I’m replying only because I read this post (thereby increasing the view count) and if I don’t put a reply it may later be counted as “doesn’t want to join this discussion publicly to avoid any issue in their volunteer life and future in Mozilla”.
It is just today that one of the communities I am a part of started working on adding a local language to voice.mozilla.org. No swags involved, no phones involved, no resources (other than web resources) involved. The value of the direction Mozilla is taking in generating a corpus like this was implicitly understood by the people of that community. They were not worried about Mozilla not having had them on the discussion table because Mozilla had chosen the right direction.
Now, has Mozilla always chosen the right direction all the time? Perhaps there’s mistakes been made. Perhaps in hindsight, Firefox OS being KaiOS and getting major share in a market like India may sound like Mozilla made a bad decision in the past. But, I think the fact is that some decisions are tough to make but easy to criticize.
I do not understand the flow of your argument completely. It is perhaps got to do with us being non-English speakers. But, I do not understand why you have linked to various websites like whatcanidoformozilla.org, codetribute, bugsahoy, etc. What is the argument you are making here? Is the existence of these resources bad? Should they all be shut down? Are you saying that they should all be merged into one?
What I understand you’re saying is that it is very hard to tell people how to contribute to Mozilla. I agree. It is hard. In fact, Mozilla India just redesigned their website because of exactly this problem. Is it Mozilla’s problem that the challenges that the open web is facing has been growing exponentially fast? Machine learning had nothing to do with the open web a few years ago. Virtual reality had nothing to do with the open web a few years ago. Internet was not that of things, but that of webpages in the past. C++ was enough. Android wasn’t so popular. Google, Amazon, Facebook, weren’t so evil. World over privacy violating laws were not being drafted. Surveillance was not easy. Internet wasn’t being cut into lanes.
Is it Mozilla’s fault that so many things are happening at once? That most of these things are harmful for the open web? That Mozilla is one of the few who can and does fight for the open web?
Which decision on direction could have been made better with volunteers being a part of the decision?
Which “competitor that does better community involvement” is Mozilla losing the fight against? Google? Microsoft?