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A few weeks back Chris Beard framed a pretty interesting problem. How do we make Mozilla “increasingly knowable to a wider audience, so that we can grow as a community (and as a movement) to meet the challenges that lie ahead?”

Now I’ve known and worked with Chris for long enough to understand how deeply he cares about helping make Mozilla sustainable for the long run.¹ We both believe that a major part of getting to sustainability is making it far easier for even the most casually interested person to quickly understand what Mozilla is, and why we do what we do.

As a relative latecomer to Mozilla, I distinctly recall how dense the layers of communication in the Mozilla project felt early on.

When I started blogging for work, it took me several months of following our primary community blog aggregator, planet.mozilla.org, just to start to understand the flow of communication across projects, disciplines, Mozilla Corporation employees, volunteer and paid contributors, and on and on.

And that was just the first few feet of the rabbit hole.

Ancient – by Internet time – communication systems undergird the shinier surfaces of our blogs. Usenet newsgroups are parliament floors tucked away in a remote forest where debates occur and decisions that affect the entire project are often reached. IRC channels are our global lounges, hidden in plain sight, where developers idle and conversations can spark from the absurd to the sublime in realtime.

There’s much, much more to it than this, but my intent is to provide the beginnings of a map for you, the traveller along the Mozilla path.

If it’s true that language and the structures of language can inscribe the character of an individual, I think it’s also true that the ways we communicate here at Mozilla illustrate some of what makes us an animal “that is particularly hard to describe.”²

FIRST PRINCIPLES

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

What you now interact with as Mozilla Corporation has, at its roots, the open source Mozilla project. I won’t rehash the history (it is available elsewhere). Suffice to say that, yes, we’re structured as a corporation, but as Mitchell Baker has said:

We formed the Mozilla Corporation as a tool for accomplishing the Mozilla mission of an open and innovative Internet. It operates to promote the public benefit. It does not operate on standard for-profit principles. The Mozilla community (including those community members who are employees of the foundation and/or corporation) would not allow it to do so.

So while we follow some of the communication forms of a typical for-profit corporation – we issue press releases, we meet with and brief journalists and bloggers, and we maintain a web site for end users of our products – it would be a mistake to think this is the end of the story.

More important, I think, is that the surface forms of communication of most for-profit enterprises usually reflect an imperative to control and limit these forms and the voices of those involved to mitigate risk, advance a centralized agenda, and assert command. Basically, to get shit done on a quarterly basis so you can move the business forward.

There is likely no greater opposite model for organization to a typical corporation than an open source software project. Authority is earned through merit and contributions over time. Contributors are free to leave at any time, and will do so if they disagree with the direction of a project. And any attempt by leaders to hierarchically dictate action fails.

In a distributed organizational model, communication naturally occurs in ways that are nonlinear and multivariate in both form and content.

In plainer English: there are multitudes of voices, and multitudes of channels of communication, because there were and are multitudes of participants in the open source project that has begotten the Mozilla Corporation.

It’s a lot harder to parse, and it often makes divining the “official” Mozilla position difficult, but we aren’t about to change our clothes to suit the recent enterprise.

A MAP

I’ve built a rudimentary grid in 3 dimensions to indicate how I understand the Mozilla communications toolkit. Precision isn’t intended here, nor value judgments (’high’ and ‘low’ don’t equal ‘worth’). Take the various positionings of our communication channels as approximations, not fixed. Definitely room for improvement, but I wanted to start a discussion about this. It’s a bit complicated.

Here’s a narrative map of how we communicate, and how you can enter the grid.

Press releases. The closest thing we have to official statements, with a primary focus on product release news, partnership announcements, and significant events. We develop these internally at Mozilla Corporation with our PR agency. Mozilla Europe and Mozilla Japan also generate from time to time press releases that are specific to Europe and Japan. Get this content at www.mozilla.com/en-US/press, www.mozilla-europe.org/en/press and www.mozilla-japan.org/press.

End user web sites. Polished product information designed to introduce potential new users to Mozilla software and encourage download and usage of same. Parallel sites for end users in the US, Europe and Japan, with more to come this year (China is up next). Get this content at: www.mozilla.com, www.mozilla-europe.org and www.mozilla-japan.org.

Blogs. Two primary aggregators: planet.mozilla.org and feedhouse.mozillazine.org. Feeds at planet are added at the discretion of the module owners. Planet is the primary collection of blog content from Mozilla developers and, lately, marketers. You can view the content at planet or feedhouse through any modern feed reader.

wiki.mozilla.org. The workhorse for product development, planning, and collaboration. The site of record for Firefox 3 feature definition. View content at: wiki.mozilla.org.

developer.mozilla.org. The definitive resource for Mozilla developer documentation. Resources for people contributing directly to Mozilla projects, and for developers interested in building add-ons or working with Web standards. View content at: developer.mozilla.org.

www.mozilla.org. The historic home of the Mozilla project. Some parts are out of date and have migrated to wiki.mozilla.org, developer.mozilla.org, and mozilla.com, but much content remains. Prior to the introduction of mozilla.com with the launch of Firefox 1.5, mozilla.org served a dual purpose as the home of both developer and end user content. A bit adrift at the moment, and in need of more attention to streamline and de-confuse visitors. Visit at www.mozilla.org.

labs.mozilla.com. Mozilla Labs blog, forum and portal for our ongoing software experiments. Visit at labs.mozilla.com.

spreadfirefox.com. The community marketing hub for Firefox. Primarily a group blog at the moment, but soon to be revamped with a much stronger project focus. Visit at www.spreadfirefox.com.

IRC. One of the key ways a distributed, global software project gets work done. Developer-focused, although there is always a social discussion available on #foxymonkies. Learn more here: irc.mozilla.org/. You’ll need special client software to connect to IRC, which stands for Internet Relay Chat.

bugzilla.mozilla.org. Think of it as the key project management tool for Mozilla software. BMO, as it’s known, is an open bug tracking system that enables group collaboration to diagnose software problems, assign responsibility, and track resolution. Anyone can create a free account and start reporting bugs with our software and web sites. Visit at bugzilla.mozilla.org.

addons.mozilla.org. Both an end user and developer resource. For end users, the sole whitelisted provider of software add-ons that extend the functionality of Firefox. For developers, the place where they can upload the add-ons they have created for review and introduction to a worldwide audience of Firefox users. Visit at addons.mozilla.org.

mozillazine.org. The primary resource for support for end users of Mozilla products. Completely independent of Mozilla Corporation. Also provides independent Mozilla news and hosts the blogs of several Mozilla project contributors. Visit at www.mozillazine.org.

Newsgroups. Usenet newsgroups originated with the Internet and are one of the earliest methods of group communication enabled by the Internet. Because of the versatility of access options, longevity and record keeping function of newsgroups, many open source projects, including Mozilla, use them to serve as the permanent record of many policy and project decisions. Access Mozilla newsgroups through a dedicated newsreader or on the Web via Google Groups. Here’s a listing of active Mozilla newsgroups: www.mozilla.org/community/developer-forums.html.

PARTING THOUGHTS

I knew this was going to take some time to get down in writing. What’s clear to me now is that just getting the beginnings of a map down is only a start.

The end goal for us, as stated up top, is to make it much easier for anyone in the world who’s interested in Mozilla to more quickly jump in, get the lay of the land, and start trekking alongside us. Let us know what you think!

¹ It’s right up there for him with a free and sovereign Ottawa, as far as I can tell. I believe, Chris, I believe! ;-)

² Think platypus.