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Mozilla 2009 All Hands
The document summarizes John Lilly's thoughts for his upcoming talk at Mozilla's 2009 All-Hands meeting. He considered discussing Mozilla's growth over the past 4 years but felt it didn't capture the full story. His talk ultimately focused on balancing Mozilla's mission ("poetry") with the pragmatic challenges of building products and communities ("pragmatics"). These challenges included managing organizational growth, having too much work to do, and adapting to rapid market changes. Lilly encouraged attendees to think big but also focus on shipping things, and to enjoy collaborating with others at the company.
Editor's Notes
- #5 not just a complex organization or organism, but a complex *ecosystem* of organisms
- #6 The pace of technology change right now is unbelievable, and the web+browser world specifically is going through more change, more quickly, than any time in history.
- #9 4 years ago was just a few months after Firefox 1.0 was released -- before most of us arrived here full time, but already doing shockingly fantastic things. (this is a slide that i cribbed directly from the all hands meeting a couple of years ago)
- #22 Let’s think back to 2004 & 2005 & most of 2006 -- essentially clear field for us -- only IE really in the game. remember when people said IE7’s introduction would kill us? :-) Now it’s a whole different situation -- we’re doing well, but there will never be easy shots again. and then on mobile...
- #26 pictures here are from MozCamp EU in Barcelona, dev day in Tokyo, MAOW in Berlin -- but i could have picked from hundreds of events. people engage everywhere we go around the world. am always humbled by the engagement & enthusiasm
- #27 beyond “mozilla” communities, we’ve had huge impact other places. on the left you see Mitchell after talking with the French Senate -- just last week we had ministers from Brazil & France visit us in Mountain View -- but Johnath has spoken in the House of Lords, Chibi has worked with a variety of Japanese governments, on & on. campaigns -- obama & otherwise. education -- this is a picture of the design school at stanford, but we’ve also had huge impact in programs like Seneca, Keio, many others
- #28 and of course we’ve had impact on technology organizations -- not only browsers, but software in general. the march towards open is speeding up, due in no small part to Mozilla’s work over the last decade.
- #30 50 years -- or 100 years -- most of us haven’t even lived 50 years.
- #31 our mission - to keep the Internet participatory - that’s a 50 year mission. that’s something worth doing for a very long time.
- #33 5 years ago, no YouTube, no Twitter, Facebook was only 2 months old.
- #34 10 years ago
- #35 this chart should show the difficulty of staying relevant
- #36 no netscape, microsoft was on windows 2; apple on system 6; no EFF (1990)!
- #39 lisa gansky gave me the term ‘poetry’ -- what she meant when she said ‘poetry’ is the stories and ideas that drive organizations. google’s pieces of poetry are ‘don’t be evil’ and ‘organize the world’s information’. wikipedia’s is ‘the free encyclopedia’ organizations sometimes line up their poetry and pragmatics; sometimes they go out of alignment. mozilla is better at lining up our poetry with our pragmatics than any organization i’ve ever seen
- #41 this is an amazing mission. simple, coherent, and with a clear sense of how to figure out whether you’re doing the right thing or not. easy to tell if you’re in or you’re out.
- #43 localization teams; engagement of new contributors; add-ons workshops, on and on this is our poetry today; we’ll want to make more of this over time; change, stay relevant, while holding on to mission
- #45 i was invited to a discussion on transparency in connecticut last week at the philip johnson glass house. created in 1949 by one of the pre-eminent modernist architects -- he died 4 years ago and the National Trust has maintained & improved the site; has held a series of conversations there. ours was about transparency -- had architects (gang/chicago, ma/usc/china), glass experts, game designers (parsons) -- mostly we talked about twitter, of course. :-)
- #46 here’s the glass house -- was his actual residence for 50 years. notice the kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom & desk, fireplace & bathroom.
- #47 the poetry is obvious: no divisions, living life in the open,
- #49 the architects in the room talked a lot about how to have so much transparency, you have to build tons & tons of very smart engineering in the hidden spaces -- that transparency is more closed work than closed. also, gravity affects the glass over time, and the tech changes; continual redesign issues but there were also practical wins to glass -- huge sheets for buildings in china -- means you can build buildings *fast* -- pragmatic wins from glass, not only poetic
- #50 the brick house -- a practical necessity/complement to the glass house
- #61 I’ve talked with lots of people who have navigated from small to large -- it’s always disconcerting, it’s always hard. but it always goes like this. you start to lose some insight into what others are working on; you get surprised; sometimes there’s duplicate work -- or even rival work.
- #62 Because so many have gone through this, everyone has bits & pieces of advice. But the truth is that every organization is unique; has unusual aspects; there is no one-size-fits-all game plan. And we’re as unusual as they come.
- #66 and don’t forget gecko, xulrunner, embedding, standards organizations, on & on
- #67 we need to help people understand how the pieces work together, while also remembering that we’re an organization that’s built in a way that loves chaos, that loves innovation in every possible location.
- #69 remember that community is better than users. concept series, SUMO, QMO, SFx, campus reps, design collective, open marketing, design challenges
- #70 remember that community is better than users. concept series, SUMO, QMO, SFx, campus reps, design collective, open marketing, design challenges
- #74 open, community, extensions, etc
- #76 that means Gecko, Firefox
- #77 we’d rather disrupt ourselves than be disrupted by others.
- #80 the trick here is to have the poetry & pragmatics inform & amplify each other. the thing to avoid is the pragmatics pulling the poetry into the mundane. and the poetry pulling the pragmatics away from the useful.