Hi there Kensie,thanks for the response, it's Friday evening here so I had
assumedeveryone had left the office already.
I originally raisedthe idea of the platform in 2010 although a lot less
eloquently andprobably not in the right manner. It's something I feel is of
vitalimportance to the future of not only Firefox but Mozilla as a whole.
In regards to peopleworking on solutions to some of the issues I've raised,
it'ssomething I'd definitely be interested in. Especially
thecommunity-engagement software side of things. But before I get aheadof
myself, I thought I'd take the weekend to read through theParticipation section
of the Discourse (MozCom) and catch up onthings. Of the three options you
highlighted, research would be theclosest to a fit for me.
Let me get mybearings and I'll get back to you on Monday.
Cheers,
Paul
On Friday, 4 September 2015, 19:20, Majken Connor <[email protected]> wrote:
So I think you've raised issues that mostly people agree with. Your idea of a
platform is interesting, I'm not sure if that is something that had been
considered or attempted.
There are people working on solutions to these problems, some areas are making
progress, some might not be.
Do any of these particular problems interest you particularly, and do you think
you'd personally be able to help solve any of them if you were given the right
resources?
In terms of mailing lists, some of us put up
https://discourse.mozilla-community.org as an alternative. You can subscribe
and reply via email, it can work just like a mailing list for those who prefer
it (though not exactly like a newsgroup at the moment). We need to write more
documentation, and we have some improvements we need help researching and even
coding. If you're interested in helping, mail me directly, or post in the
Community Ops category.
You will also be interested in the Participation category. That's where that
team communicates about how to improve a lot of the other issues you raised.
- Kensie
On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 2:05 PM, Reuben Morais <[email protected]> wrote:
I took the liberty to fix the formatting while reading it.
-- reuben
I've been around Mozilla a long time, but I'm not an employee, what keeps me
coming back is my passion. It's also what keeps me frustrated. But needless to
say, I have over the years, accumulated my own insights that I believe are
overlooked and this comes at a cost to both Firefox and Mozilla.
The attitude of Mozilla is that development (coding) rules the roost, but if
you look around, how's that working out for you? That's the attitude of a
company that is self-sustaining and quite frankly that's not an accolade that
Mozilla has to its name. What should be ruling the roost at Mozilla is
engagement and that's the one place where Mozilla consistently falls down.
One of the fundamental goals of Mozilla is to ensure the web remains free, open
and accessible to everyone everywhere. Any individual that wants to create any
application that can render standards should be able to access the internet in
all of its glory. It's a hard unappreciated road but it's a road that Mozilla
walks upon.
When Microsoft was subverting the web with Internet Explorer, Firefox was there
to fight it back and provide us a better tomorrow, not just for the users on
Windows, but Mozilla provided the foundation to ensure that anyone on any
platform could access and use the full potential of the worldwide web.
Firefox should have given birth to the Mozilla platform. The Mozilla platform
should have been a basic UI and a bunch of APIs and any developer should have
been able to create an application and plug the guts of that application into
the Mozilla platform and have that application run on any OS that the Mozilla
platform supported. Thunderbird should have been the shinning example of that
platform at work. By switching out most of the functionality of Firefox for
Thunderbird, Mozilla should have had a low maintenance application that was a
proof of concept of the viability of the Mozilla platform. By virtue
Thunderbird should be available for Windows, Linux, OSX and Android. We failed
to bring that to fruition. In failing to do so, we failed to create an
ecosystem that would bring more contributors to the Mozilla platform and by
association Firefox. Imagine things like LibreOffice, Jdownloader, qBittorrent,
Corebird, GIMP, etc running on the Mozilla platform. That was how
sustainability was supposed to be created, by becoming the bedrock of open
source development.
Recently Mozilla made a tough call that made many turn their heads. It was the
call to support DRM in Firefox. The reality is that this was the right call. It
may have sucked and may continue to suck but it remains the right call. We
decided to partner with Adobe to ensure that the needs of the evolved internet
could be met by users of Firefox. However we've gone about this in the oddest
of ways. Instead of creating an API and putting the responsibility on Adobe to
ensure that not a single Firefox user is left behind, we have instead decided
to create more work for Mozilla and embark on a course that requires us to
stagger out what we've recognised as fundamental functionality for the modern
day internet with Windows leading the charge. This isn't what we stand for nor
what we believe in. Any discussions we had with Adobe should've ensured that
all of our users were to get the ability to stream Netflix at once.
Firefox is supposed to stand for open. It's supposed to be the counter-measure
that ensures that no one corporation is able to manipulate the internet. Yet in
attempting to chase that goal in its name, we seem to be throwing the actual
nut and bolts of that goal out of the window. Case in point is Firefox for iOS.
In our failure to engage a wide enough community, rather than prevent the
subversion of Webkit of derivatives by lobbying our parliamentary
representatives for an open iOS that would allow Firefox to exist as intended,
we've decided to further entrench the dominance of Webkit and its derivatives
in the internet. We're literally selling our soul for numbers/users. At what
cost? It's our failure to again create and engage the community that sees
Google requiring that Chrome is bundled as the default on any Android device
that wants to come preloaded with the Play Store.
We are horrible at community engagement. We have raised the bar as high as we
possible could in order to ensure that our community shrinks as much as
possible. We believe that by holding a few summits a few times a year, we're
doing something great but in reality, we're an internet company and that's
where our strength should lay. The hurdles to become a Mozillian are too high.
Everything we do in our home patch is horrible and antiquated. The mailing list
as an open and viable means of following anything is gone. It's a remnant of
the past. It evolved into forums and yet we have all these mailing lists
because apparently we like to make it as hard for everyone as possible.
Bugzilla is just 'ugh', you know this, I know this. The separation between
discussion of a bug and discussion about a bug is too wide. As a software
company, we need to realise that the mailing lists and Bugzilla are two of our
first points of contact. They shouldn't be horrible to use and they shouldn't
be hurdles. In fact, they should be a single entity.
Anybody and everybody should be able to access this lobby of Mozilla and
discuss anything and everything. Discussion about a bug should take place on
the bug. Yes, it seems like it would be messy for people wanting to work on a
bug, but there should simply be a toggle that hides non-technical comments.
Everyone should be welcomed and embraced in the same place.
A pre-requisite for working at Mozilla should be a desire to work within the
community and most importantly with the community. If an employee doesn't want
to teach or discuss a position/decision they shouldn't be a part of Mozilla.
Engaging one person and making one person feel like they are being heard, even
if they are wrong, could mean that person contributing something that can
further the growth of Mozilla. Yes, in some regards it is tedious, but
necessary. I myself am subscribed to bugs where years later people are asking
for some implementations to be reversed. However I am not saying that every
reply needs an answer or that conversations never expire but I am saying for
the time that the conversation is ongoing, anyone that's taken the time to
engage an organisation the size of Mozilla should feel like their voice does
matter.
In regards to Bugzilla, the failure of the software and perhaps our approach is
that we recognise coders above all else. Designers and testers be damned! We
don't show nearly enough respect to the non-coders and that's saddening. If
someone files a bug but a developer has come along and posted some code in
another bug, if anyone even acknowledged your bug in the first place, you're
going to get it duped over. Code is movable, the fact that patches can't be
moved to another bug is a failing of Mozilla, but the fact that someone took
their time to engage us and file that bug can't. Those people should always be
recognised, in fact those people should be lauded. Because even if it's a
utopian train of thought, that bug could be the bug that leads them to learn
something that has traditionally been considered tangible by Mozilla, i.e. code.
In failing us all, Bugzilla can't merge bugs, can't move patches, can't host
discussion, can't produce daily digests, can't produce summaries and most
damning at all, can't serve mobile content. Remember what I said about
delivering content to everyone. How is it that as a company who's very raison
d'être of the flagship product is about providing a window, a platform to
consume the content of the internet, we neglect to ensure that the products
that facilitate that can be consumed by everyone independent of the device they
use. The lack of mobile accessibility at this company is nothing short of
damning, whether it's Bugzilla or Planet Mozilla or even Nightly.Mozilla.org.
We neglect our very means to grow our reach, our very means to engage. Another
example of this is our failure to have enough people triaging bugs, the goal
should always be to have no unconfirmed bugs and yet anyone that's been around
Mozilla a while will have a large number of unconfirmed bugs, which are simply
examples of our inability to show the respect to the efforts of people
attempting to engage us.
Mozilla should be about providing a platform for people with a passion to
embrace those passions. Whether they're designers, coders or whatever. To
succeed, we can't want to be or replicate the likes of Apple or Google but
rather do it the Mozilla way. We have a contributor that's passionate about
both Ubuntu and Firefox, that's great, Mozilla is the perfect marriage. We'll
embrace you and grow you and give the platform you deserve to further Firefox
on a Ubuntu from a usability point of view and you'll teach us things. The same
goes for Windows, OSX and Android. We'll not sit in our ivory tower of Apple
products and talk down to you, we'll marry our knowledge to take us all
forward. We are the home of a unique set of coders, designers, testers and
community officials that want to teach and want to engage. The type of users
that aren't particularly suited to the likes of Google or Apple.
Design engagement is somewhere we are horrid. We're discombobulated. Take for
example 'share', we use a share icon on desktop that is a generic share icon.
One that acts as a means to replace the various little buttons sprinkled around
the internet. Yet on Android we use that same share icon for Firefox sync
services. It doesn't take a User Interaction Designer to tell you that's
confusing. There's no need for ambiguity and yet to raise that to the point of
actually getting something sorted out is practically impossible. Even if you go
as far as to submit alternative artwork. In failing our users in simple and
straight-forward things like that, we fail ourselves, we fail Firefox and we
fail Mozilla.
In order to take Mozilla forward it's time we actually took Mozilla forward. We
need more emphasis on all things user-facing. We need to invest more in triage,
evangelism and all round engagement. We need to invest in ensuring that the
tools we use not only work but are accessible. It's time to put the mailing
lists and Bugzilla to bed and come up with something that's easier to use and
takes pointers from the evolution of internet based communications systems of
the past five years.Planet Mozilla should be more akin to HackerNews or
Slashdot. Or we could just continue to stagnate.
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