Mozilla’s creative team is working on a redesign of some parts of Mozilla.org, and they’re interested in hearing our answers to some broad questions that will help their understanding…reply with your answers!
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.
I like your answers, but I think I have a problem with the questions. At
first read, they’re phrased in a way that I just don’t think about Mozilla
and community building. It’s possible that we should be thinking this way
(like how we should be asking questions about impact to help shape our
thinking) but on first instinct I dislike the focus on competition. I liked
your answer that apathy is our “competition” to keeping community members.
I have seen us lose community members because we lean too far towards
practical on the scale of idealism. I have seen us lose them to linux
communities and other groups that work in the same space, but take a more
ideological or political stance. However in these cases the solution
doesn’t have to be how to take them away again. To scale we need to partner
with organizations that specialize in things that are just one piece for
us. So I dislike question 4. I would want to ask how can contributors of
other open source projects also contribute to Mozilla.
I hope it’s ok to steal the buzzword “intersectionality” but I think it
applies. When you want to work in large numbers, you can’t just factor in
one aspect of a person or their causes or interests.
I also think that what success looks like for Mozilla is not that we have a
hand in everything, but that our values and ways of doing things become
normal when doing business on the internet, and therefore to succeed we
also need to promote other projects that work the way we think they should
work. In that case we should not be trying to take contributors away from
them either, so again I think we should be looking at ways to show them
that contributing to Mozilla or working with Mozilla contributors will
supplement and amplify their contributions to the other project.
Keep in mind my perspective as a former paid-staff.
1. What keeps you up at night with respect to your work with Mozilla?
The lack of synergy (yep, I used that word) between Mozilla-the-company and Community & former-paid-staff.
@george, you and I’ve talked about this, of course, but if I’m being honest, this is what keeps me up at night.
My answers:
1. What keeps you up at night with respect to your work with Mozilla?
That we still have to justify participation/community. Sure, it is in our DNA, but I feel at this point that the org should be much better setup for and accepting of volunteer participation. For many it is still just a nice to have.
Also:
2. Whom do you consider your competitors and competitors for community members?
The tech landscape, and world, has changed enormously over the last decade. I agree that there is so much competition for attention from all different angles.
For our community members, for me it is not so much about competitors but rather how it is harder to stand out from the crowd now at Mozilla and many people move on earlier, or at least drift in and out frequently. Sustaining contributions is hard. I suspect we have plenty of new people waiting to contribute, we just don’t know how to onboard well enough and at scale.
3. What are your competitors doing really well?
To mirror other’s comments, I would say focus, value, and visibility.
4. Why should someone contribute to Mozilla over another Open Source project?
Because we have the largest scope and ambition, and we are advocating and building the platform (the Web) that has the most impact on the the most amount of lives.
I’ve only read a couple of responses to avoid influencing my own 
What keeps you up at night with respect to your work with Mozilla?
Literally I wake up at night thinking about these things…
A panic that no one else is looking out for my children’s digital freedoms and literacy. That without Mozilla we are becoming ‘products of the web’.
As far as participation goes, we are at the same place as much smaller projects with much smaller communities - that we are in the position to design, implement and influence what it means to design thoughtfully and effectively for people who want to give their valuable time to this mission we care about.
Whom do you consider your competitors and competitors for community members?
I actually feel as if , with proper design and collaboration we only have allies in other projects - that as contributors move between opportunities at Mozilla, so too can they move between external projects - but feel connected to a greater spirit of lending skills. For me competitor is a negative term - I think we can do more together. I also believe that Mozilla can lead the way in solving problems faced by almost every other open project out there. An MDN for participation MPN? 
I think our true competitor is - our inability to communicate ‘why volunteering at Mozilla matters’
What are your competitors doing really well? Why should someone contribute to Mozilla over another Open Source project?
I think most open source projects are in the same boat. Those who do better prioritize mentoring people, and communicating ‘impact/why’ much better than us.