I’m pleased to introduce the members of the search committee for the Mozilla Foundation Executive Director.
Dan Mosedale: Dan has long experience in Mozilla governance, as well as experience with multiple products, from the Mozilla Application Suite to calendar to Firefox. Dan joined Mozilla as a member of mozilla.org staff in the early, early days. Later he moved to the product group to work on LDAP and related capabilities. He spent a few years away from the project in daily life, but never in spirit. Dan returned to the Mozilla project a few years back when he joined Oracle to work on the Mozilla calendar project. Dan remained at Oracle as the lone Mozilla developer for some time after the Mozilla team there disbanded. He moved to the Mozilla Corporation a while back, worked as the lead calendar developer, and has most recently moved to working on Firefox.
Deb Richardson: Deb is a long-time member of the Linux world, and one of the founders of the Linuxchix. She came to the Mozilla project a few years back. Deb’s initial challenge was to create a useful developer documentation site. We had always known our documentation was poor. If you look today you can see the results of Deb’s efforts, now under the leadership of Eric Shepherd. The Mozilla Developer Center contains documentation for multiple aspects of the Mozilla project, from technologies to projects to products. Deb most recently turned her attention to product management, working on Firefox product planning.
Deb also has a significant interest in Mozilla organization and governance. It was Deb who took my initial draft of a document about the Mozilla vision, teased apart the separate threads, and created the structure for the parts that eventually became the Mozilla Manifesto. Many contributed to the Manifesto, but Deb’s early, giant contribution made a huge difference in getting this done.
Robert Kaiser: Robert has also been part of the Mozilla project for many years. He started as a localizer of the Mozilla Application Suite. Today he is the one of the leaders of the SeaMonkey project. The SeaMonkey community group took over ongoing development of the integrated mail/news client known as the Mozilla Application Suite when it was retired as an official project. SeaMonkey is a vibrant, successful community project with ongoing development work and project releases. Robert interacts regularly with other members of the Mozilla project across a range of topics.
Stuart Parmenter: Stuart came to the Mozilla project as a high-school volunteer. He joined Netscape in 1999 and has been working in the Mozilla world almost constantly since then. Not long after the Mozilla Foundation was formed Stuart joined Oracle to work on the Mozilla calendar team there. He moved to Mozilla a year or so later, returning to his original interest in graphics.
Stuart also has an interest in Mozilla project dynamics. Stuart lead the recent effort to review and restructure our code modules, as well as started the process of thinking about non-code modules. He’s been active in thinking about the role of super-reviewers and other governance mechanisms.
Bob Lisbonne: Bob 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 the Mozilla project, and joined the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors in late 2006. 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.
Mitchell Baker: I joined the Mozilla project part time in 1998 and full time in 1999. I’ve been the general manager of the project (known as the Chief Lizard Wrangler) since 1999 and have been involved in a broad range of Mozilla activities. Together with Brendan Eich I lead the effort to form the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and to articulate the Mozilla vision through the Mozilla Manifesto.