I had a long talk with Dave Eaves today as a result of a couple of his recent posts which I didn’t quite understand. It’s fun to find someone explicitly interested in how Mozilla works as well as what we do. But I was confused, especially by the post on the Manifesto. It felt a bit to me like a post that said “let’s replace the Manifesto” in order to appeal to an undefined set of people for unknown reasons. That seemed odd.
I was pretty sure this wasn’t quite what was intended, but I couldn’t figure out what was intended. Sometimes it really is good to be able to talk to someone, “real-time,” voice to voice — rather than exchange comments back and forth through a blog or IM or email.
Dave’s focus as I understand it now, without putting too many words in Dave’s mouth — though he has read this post in draft form, so I know I’m close — is whether we can make it easier for people to adopt the Mozilla Manifesto as their own, to figure out what they want to do to move the goals of the Mozilla Manifesto forward. In particular, for people outside the current Mozilla Communities of Practice and Action to do this. We can see there are a bunch of people who care about these goals (or goals similar to them, since the Manifesto isn’t perfect) but don’t see their main contribution as building software. There’s many interesting contributions this group could make to an open, transparent, participatory Internet. Is there some way we can be more welcoming to people wanting to do this? Dave was suggesting maybe making the Manifesto more approachable would be a way to do this. And the underlying question is: can we be more welcoming to people who want to move the Mozilla Manifesto forward through new types of activities?
That’s a great question. It’s something I want to see happen. However,my top priorities each day are still more tightly focused on supporting our current communities. So it’s good to have new energy looking at this question.