Watch video here: https://air.mozilla.org/7-lessons-from-mozilla/
What follows are the notes I took during John Lilly’s talk. I left them unedited and for now will let them be, without drawing conclusions.
7 insights, 9 problems
Mozilla Mission:
“internet to be better and people to patriciate”
“take an interest, act, and make the world the way they want”
Not so insightful insights..
1. Superior products matter
-produces that don’t suck
-without excellent experience & utility, the rest is meaningless –
2. Push (most) decision-making to the edges
-let the people who code make decisions
-chords “half chaos, half order:”
1. distributed decision-making
2. nodal authority
3. ways to route around
lots of decision making, notes with authority to make the decisions
highly robust and scaleable, don’t need central leaders
Mozilla Chaord:
1. high agreement on core values – make internet good and participatory
2. decision-making rests with module owners –
3. groups have distinct ways of working
4. many decisions-makers outside the “official” organization
5. communication is central
3. Communication will happen in every possible way (so make sure it’s reusable)
-people will communicate in useful ways and ignore non useful
-product plans in wikis, blogs, other peoples’ blogs
-where is the conversation? all over
-buzilla, irc, newsgroups, videoconference
-without face-to-face it’s hard to build relationships
-how do you make conversation reusable?
-how do you make video reusable?
4. Make it easy for your community to do the important things
-Spread Firefox, QMO, Support Mozilla
-localization
-How compete with other companies. Not be them (apple, google), be us. Somethings are really hard for us, like changing a menu item, some things are really easy for us, like shipping in 73 languages – we know how to do it
^Walt Mossberg: Why volunteers not experts?
Mitchell Baker: How much software in the world do you think is outstanding?
Mossberg: Not very much, most of it is crap
Mitchell: All of that is done by paid experts of big companies
^Later, We do have experts, just because not paid doesn’t mean they are not experts. Clear and deep expertise that is priceless – can’t pay any amount of money for.
-make it easy to help others do more
5. surprise is overrated
-surprise is the opposite of engagement
^get people to change their own web, not sit back and be surprised by it
-goal: increase surfaces of engagement circles
^growing inner circle, everyone should feel included
6. Communities are not markets: members are citizens
-citizens are more than consumers, more than bystanders, more than stakeholders
-They are us. We are them.
– there isn’t employees, not employees > think of everyone as citizens
^fewer decisions based on employment more decisions based on merit
– the best citizens challenge the status quo, propose improvements and make the conversation richer
^pain in the asses and bug you on things that suck and know what has to change
-they don’t just make the product better. They make them what they are.
7. The key is the art of figuring out whether & how to apply each of these ideas
-generic rules, figure out which is important to your community
-experiments, measure things you can
PROBLEMS
1. Engaged citizens are noisy
-they have a lot of opinions, everyone thinks different things
-contributor: third stuff we are already doing but he didn’t know, third who cares, third spot on!
-they help products & technology & organization make hard decisions in the right way
2. At scale, there are no maps
-aren’t many people to ask at scale
-key is defining what you care about, and how to measure it and how to communicate litmus tests
Projected web/technology problems
-everyone is trying to build a closed stack
Glory of web/technology
-on the web, you don’t have to ask permission
Q&A
commercial vs nonprofit open source
-leave it to market vs leave it to the people
-don’t care if you use our products, just want you to make your own decision
-Chrome reactions Sept 3rd (2009?) on blog
^Chrome made us better
Mozilla…
-we rely on nerd phenomenon to educate people
-make a great product that people decide to use and throw of the chains off the other stuff
answer to Matt Mullenweg’s question at the end
-people in authority should ask what to do more often
seanbolton.me 