Posts Tagged with “Project”

The Mozilla project is an enormous worldwide community of people who choose to work together to produce and share technology, products and a passion for the web. The Mozilla Foundation is the official home of the Mozilla project. It has certain special abilities and responsibilities with regard to leadership of the Mozilla project and stewardship of the project’s assets.

In some ways the Mozilla Foundation is like the proverbial “tip of the iceberg.” It’s the easiest part to see, it has a size and structure that is easy to understand. But the heart of the Mozilla project is the enormous, highly motivated, loosely structured set of communities that make the project vibrant. Like the tip of an iceberg the Mozilla Foundation is a good marker for the larger reality and a good place to start an understanding of the project. And like an iceberg, one needs to go far beyond the surface of the Mozilla Foundation to understand the breadth and depth of the Mozilla project.

In other words, the Mozilla project is larger than the Mozilla Foundation and its employees. This fact should be reflected in the way the Mozilla Foundation organizes itself. Employment with the Mozilla Foundation is not and must not become the source of all authority within the Mozilla project. Contributors must have a voice within the Mozilla project unrelated to employment.

In the days before the Mozilla Foundation existed a group of people known as “mozilla.org staff” provided this voice. Mozilla.org staff was a virtual organization which governed the Mozilla project in general, and did so increasingly unrelated to any employment relationship. Some of the functions that mozilla.org staff used to fulfill now live in the Foundation — stewardship of the assets, release of products using the Mozilla name, as examples. So the old model of mozilla.org staff cannot continue unchanged in the world of the Foundation.

Nevertheless, we need a mechanism to recognize, organize and legitimate the leadership of key contributors and community members unrelated to employment status. This mechanism should both (a) organize and amplify this contributor voice and (b) give this voice input and participation into the Mozilla Foundation’s activities.

We have proven policies for ensuring authority unrelated to employment in the development of code itself. We need a way to maintain and update these policies that doesn’t put all leadership in the hands of Mozilla Foundation employees. We also need to ensure contributors can provide leadership in Mozilla project activities other than writing code.

Some may ask “why?” “Why doesn’t the Mozilla Foundation simply take on the leadership and governance role through its employees?” there are many answers to this. First, the Mozilla project is an open source project. We build software through distributed authority based on reputation, peer review, proven results and ability to lead others through results rather than title. This system produces great results, allows new contributors to appear from unexpected places and join us, drives technical excellence and prevents group-think from making us complacent. The operating style of the Mozilla Foundation must reflect this DNA.

Secondly, the Mozilla Foundation does not and will not employ all the great contributors to the Mozilla project. There are far too many contributors for this to be the case. And it is an explicit goal to have volunteers and people employed by different organizations contributing to get broader perspectives into the heart of the project. Expertise and dedication will exist outside of the Mozilla Foundation’s employee base. It is critical that these contributors have an understood, identified, accepted way to participate in the Mozilla Foundation’s activities.

Those people who have been involved in the project for along time have a short hand phrase for this — we say that “mozilla.org staff needs to be revitalized to provide this role.” Framed more generally the question is: We need a way for participants to exercise leadership and moral authority in the governance and activities of the Mozilla project that is unrelated to one’s employment status. We need to articulate the scope of that leadership and authority and create a mechanism by which that voice is involved in Mozilla Foundation activities.

Last December we had a gathering of people who were critical to shipping Firefox 1.5. It was called the Firefox Summit and it was about 100 people. I think 10 or so came from Europe, and Roger Sidje came all the way from Australia. We had volunteers, Mozilla Foundation and Corporation employees, and employees of other organizations who are deeply involved in shipping Firefox. (It was an astonishing event for me. I spent most of the dinners looking around in amazement. )

We had a general session on Mozilla Project Dynamics and a discussion about keeping the identity and culture of the Mozilla project as we grow. We’re growing in user base, user needs, contributors, program needs, scale of infrastructure, industry stature, employees (both employees of Mozilla Foundation and Corporation, and employees of other organizations), and management. How do we keep the core identify of the project in the midst of this change?

Ben Goodger made a comment that stuck with me and has been connecting with some other thoughts lately. Ben noted that our identity is deeply tied up in how we build software. A continuing focus on openness, peer review, merit, leadership through reputation, influence through action in building software is fundamental to our continued health. In one sense this seems obvious, but I have found it very helpful. There’s a lot going on with Mozilla and Firefox these days; it is very helpful to focus on the fundamental thing we have done well for years and years, even before the world knew of it — we build software in an open, distributed manner where people choose to participate because the project is worthwhile and works at least well enough. I think of this often as I think about how to manage all the new things that are on our plate today. I also think about it in relation to a set of questions about management and an open management style — more on that later.

My experience with the Mozilla project in 2005 was about a few things:

1. Growing our organization into the stature the rapid adoption of Firefox brought us. We started the year with about 15 people, and an unexpectedly large set of users. Organizationally we needed to get more people involved full time to take care of things, to build our physical infrastructure (with special thanks to the Oregon State University Open Source Lab), to take care of our user base, and to start to add more coordination among our contributors. Coordination means management of resources so we added a few managers to the employee base. Management in an open source project like ours is not as well understood or developed as code development in an open source project, and I hope to describe our thinking more clearly here and to generate discussion before long.

2. We adjusted our organization a bit, forming the Mozilla Corporation as an adjunct to the Mozilla Foundation. Personally, this was a lot of work. It needs more work, in particular to work explain, refine and further develop the roles of the Foundation and Corporation to help guide the Mozilla project.

3. We shipped Firefox and Thunderbird 1.5. This was important to get updated technology to our users and to provide a way to help protect users through automatic update, particularly for improvements related to security and privacy. It was also important to show that Firefox 1.0 wasn’t a one-shot wonder; that we understand how to ship software on a regular basis. We also broadened our search relationships, with Yahoo becoming the default in the Japanese, Chinese and Korean languages.

We did a lot of other things, but these are the chunks that occupied me for long periods of time.

In 2006 I see a continued focus on products. This has always been the core of what we do and we will continue to ship great products. For me personally, another large focus is in articulating the overall nature and goals of our organization and the means by which we will seek to achieve them. What is the mission of the Mozilla project? How do we best achieve these? What should the Mozilla Foundation do to help people enjoy free, useful participation in what the Internet offers? How best can the Corporation develop products and technologies to promote this goal? How do we combine management with open source DNA? How can I help bring the open, collaborative and distributed decision-making principles of code development into management and leadership of the Mozilla Corporation?

I don’t think there’s a how-to guide about how to do this

One of my Mozilla-related goals for the last year or so has been to increase the outward focus of the Mozilla project. For years we’ve been so focused on getting a great applications shipped that we’ve been extremely inwardly focused. I’ve been spending a chunk of time lately meeting people who are in and around the Mozilla space, trying to get to know people involved in the consumer side of the Internet and people interested in the non-profit world. (I know a lot of the enterprise folks already, thus the focus on the consumer side.)

I had lunch yesterday with Jim Fruchterman. Jim leads the BeneTech Initiative, a non-profit high-technology organization dedicated to building sustainable technology initiatives that address social problems. I met Jim courtesy of Kevin Lenzo, open source speech technologist from Carnegie Mellon University, who had been exploring uses of open source speech-related technology for providing greater accessibility in software. BeneTech has a range of technology projects in the literacy / accessibility and human rights areas.

Talking with Jim is always great. He’s got great experience with the organizational issues that affect a non-profit. Non profits are subject to both various state laws that govern the operation of a non-profit and various federal laws that govern the tax exempt status. It’s a complex area with only a few technology organizations represented. Any many of these — such as the Apache, Perl and Python Foundations — employ very few if any full time people. So finding someone with a number of years of experience in this area is wonderful.

Jim is also experimenting with different ways of generating funds to sustain these technological projects since traditional models don’t fit. And of course he’s thinking about how to generate funds and remain true to the mission of the project. These topics are very similar to those I think about with regard to the Mozilla project. I’m always drawn in by the process of understanding different perspectives and figuring out new ways to do things and Jim and I get together periodically to trade notes. Yesterday’s conversation was particularly interesting coming so closely after the venture capital focus of last week’s Women’s Technology Cluster awards ceremony. In that case the organizational model is known and the issue is finding the people, technology and market opportunities for successful execution of the model. Jim is trying to do something different, meeting needs of groups of people who aren’t likely to ever generate large return on capital investment. These problems — literacy, accessibility, human rights — need solving, and I hope we find some ways of making our vast technical capabilities available to those who need them so badly and can pay so little.

Bart’s recent blog post asked for comments about the mozilla.org homepage, and so here are mine.

I disagree with the view that “the primary purposes of the mozilla.org homepage should be (1) to generate Firefox downloads and (2) to direct people to the information they are looking for on our site.” The mozilla.org homepage is the main view into the Mozilla project. The Mozilla project is bigger than the Mozilla Foundation and bigger than Firefox downloads. I believe that www.mozilla.org should reflect this.

End user adoption is obviously a critical factor in the success in the Mozilla project and I totally agree that we need to need to make it easy and desirable for end-users to get Firefox. New end-users are coming to Firefox in record numbers; we should celebrate this success and maintain a strong focus on the end-user experience.

But Firefox is an appealing product because it is an active project with a vibrant community. I am uncomfortable with a home page that doesn’t reflect this.

It may be that the changes Bart has proposed are exactly what I would do with the page if I were designing it and that we agree on the specific look for www.mozilla.org that makes sense today. I’m not trying to design the page; I’m not the right person for that. But the mozilla.org homepage I would like to see will reflect a broader view of the Mozilla project than Firefox downloads.