WordCamp New York - About Mozilla

Better Together: Lessons in Open Source Community from Mozilla Paul Kim Automattic WordCamp New York November 14, 2009 1

Over 300 million people use Firefox as their browser Firefox market share as of 04/2009 3

Mozilla’s Mission: To promote choice and innovation on the Internet 4

Mozilla a global, open source project a mission-oriented organization a public beneﬁt company and subsidiaries 250 employees 40% of code comes from non-employees 20,000+ testing volunteers over 300 million users 5

2004 6

New York Times Campaign 10,000 donors, $250,000 raised 7

Insight #1 Push (most) decision-making to the edges 8

Open source principles 1. high agreement on core values 2. decision-making rests with module owners 3. groups will develop distinct ways of working 4. many decision-makers outside the “ofﬁcial” org 5. communication is central 9

Chaos Anyone can comment on a proposal for a change 10

Chaos Anyone can submit a change to the code 11

Order Not everyone can approve a change 12

Order Strong leadership structure 13

Order Strong leadership structure 14

Order Identify and elevate smart contributors 15

Create small teams, led by strong contributors, and give them responsibility 16

Chaordic system The strongest open systems are chaords 1. distributed decision-making 2. nodal authority 3. ways to route around 17

Insight #2 Communication will happen in every way possible (so make sure it’s reusable) 18

Wikis 19

Blogs 20

Primary work channels: Bugzilla, IRC & newsgroups 21

Increasing use of video and audio 22

Lots of real life meetups 23

Insight #3 Surprise is overrated 24

Surprise is the opposite of engagement 25

Increase the inner circle of participation ... 26

... and strive to make everyone feel included 27

Insight #4 Make it easy for your community to do the important things 28

Not just for programmers - everyone can help! 33

Increasingly, the focus is on making it easier for anyone to participate 34

2009 “It’s too late to be a pessimist.” - Yann Arthus Bertrand 35

Thanks paul@automattic.com blog.numenity.org @pkim All content CC-Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Ideas and materials borrowed with gratitude from: John Lilly, Mike Beltzner and the Mozilla community Image credits: “Internet map” http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d2/Internet_map_1024.jpg All other images from the Mozilla community 36

WordCamp New York - About Mozilla

by Paul Kim

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