Thanks for your reply! Response below...

On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 5:35:55 PM UTC+8, Rubén Martín wrote:
> 2014-03-25 3:32 GMT+01:00 <[email protected]>:
> 
> 
> 
> > 1. Regularly scheduled town hall meetings (keeping world time zones in
> 
> > mind) for high level news, feedback, and idea-sharing; maybe on an annual
> 
> > or bi-annual basis, including recommendations that may be offered by the
> 
> > convocation as a whole, with a majority vote of those present (including
> 
> > those attending online), hopefully prompting Mozilla to take a very serious
> 
> > look at these recommendations.
> 
> >
> 
> 
> 
> AFAIK, there are regular town halls about all important topics when needed.
> 
> The last one I remember was about the promoted titles and Mitchell talked
> 
> yesterday about a new own about the CEO change.


In my view, "when needed" would be on a regular basis where people look forward 
to a specific time at which they can get updated and offer suggestions, be 
informed or reminded about the venues which exist throughout the year, etc. Not 
all of us have the energy to be kept abreast of all planning, mailing list 
activity, etc., so haven't a regular (though of course not excessively 
frequent) venue for sharing of big plans and welcoming of input would I think 
have many benefits beyond specialized meetings.

> > 2. Regularly scheduled community election of delegates who could make
> 
> > recommendations at annual meetings or such to the same effect as number #1.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Mozilla Reps program has a
> 
> Council<https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReMo/Structure_Governance>voted by
> 
> reps which aims to be a fair representation of the community. They
> 
> are having a more relevant role each year and are very aware of "base"
> 
> contributors/users opinions.

Excellent, I had not known about this. I hope their big picture involvement and 
decisions or activities will be more publicized.

> > Without such engagement, I believe Mozilla will continue to be seen by
> 
> > some as a mere "least undesirable" option, with Mozilla benefiting from
> 
> > public participation and a sense that Mozilla really does have its heart in
> 
> > the right place, but facing a sometimes unconcealed frustration from its
> 
> > community supporters (e.g., small add-on developers) if not users, that our
> 
> > voices are not being heard.
> 
> >
> 
> > Can you give some examples where do you feel Mozilla didn't encourage
> 
> public participation? Almost everything at Mozilla is public beforehand.

It is not that public participation isn't encouraged--on the contrary I was 
saying that _is_ one of its well-recognized positive features--it is a sense 
that decision-making does not seem to take the little guy into account (and it 
is a complaint I have seen a number of times over the years from other people 
as well). While people may always quibble about not getting their own 
particular voice heard, if there is not a regularly scheduled venue for 
sharing, I think this is made worse.

I really don't want to particularize this too much which is why I hesitated to 
give my particular concerns or gripes of the moment, but if you want specifics, 
my own at the moment that I can think of are:

1. Though I haven't played around with it yet, from what I understand of 
Australis, one will have to make an extra click to get to one's add-ons. An 
extra click to get to add-ons is like a kiss of death to me even and I would 
hope this feeling could be accommodated along with the understandable desire of 
other users to keep their UI minimalist.
2. I'd like to know why globalStorage was abandoned, and why no shared storage 
mechanisms appear to exist (besides for installed apps), and if this is for 
privacy/data-integrity reasons, why user approval could not be sought.
3. I'd like to strongly suggest a long-term plan for Mozilla be to allow web 
apps to be written in HTML which provide an alternative, full-screen browser UI 
to replace Firefox's own UI so that the UI design business can move to web devs 
who are fully capable of making creative and powerful alternative UIs and let 
Firefox concentrate on the plumbing (even if continuing to provide a rich 
default UI). Those wishing to keep the UIs stable, unlike say Firefox (yet 
benefiting from updates to core functionality added to Firefox and ideally a 
process of abstracting and standardizing things like toolbars, globally 
available context menus, etc. so that these alternative browser apps can 
leverage previously stored add-on data and place them wherever they desire) may 
do so.
4. Invite collaboration so that Mozilla might better publicize the 
possibilities of https://github.com/brettz9/webappfind project for allowing 
local data files being opened directly from the desktop into web apps and 
optionally saved back to disk.
5. Move away from add-ons being installed to one where sites can ask for 
specific privileges (like my https://github.com/brettz9/asyouwish/ yet 
optionally be network-restricted so they can be packaged as normal offline apps 
but where the user need not fear malicious updates to any version they already 
reviewed).

In other words, I want a place--besides IRC (esp. since my timezone differs 
widely from the devs) where I can offer suggestions and get feedback, ask for 
rationales on big design decisions, etc. I suffer from chronic fatigue, so I 
don't have the energy to stay on top of all of the forums, or topic-specific 
town hall meetings, or even to adequately express all of my ideas in writing. I 
assume such a regularly scheduled opportunity of sharing and feedback would, 
besides gaining positive publicity for Mozilla, allow others to similarly 
become involved who might not otherwise, or to jog ideas and inspire 
collaboration which might not occur otherwise.
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