brian Behlendorf, Joichi Ito and me.

Bob Lisbonne is a long-time friend of the Mozilla project. Bob was involved in the launch and early days of the Mozilla project at Netscape, and has been involved in the browser space since the early Netscape versions. Bob has consistently provided reasoned and thoughtful advice to me, both at my request and on his own initiative. Bob is currently a general partner with the venture capital firm Matrix Partners. His involvement with Mozilla is a personal effort, not to be associated with or attributed to Matrix Partners.

Carl Malamud has a long history of involvement with Internet and web-based projects supporting the public good, including most notably getting the US Securities and Exchange Commission to release EDGAR filings over the Internet and establishing the Internet Multicasting Service and Internet Talk Radio (home of the “Geek of the Week” show). Carl brings a depth of operational experience to the Board.

The Board is responsible for the assets of the organization, financial controls and overall operation. In addition, a Board provides leadership in setting the overall direction of the organization and represents the organizations and its causes to the world at large.

As part of the selection process, a set of community members participated in interviews with each of Carl and Bob, with feedback provided to the Board. In the future the Board plans to take further steps to involve the Mozilla community in the governance of the Mozilla Foundation. Whatever mechanisms we ultimately adopt, our intent is to have the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors reflect and be influenced by the views of those who are ultimately responsible for the success of the Mozilla project and thus the Mozilla Foundation -– the many active and dedicated members of the Mozilla community.

This is the week of our second annual Firefox Summit, where we gather a set of the people who make Firefox possible to plan what comes next. It’s an exciting time, especially since this is our opportunity to meet people face to face after long online collaboration.

Yesterday I arrived at Mozilla just as the bus arrived bringing people from the hotel. It’s an odd moment. My first reaction was, “Hmm, there’s a giant bus parked in front of the office.” Then people started to get out, and I realized “Ah, that’s the Firefox Summit bus.” And there’s Tristan, there’s polvi, there’s three, four, no, five people I don’t even recognize yet. Sometimes when we’re introduced I don’t recognize the name, and we have to get to the email name or IRC or IM name to recognize each other.

In early June I noted that we had found a great person to lead development of a grants and donations program and that we would turn to this topic in mid-July. That person is Seth Bindernagel, we’re coming up on mid-July, and Seth joins us at the Mozilla Corporation today.

The goals of the program are to help strengthen the Mozilla community. They are not to turn volunteers into employees or to reduce the number of employees. We’re not looking to be an all-purpose grant–making organization, or to be gigantic. The point is to use all the different kinds of resources available to strengthen our community, and that currently includes some financial resources.

Seth will join us for an initial 6 months to flesh out how this might be done, to try an initial set of programs and develop a clearer view of our path before joining us permanently. The focus is not on making a big bang, but on doing useful things. Seth and I spent some time articulating this work more clearly. I’ll post this separately, since this welcome is long enough already.

This is an unusual role. We are lucky to have found Seth, whose background in business and social entrepreneurship matches remarkably well. Seth comes to us from the Haas School of Business at the University of California. While there, he focused on socially responsible business, co-leading the school’s Net Impact Club and serving as co-chair of Judging for the Global Social Venture Competition. He was also a member of the winning team for the Global Ethics Challenge. Before business school Seth spent three years working with Ashoka, a global nonprofit organization focusing on advancing the profession of social entrepreneurship.

At Ashoka Seth served as the Program Manager for the U.S. and Canada programs. With the team, Seth helped search for and select leading entrepreneurs in the U.S. and Canada who were creating new ideas to solve critical social problems. He helped launch Ashoka’s Accelerator for Social Entrepreneurship, which brought together Ashoka’s corporate partners Hill & Knowlton, McKinsey & Co., and the International Senior Lawyers Project with Ashoka Fellows in need of pro bono professional support. These partners donated their time and industry expertise to Fellows who were starting new organizations with strategic development needs. Seth helped organize all orientation and induction programs for the new social entrepreneurs entering the Ashoka Fellowship. Seth has consulted many different social ventures during his time at Berkeley, including the Omidyar Network, Ashoka, World of Good, and the San Francisco Giants Community Fund.

Please help make Seth feel at home. Feel free to ask him about his experiences, about why he switched his undergraduate degree from engineering to “Agriculture, Resource, and Managerial Economics,” about sports in general and baseball in particular. Please make some time to help Seth get to understand the Mozilla project so he can do more sooner. Seth will have a Mozilla related blog up and running shortly, I’ll point to it.