My answers:
1. What keeps you up at night with respect to your work with Mozilla?
I really don’t think we can “win” our mission with our products alone. At least not on the current trajectory. So we absolutely need to be successful in unlocking massive, scaled-up, high leverage participation (high touch and low touch) – there is no alternative. What keeps me up at night is that I can’t quite (yet) see the answer for how we can capture more mindshare at scale through participation than Google or Facebook.
2. Whom do you consider your competitors and competitors for community members?
To me it’s not competitors for community members that matters. It’s competitors for mindshare of what the internet is all about. Apple, Google and Facebook in North America. What’sApp, Facebook and Android and whatever the number one search engine is everywhere else in the world.
On the community member question, our number one competitor is apathy/people being busy. After that it’s a massively fragmented market for talent – literally a hundred competitors depending on people’s interest area (different strands of technical contribution, web literacy, advocacy, marketing, localization, etc). Mozilla is the big tent.
3. What are your competitors doing really well?
For contributors, everyone else’s number one advantage is being narrower and smaller than us – it’s easier to feel connected to the whole of what’s going on and to feel central and important. Both of those are major motivators.
In the battle for participants (Google/Facebook/etc) overall, each of them provides visible value to the participant, many many times each day. Our products are in the background and only visible when they break/fail!
4. Why should someone contribute to Mozilla over another Open Source project?
Because we’re the only ones with the chance of being relevant at scale, and in doing so keeping the web an open and accessible public resource.