Hi, At MozCampEU 2012, I think during Leadership Panel, Brian King mentionned that Mozilla (I would guess MoFo&MoCo) and the community sometimes have unaligned priorities. After being asked, he gave 2 examples; one being that the community still maintains SeaMonkey which is not a priority for MoFo/MoCo and I have forgotten the second one (please complete if anyone remembers), but I remember it was another valid example. He added that he is no one to tell anyone not to contribute to SeaMonkey and I certainly agree, but wish to provide some in-depth thoughts on this topic.
The common thing that MoCo/MoFo and volunteers have in common, what make us "One Mozilla" is the Mozilla Manifesto. Ideally, every decision made within Mozilla comes as a natural conclusion of the Manifesto read in the context of the world at the time of the decision being made. As a concrete example, prioritizing on mobile in the current context is a natural consequence of defending the values described in the Manifesto. If we all, volunteers and paid employees, have the same informations about the world and agree on the Manifesto, I don't see a reason for having our priorities not aligned. Please tell me if you see such a reason. After some time spent at several Mozilla events, I have realized that MoCo/MoFo seems to consider volunteer contributors as sensitive birds that should be taken with care to not scare them away. Volunteer contributors, since they are not tied by any contract of any form are free to work on whatever they want, the quantity they want, change anytime and are free to go away whenever they want. A consequence of this volatile vision of volunteers at the organisational level seems to be that volunteer contributors do not take part of strategic discussions to decide Mozilla priorities including suggesting new priorities at the organization level. In a way, it's only fair, since volunteers do not have to follow any priority, why should they take part of the discussions to decide them? But the situation is a bit more complicated. "Volunteers" is very very far from being a uniform group when it comes to level of involvement, when it comes to interest in what's going on at the organization level. I think there would be value in having dedicated volunteer contributors taking part in organisation-wide strategic decisions. If we, volunteers and paid employees, all take part in deciding Mozilla priorities, we will have our priorities aligned as a consequence of the decision process. Now I understand that business requirements make that all informations to make educated decisions about Mozilla at the organization level are not available to the general public. One idea would be to invite some volunteers to take part of these decisions and having them sign an NDA. All details of this idea aren't figured out (especially how to choose who's invited to the discussions), but I'm starting this thread as an attempt to propose a solution to the problem of unaligned priorities. David _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
