[Call for input] Open Letter to Mozilla Leadership

What do you feel about the current direction Mozilla is heading (including all recent announcements)?

Everybody in order to put their trust and confidence on any organization needs the feeling thatthings are working out or at least are being aligned toward long term “achievable goals” Imagine a ship inviting passengers on board but switching destinations every day, week or month… I don’t think success would be easy to reach for such cruises line…
Sadly the feeling nowadays is similar in Mozilla and among Mozillians very little seem to understand where we are really going and for how long…
Are we going to drop some BIG projects again and pursue new goals every time…? Mozilla needs at least an easy consistent path that everybody can understand and follow that’s the basement we are loosing as far I see…

  • Big projects and dreams being dropped overnight.
  • Big expensive campaigns left in the limbo
  • A lot of smart people leaving mozilla with a fake smile… waving goodbye to nwver come back…
  • Alot of disappointed contributors and volunteers
  • Difficult processes when it comes to request swag, budgets, etc. I ve been waiting SINCE 2015 my Reps welcome pack just to mention a simple example…
  • Communities being left on their own with their own ideas and projects… the feeling is: Do what mozilla is asking you this month/week/year to do… Help Mozilla! My perception was… Mozilla will help us to achieve our local goals covering our local needs in order to help Mozilla be what people and users are expecting it to be…

What do you think Mozilla should do to succeed that we are not doing right now?
Mozilla should align with average web users needs. IOT is the future for sure but what about simple things like empowering women and mothers to use and educate their children to use the free open web and preserve it.? Projects like these get very little atention and funds in my opinion…

  • How many non tech people… around the world does really know what Mozilla is, does and believes in, evwn if it exists?

  • We need Mozilla to go back to its roots… The People… The Web, Freedom…then we all can move toward the future together.

how can we dream with an everlasting open web for everyone…

Why we can not really connect with the masses? Why apart from the IT world very few average web users can tell or know what Mozilla really is and does?

Technical goals should follow but communities should focus on reaching the web users…our tweets our likes our shares fill the metrics Mozilla uses to prove we are big and populars and we as mozillians happily do that, but are we the communities supposed to serve only for those purposes?We should be thermometers for Mozilla testing the web users worldwide, but feel lonely everytime more…
We want people joining mozìlla, average users, free thinkers, teachers, parents, engineers, everyone… Don’t we?
Of course most Mozilla current projects are good and exciting… for who? For everyone? I ask…
I believe we should start matching high open technologies covering and solving web user needs worldwide!
Think of countries like Ghana, Colombia, Ecuador, Vietnam… What can we do to help these people? Do they really need VR, IOT there.? Yes they do but when, how and what are we going to deliver? Let’s built products and projects that connect with everyone using or interested in using the web… FIREFOX is a perfect reminder of that.

End of my rant…

Dave

5 Likes

Thank you Michael for this opportunity offered by Mozilla here to give ours feedback since all recent and current announcements.
Unfortunately, no too much comment on this, precisely from Mozilla Community Côte d’Ivoire (ours community).

I have write a discourse post about current statut of Mozilla Côte d’Ivoire here

From y part, i think the current direction Mozilla is great. since 2012, i have been fight to promote inclusive community for Mozilla Côte d’Ivoire.
it’s wasn’t easy because communication between Mozilla and community precisely west africa (french community) was very bad.
I think this was the origin of the failure of firefox Os lunch in Africa.
Many mozillians from there were very frustrated because Mozilla was not collaborate with local community.

Otherwise, i think Reps Regional Coach program will help a lot west Africa to understand Better Mozilla goal and how give satisfaction to community also.
Me as Reps Regional Coach i will try my best to do this and make inadequacies a positivity.

  • Trust on Africa potentiality
  • Try to understand better africa needs because Mozilla can solve them
  • Communities training to give good knowledge of Mozilla projects (we are need it in Africa)

**

I ask:

**
what we must do when one part of community (a few people) don’t want an inclusive community ?

How do you expect volunteers to contribute to Mozilla projects while the core team members of communities who have to guide the contributors do not even master them?

1 Like

Hello,

Using Mozilla Browser since 15 years ago and volunteering with Mozilla since 7 years ago.

What do you feel about the current direction Mozilla is heading (including all recent announcements)?

I feel like they have been transitioning from the foundation to more corporate (which is not bad) but in the process I feel like they’re treating volunteers like 2nd class citizen or omit them, sometimes if you wanna help, I feel like there are barriers.

I like the idea to power Firefox even more, I know that Thunderbird is a side project but I think it is still used by a lot of people, community can maintain it if mozilla motivates the community and brings some help. Same for other projects, don’t use the volunteers as tools, we are people and share with us some important news, I don’t understand why some stuff is NDA while they should be open, like the mozilla’s mission.

For example, we were saying in the social networks that mozilla wasn’t going to close Firefox OS and convincing people in groups that it will be used in IOT, etc. And then 2 days later, mozilla closes the project and people tough that we were lying or doing fake promotion. At least mozilla should tell us or prepare us for canceling Firefox OS.

What do you think Mozilla should do to succeed that we are not doing right now?

Increase the motivation for volunteers, there are a new people that wanna help with the Mozillians vision, but it’s hard to join them to new projects, or sometimes find a way to get them to a mozilla employee so they can help with a project.

Also, Mozilla needs to be cool again, I teach in a university and most students know a lot about Microsoft or Google, less people know about Mozilla and what they can do, FSA program doesn’t help much and sometimes it’s hard to find new mozilla pages or campains in spanish, so they lose voluntering market in latinamerica.

I started to help with the WordPress communitiy, and Automatic have people that contact me to parcipate in the project, explain me and train me to help in the community (it was mas first contact, newbie, finding a way to help for the first time), with Mozilla I don’t see a quick response for newbies (at least in spanish) to collaborate with mozilla.

2 Likes

I’d like to add a few things to my statements above.

Mozillas full time Community Personnel is mostly employed or working by US hours and it shows. It means every community not from the US is underserved a lot. The Road Show improves that a little when it comes to meeting, but communication in general is really bad.

Also, seeing all the news about participation people being let go and the community positions in Germany suddenly vanishing from the page (sad, I know someone who would have been an incredible fit for that, please ping me if there is still need).

The problem is that Mozilla does not seem to understand that Community lives through people doing legwork. Going to local meetups, conferences, etc. Being there. You cannot expect that to be done by volunteer community members or employees doing that on the side. It gives no consistent service. Mozilla seems to be running under the belief that everything can be remotely organised. That doesn’t work for community, you need the proverbial “foot on the ground”.

I’ll give an example: ViewSource Berlin was a great conference with a major flaw. It was struggeling to even get noticed in Berlin. Why? Because it was organised and promoted from SF. That works for the organisation part (organising a venue, suppliers, etc.), but it was really struggling for the local community to even take note that there was a conference running here.

Having someone tour Berlin or the wider area would have been a good way to seed the knowledge. No one did that.

Finally: long breath. It took me a while to grok that DevRel is something new for Mozilla. Sadly, you don’t start doing DevRel yesterday and have results tomorrow. Participation is not even public for a year and already it’s being cut down. I have my frustration with it, but gosh, that’s too short to even have measurable results. It’s just enough time to fail at one or two things, and not enough time to try out new things. I find it really disheartening to see a good initiative so gutted on such short notice.

1 Like

How is this different from Google and Microsoft? We hope that the Lords of Mozilla are on our side?

1 Like

actually is not making difference

Its hard to explain how I really feel, there is a lot that I want to say, I’m going to try be clear.

Currently Mozilla has lost the idea about how to keep in touch with the world community, last years, looks like Mozilla leadership is living in wonderland, a place where communities are not disappointed, not confused or they are ready to drop projects every six months.

I guess leadership has not idea how really Mozilla is, they think Mozilla is like Apple, Google or even Microsoft. They don’t care or they don’t know how important the community to Mozilla are. They are just making simple and easy decisions, just cut, cut and cut. so now we have only Firefox, because privacy and political speech about internet health and encryption is one of the principles that why Mozilla was created, but now if you go to mozilla.org and you look for the manifesto, you need to know what are you looking for, now when you open Mozilla’s site you can see our innovations and our impact, what are you trying to show to the world? Our products? What are you trying yo say? Hey world! Look at me! I’m Mozilla, I have 4 projects (for now), well actually only one, but I’ll post 4, and we make other kinds of things, like ammm encryption, some about learning and you know that kind of stuff.

Some months ago, the first thing that you could see there was the manifesto https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto

Mozilla is turning to the dark side, now Mozilla corp is taking the big decisions around future priorities.

Community is losing members every day, and they don’t worry about it!

If we ask them something about manifesto or why they support or why they work to Mozilla I have no doubt that the answer will be money or something not really relevant to the Mozilla mission.

I think Mozilla should start to create their own innovations and fancy products, not only copy or adapt Google’s technologies to Firefox. We can make better products and better technologies than Google.But we have lost self-confident.

Mozilla is not alone in this path, just turn the fires on, just need to say "Hi, we have a plan to the next five years, we need your help, and don’t matter how hard the way will be, we’ll do this“ and the community will help.

I want to finish this with phrase:

->Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust.<-

I only hope that when Mozilla finally wakes up and look around, don’t be too late.

Many voices, one Mozilla!

3 Likes

Hi all,

I rarely play the card “I have been there for a long time, saw the dinosaurs walk among us…” (aka “It was better before”), but I feel now is the right time.
I saw the netscape layoff in 2003, felt the hope rising again from former paid netscape employees becoming volunteers (it was that or giving up). And it worked! In 2004, Firefox 1.0 was launched. And the marketshare increased slowly but steadily, thanks to volunteers everywhere in the world used it, talked about it, installed it on friends’ and family’s computer. Good ol’ times, huh?
Well, certainly good memories, but that’s how the mind works. There were struggles too.
Can we go back? No, sorry.
But we can understand why it worked. First, the only real competition was IE6: old, no feature but 95% marketshare. It was an easy target. Firefox came in all shiny, innovative, awesome features that people wanted.
But remember, at the time, Opera was also there, a very good browser too. But it never managed to grow. Because you had to buy it and it lacked the community around it.

Where are we now? Firefox is an old browser (new version every 6 weeks, but it’s been there for 12 years). There are new kids on the block and they get all the attention, being cool and with a rich dad.

My feeling is that mozilla seems like they’re listening to the communities, like asking for feedback, polls (well, to be honest, that is still what we are trying to do here). But at the end of the day, mozilla is doing whatever they decided whether the community agrees or not. I get it, we need a strong leadership, we can’t always do what the communities want, tough decisions must be made. But sometimes, when the communities say “Oh oh… Bad idea!” and mozilla does it anyway, there is backlash. And it never feels good to say “Told you” when we’re all in the same storm.

I’m thinking “webextensions” right now. It could have been great, but addons developers have not been heard. Those people are members of the community, people who make Firefox actually great, because they add some features that a lot (millions) of users want. And BAM Webextensions! They struggle to rewrite their code to keep features, it does not work because mozilla does not seem to care to help them to improve the system. These great extensions get reduced to minimal features, which already exist in other browsers. Developers get angry and quit! So much for Grow mozilla!

So yes, it feels like the communities are asked for their opinion but it does not matter in the end. It feels discouraging and disempowering.

About events organized by reps and which activities it should include, what people all around the world should do / learn at a given time. You know what? Not all people in every country needs the same thing at the same time. Mozilla talks about alignment, we talk about diversity. Who better than a person who lives in some part of the world knows what their neighbors expect? You talk about objectives and goals? We talk about ways to achieve them: there’s not one single way, but multiple ways to get to the same objective : grow mozilla.

What we should do to improve that? Firefox succeeded in the beginning because the volunteers were commited, creative, dedicated. They found ways to achieve their goals that had not been yet explored. Just trust the volunteers, the communities that are the strength of mozilla. The very thing that make them different from other browsers or other corporations.

This post reflects my own thoughts, not the reps council’s opinion.

9 Likes

How do I feel?
Mozilla has changed into something I don’t recognize. Mozilla lost its true DNA. Mozilla might trying to fit with current tech scene, but it didn’t work. Some volunteers has lost their faith, some are trying to keep it and some are pretended to keep it. Even though, giving more focus on Firefox is one way to re-initiate the real spirit of Mozilla.

What do we ask?

  • Clear documentation on everything from staff.
  • Unification of news source for public, volunteer and staffs (if it’s a blog, make them centered on that blog. if it’s Discourse, make those annoucements centered from Discourse).
  • I don’t know any more. I feel exhausted.
5 Likes

Well, first of all I think this is a great way to communicate all the issues we have in Mozilla, for me Ive been more than 5 years in the Community Mozilla México and now I have 2 years in the Community Mozilla Hispano.

What do you feel about the current direction Mozilla is heading (including all recent announcements)?
I think the mainly topic to all of this is the lack of meaning of Mozilla. By that I mean the few projects that were made like webmaker (popup webmaker) they were so many interested projects like them that ended to early. Im just saying what I see and lived as a mozillian. We have to be more open yes but we have to safe the meaning of Mozilla and the great work tools it provides Mozilla. We have to focus in few products but improve the quality of their interaction with people.

What do you think Mozilla should do to succeed that we are not doing right now?
I think Mozilla has to make more projects everyday that includes education as a form of lifestyle, we are so involved in make the best products, but what we not see its that we have the power to educate people around the world in a ways we cannot perceived! Its great to have projects, its great to have clubs, but what we need to do is teach people how to use the web in a better way, maybe a mozilla school would be nice to start, we can experiment with the products we already have and include all volunteers around the world that can access to work in them.

A free school online for everyone, including an awesome free library online, all kind of activities like workshops, courses that can be approved by digital rights, all connected with everything. And people more aware of their privacy. Big Data is a great way to access in the mind of people, we have to use the Bid Data to make people understand that their way of consuming technology is affecting the way in how perceives the world, we have to make them more human in a world of technology, more attentive to what they do and educate them to educate themselves in the good use of technology. Privacy and technology.

Hi!

I’m going to add some bullet points, and I let someone to explain it better:

  1. Mozilla has shifted to be a community-centered model, to a employee-centered model.
  2. Mozilla grew in the early days thanks to the community, now, it has shrink in % of userbase when the number of employees has exponentially increased. (Ok, maybe this point is not fair, but it is kind of ironic)
  3. Communication is always bad in every business. Mozilla discussed in the open. Now it seems that decisions are made closed doors and you cannot argue with that once they are released for everyone.
  4. We are losing long-term contributors because they feel community is not be heard like in the past.
  5. We don’t know what’s Mozilla is doing, apart from closing projects.
  6. Pivote is a nice word, but remember that we are a community that we do this in our free time, for free and some of us want a little bit of stability to commit to a project.
  7. NDA? Seriously? What kind of confidential information does Mozilla manage this days to be a NDA? This is not like in Firefox OS, where there were other partners.

And answering the questions:

  1. The direction is bad, IMO. We pivot a lot, we do not focus on a project for a long time (ok, maybe Rust + Servo, but it’s like a experiment that is being added without too much big changes into Firefox, which is great in technology, but not for marketing), and people that know how communities work are leaving mozilla. This sounds really bad.

  2. We are Mozilla. We are community based. We need to listen users. What we do in the past with Firefox? Create a browser that outstand IE, but because we heard users. We need to do the same again. Maybe some of the projects we have right now need that community, our input. Maybe we fail, of course, but at least we fail being respectful to our roots. Please, remember that much of the position actually held by Mozilla is because of the community. We need to grow, but we can encourage the community to be part of that growth. And firing key community members that have become full time contracts for Mozilla does not help at all.

Thanks.

5 Likes

This reflects my own opinion, not the Reps Council’s (if that needs to be said). Last week I was very busy at an exhibition and therefore was not able to write earlier. This also brings me to my first point (in no particular order):

Time to catch up
There is so much going on. Even with me having time to read mails and delete/move the ones that I didn’t need to act on, I still had a lot of communication to catch up with. And that is only the communication I receive. We are not talking about all the videos on AirMo or Discourse topics here. Maybe we could look into how we distribute all necessary information to volunteers? (Yes, I will talk about communication below, which will instantly contradict this sentences here, that is the challenge to solve!)

Communication & Information
While we have sooo many channels (Wiki, IRC, Meetings, Mailing lists, Discourse, Telegram, Slack, Matrix, Mattermost, Mail, 1:1 chats, …), there is still not enough information flow towards volunteers. Either the selection of the channels or the amount of them might be the problem, really hard to say. What I know though is that channels like slack are really not open.

There are at least 2 slack networks I know of, one being the Firefox one, the other Mozilla. What is happening on those channels? What is it used for? What’s the goal of them? Do we need those additionally to IRC? Do we want to replace IRC? What I know is, that all Slack channels I’ve encountered so far do not have any possibility to register for as a volunteer. I’ve not bothered to complain about this in the past, but I feel this is a good way to do so now. This is in no way “defaulting to open”. How many of those discussions happening there are really internal worthy? Why is that the case?

Another topic I’d like to talk about in this section is the term “business value”. Talking with several volunteers, that term doesn’t really have a good association with it for volunteers. While volunteers are very driven by Mozilla’s manifesto and vision, the term “business goals” has a very stale taste. In most cases this amounts to financial and growth goals, while we have Mozilla’s mission in our mind. In Mozilla’s example this is basically the same (with the Corporation fully owned by the Foundation), but nevertheless not all volunteers feel comfortable with that term.

Communication of things Mozilla does
We are really bad at communicating what new exciting stuff Mozilla is doing. There are new repositories on GitHub daily, and other stuff that is harder to be tracked. For example there is a meta bug about “Photon” (Firefox GUI refresh) on Bugzilla, and there was a work week around that recently, but there is no public information about it all that would enable volunteers to get into it.

How can we make sure that new things are easily accessible and known to volunteers? With the right premise this is even okay if the project doesn’t exist anymore in 2 months due to it being an experiment.

Also recently George Roter posted two GitHub repositories on a Telegram channel most people didn’t know about. This is a lot of information to gather, but I’m sure there needs to be a way to make it easier to aggregate new projects and initiatives without the need of waiting for an official blog post months after project initiation, or tracking github and wiki edits daily.

Also most new projects are not built for participation. These come out of a functional area and therefore are known to employees. Volunteers however don’t know the background of them and even though in theory they are open on Github in terms of source, the whole project is not participatory.

Transparency of decisions
With all of this in mind, i still have the feeling that I don’t know the background of a lot of decisions that are taken on a daily basis. I highly doubt that I just miss those, I don’t think it’s as open as I want this to be. With me being on Reps Council, I of course get quite a few messages with more background, but this is a really small group and everything is under NDA. This doesn’t help me to provide background for my fellow community members because I can’t talk about it directly. Mitchell blogged about this quite some time ago and the Reps Council also took part in an experiment to document decisions on Bugzilla. While I like the idea, I’m not 100% sure that this is solving the problem of having transparent decisions, since this only tackles the documentation of it, not the process of actually coming to a decision. I’m fully aware that we can’t do every decision in the open given our media attention. But maybe we could evolve that and do it in the open if we can get the image of actually doing it in the open and that those things are not decisions yet? This seems to have worked quite well with the new logo.

For volunteers without NDA this gets even worse. This means relying on information that is out in blog posts and on mailing lists (and for a lot of communication also posts coming from the media without any possibility to verify it within minutes and feeling confused). For this specific problem I don’t think it’s too much communication, I think it’s not being involved in the decision making itself. If we can get to a process where decisions are being taken in the open, I actually don’t think that this call for input for an open letter would have been necessary.

Also, this is not only about transparency of leadership-level decisions, this also boils down to team’s decisions as already mentioned here before in terms of the Community Development Team’s recent decisions and WebExtensions.

Goals
As of now, Mozilla’s goals for 2017 are still under NDA and were only posted in the NDA category of Discourse. Volunteers without NDA as of now still don’t know what Mozilla’s specific goals are for this year, making it really hard to plan. Even if Reps for example now what the goals are, they can’t talk about it and this makes it very hard to guide communities with their planning and focus. To be honest, I don’t see why these goals can’t be public, as I’m hearing “default to open” every few weeks, but that is definitely not living by that principle. What is Mozilla’s leadership team afraid of? Media? Failing in the open?

At the community meetup we had recently in Switzerland I presented the Open Innovation Team’s OKRs (including Community Development Team and Reps) instead of the Mozilla goals, but most volunteers did not really care about those since it doesn’t affect them in their daily work. They would rather hear about Mozlla’s goals as well as functional team’s goals they work with.

Employees working in the open
One of the problems here might be (speculative) that new employees are not anymore living by the “open” and “community” principles we built on in the early days. While there are sessions about community while onboarding new employees, I’ve seen quite a lot of employees who really didn’t care about community or would have made it easier for community to participate in the past years. This is certainly not an easy topic, but this should be the case for every single employee. While some do an exceptional job and going far to facilitate as much as they can to make it easier and more appealing for volunteers to join their part of the projects, some just might not have the right background (or even contradicting OKRs) to do so. It takes time to foster a community, and Mozilla employees should do so, even if that means “getting less done” in the short term.

Firefox Cross-functional
Since Firefox 42 I’m on the Firefox cross-functional weekly team meeting invitation list. This is a private meeting that talks about all issues Firefox that are interesting for several functional teams. I think this is a great example of a meeting that could be public and would help to understand the goals and what is going on around Firefox. As far as I know Erin now let’s the meeting be recorded and that should be available for NDA’d Mozillians, couldn’t find it so far though. I think we should go a step further than NDA for this one though. (Erin, great work though! Really appreciate your enthusiasm when it comes to community)

Hard to get in touch
As already mentioned previous in several posts here, it is really hard to get in touch with employees. Recently when I needed a contact for the Rust team, I asked my local hackerspace who is really interested in Rust and didn’t go through any channels I would have for myself. Due to that I had an answer within minutes, instead of possibly days.

Henrik’s team is working on integrating Phonebook and Mozillians as far as I know, this might make it easier. But then we also need to make sure that employees are actually there for the community to be contacted, and that they can make time to do so.

Change of direction
Having a vision is not enough for most volunteers, I’d say. With changing focus every 6 months and no goals to hold on to, this makes it very hard to stay contributing as already mentioned from others. A lot of the core of this problem is within the communication problems and decision making being transparent mentioned above. I’m sure that with a transparent decision making process as well as public goals this would look way different. We probably could even do experiments without having a bad, confusing feeling within the communities if we properly explain what is happening and what the risks are.

Currently due to lacking goals and background, a lot of communities feel uncertain and this creates a very unhealthy situation. What I’m hearing a lot is “why should I be working on that since it will be killed anyway in the future?” instead of “this is a great experiment, I want to be part of it and make it a success so we can work on it further”.

Other way for NDA
As of now, having an NDA gives you quite some additional information. It’s up to everyone to deal with this. Personally I think it’s nice to know what is going on even before there is a blog post, but still I can’t talk to my local community about it and guide them. Most things that are currently under NDA don’t strike me as being necessary to be under NDA apart from the whole “it will create a media article, we need to be careful there” perspective. Is there a better way to handle this kind of information? Do we need to set the expectations of that kind of communication differently? Can we come to a point where we have open discussions about these kind of things and go back to the roots where the corporation and all volunteers are on the same level again? On that note, I completely understand there are other topics that have nothing to do in the open (financials, deals with partners, etc), but that is just a really minor part of the informations that are shared under NDA.

Quite a lot of points, I agree :slight_smile:

7 Likes

Executive decision by the Council Chair (me ;)):
Given the amount of responses we had in the past several hours, I will leave this open for another day until our Council meeting tomorrow at 17:00 UTC. Please spread the word and encourage others to chime in as well!

1 Like

Mozilla is struggling to stay relevant, more than ever on this unfair (as always) field of the web, we have lost many fights, but it seems that we have lost something more valuable on the road.

Mozilla is losing the community faith, which is the engine that roars on the hearth of Firefox.

It hurts me when i read things like:

still not “winning” with open methods

When it was thanks to the “open methods” that Firefox was born. And thanks to that we all are here today.

Or the magical word of “NDA” which didnt exist in the community vocabulary before Firefox OS. We were told that this was “because we are now working with old-fashioned partners” and things need to stay “secret”, but it seems that we like secrets more and more every day.

Mozilla should focus more on the “big global picture” rather than just what is happening in the tech bubble of San Francisco, which is small and doesnt correspond on what its happening really on the world.

2 Likes

Hi Michael,

I’ll try to be straight to the point. I am a new volunteer, just over 6 months ago. But since I started I’ve always been very active. Currently, I am responsible along with other volunteers, for creating the feeling of team, the L10n team. And incredible as it may seem, I got faster and closer to the staff than the Reps. So in relation to what you should do, it is perhaps to be more present in the community channels, because at least here in Brazil, I only know “virtually” one Rep. And for me, among all others that are listed on the Reps list, this person is the only one I see that dialogues directly and collaborates with the community, both virtually and with the local community, in person.

Does this mean that the other Brazilian Reps are doing nothing? Honestly, I can not answer this question. But personally, for me, they are invisible. Because at least on the channels that apparently are the official one, Discourse, for example, I’ve hardly ever seen these people attending. And when they do, they do not seem to add much to the community.

Maybe I have not understood what a Rep does, or what its role in the community is, but I think a Rep should look to its local community and work the Mozilla mission within that context, not targeting the global community as The global community is a consequence.

  1. I am an aspiring privacy advocate, to the right to access the Internet, as a global public resource, but perhaps, the comment of our colleague @striptm, make sense. Mozilla today seems to have decided that the focus will be Firefox, however, we see many users complaining about technical issues regarding Firefox’s performance on computers, whether Windows, Mac or Linux, especially memory consumption. And the Servo is still so experimental that think of him as a salvation for these problems is not a viable solution in the short time. But I believe that if Mozilla is going to focus on Firefox as its principal product, it should do so now very well and faster.

  2. The lack of dialogue with the community is not something Mozilla should hold back. I’ve always heard, since when I was a regular user, that the Mozilla community was the differential, so the community should be a point of support and consultant for both Staff and Reps. Otherwise, what’s the use of having Mozilla Manifesto, Mozilla Mission and community-Mozilla dialogue not happen? My point of view, Mozilla without community is nothing. Community without Mozilla, is an attempt by a pseudo-open foundation / company trying to fit into the world of browsers. Trying to be different by wanting to combat users’ privacy and security while all others are not bothering about it so explicitly. It is necessary to win back the community, and it is a MUST to value your volunteers! This includes giving SWAGS, everyone likes to earn a souvenir, everyone likes to show that they are part of that great community, and this motivates the volunteers and encourages them to bring more people into the community in general.

Well, I hope this has become clear, and that I have somehow collaborated with that topic. Thanks.

Hi! My point of view:

What do you feel about the current direction Mozilla is heading (including all recent announcements)?

  • I personally liked what Mozilla wants for Firefox and for Innovation, maybe if we go back to our core we can fix things! :grinning:

  • Less staff for communities is a bad thing. Why I say that:

  1. In Brazil for example our community is totally broken, I’ve saw horrible things happening in the last few months. IMHO we don’t have a community here in Brazil, what we have are a bunch of functional teams isolated and working in their own worlds.
  2. No Reps from Brazil are doing what they need to do. I know a lot of Reps from Brazil and in my opinion they are totally lost, abandoning the community, reporting things (and events) that don’t happened in reality, entering in fights and a lot of other stuff
  3. I think the only way to solve this is with the Help from Mozilla and Staff, we as community members can help, but we can’t solve this alone.

What do you think Mozilla should do to succeed that we are not doing right now?

  • Improve the communication and transparency in actions/decisions
  • Ask for more community participation in those activities
  • Continue the work with RepsNext and Mobilizers, maybe this will change the scenario in some communities
  • We need support from Staff to keep the community working for now. Maybe in the future all communities have their own methods to solve problems or to take decisions and they will not need Mozilla Staff anymore, but this is not the reality right now!
1 Like

Hi all, I’m over a decade contributor.
IMO, our Mozilla’s identity is “Mozillian” (includes all staff and contributors), not the product Firefox.

Firefox is the most important platform product produced by us. It is not a product of Mozilla corporation. However, it is just a product.

I saw so many failed / ended products or projects. They didn’t hurt our identity. So, we can renew or re-innovate, because they are just a product.
But, why recent ends makes hurt us? (Mozillian leaves.) Because they (staffs and contributors) are not required for product and not respected.

Our identity mozillian is not required for Mozilla?
Identity must be respected.

2 Likes

How do I feel ?
I needed lot of time to find my words and mostly I’m feeling the same way as everyone (almost). I started to be a reps contributing to Firefox OS with a whole bunch of Mozillians at that time, putting many efforts into promoting Firefox OS. When it all went down, the french community nearly collapsed and splitted into 2 kind of groups… I’m not going to expand more on that but at that time I would have appreciated more support from Mozilla in a moment I / we felt like a whole community working on a project was abandoned.
I took a year off Mozilla for myself. It wasn’t only Firefox OS cancellation that triggered this decision but some overall background:

  • non-cohesive work in communities

  • departure from some important members

  • MoCo that sounded more and more distant from MoFo

  • and a lack of communication within Mozilla, and support.

It sounded like a “So long and thanks for all the fishes”

What do we ask ?

  • I’m asking for more communication between MoCo and MoFo. It happened when I was working on some project with employees some of my questions never were answered and it was going one way (maybe because of lack of time).

  • So it’s a very bad idea to just focus on OKRs and not keeping staff members that make the link between MoCo and MoFo. OKR’s should only be a PERSONAL way for volunteers to express their objectives and communicate about their results with each other. Major companies working with OKRs promote them to be a personnal goal for employees and not a way to communicate “orders” and objectives within a company. We really need a staff co-working with communities and helping them to choose a direction.

  • Promote more initiatives within Mozilla - that are not necessarily link to Mozilla main objectives but are part of the philosophy. One of the main reason I joined Mozilla was a discourse made by Mitchell Baker talking about the beginning of Mozilla, at a time where communities within the world where created on their own and creating their own initiative to promote Openess and Freedom, Creativity. I believe Mozilla is a big family with people linked to each other but with their independence. “Many voices, one Mozilla”

  • Therefore we need to put an accent on creating / updating our communities that promote Openess initiatives and that are linked to Mozilla thanks to staff members being both part of the MoCo and the MoFo. It seems communities are more and more splitted into many group doing there work on their sides. Reps program is a very good idea but there’s a real need to update our communities and make link within and between communities. Although it’s both a needed work from MoFo and MoCo sides. By example, I’d like to help here but I don’t necessarily find the ressources to do so. It’s sadly more easy to just focus on objectives and task I’m working on my own. By the way I start to see a change and initiatives started from some people.


Now my 50 cents, few months ago I was about to tell my mentor, I will quit Mozilla and my reps status. Although I really love that community and the awesome people working to promote a philosophy of openess.
The only reason I changed my mind was because I remember this quote “Start to be the change you wanna see in the world”. I still believe in Mozilla and I’ll do my best keep promoting our philosophy.

3 Likes

I do not think Mozilla is headed in the right direction in fact I feel our leadership does not know what direction Mozilla is headed and is constantly changing direction to the detriment of the community and employees (many of which have chosen to leave over the last three years).

My thoughts by area:

Firefox

  1. I think we need to invest more in bringing chrome extension developers into the addon ecosystem so our offering in comparable.
  2. I think we need to invest heavily on Firefox ESR which has long been neglected

Community:

  1. I think the participation team is largely not supportive of the community in the way the community building team was and I do not think the team is moving the Mozilla Community forward or better equipping contributors to have impact on the Mozilla Mission and Initiatives (I do not even think the participation team itself is experienced enough or connected enough to connect contributors to contributions that have impact)

  2. I think Mozilla has shedded some of the best employees in terms of building up community mostly because leadership had grudges against those employees not because they were performing poorly.

  3. Nepotism and entrenchment is a big problem in the community where leadership roles go to friends of staff or friends of existing leadership which creates a private club culture this has also been the case in community hiring where jobs are not listed but often job offers are made to friends of staff when they should be listed allowing the best candidate to be picked.

4 Likes

hi,
I did not write car after reading and reread the messages, I do not want to give the impression of copying / pasting because the different points have already been raised

best regard