I liked the article, as it offered a peek into the management model behind one of the most successful projects in open source history.
Keep up the good work. :)
One point though. I noticed that the following paragraphs (quite a large part) of the article were repeated twice.
******* And then there's the question of how a not-for-profit foundation like Mozilla can even consider these kinds of commercial deals, given the higher public disclosure requirements for nonprofits, not to mention the restrictions on money-making activities that accompany the favorable tax status.
To get around these barriers, the Mozilla Foundation in August of 2005 spun off most of its Firefox-related operations, including Baker and most of her management team, into a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary, Mozilla Corp. As a private, for-profit firm, Mozilla Corp. can cut deals and keep secrets. But because it's owned by the foundation, any profits go to furthering the foundation's mission of preserving choice and innovation on the Internet.
Plenty of companies, of course, can and do claim to be driven by mission. Google still beats its chest over its "Don't be evil" credo, and Microsoft will talk endlessly about its dedication to the user experience. But executives at these and all other publicly held companies are obligated to use whatever legal means they can to generate the most profit possible; if they don't, shareholders will replace them with managers who will. Mozilla Corp. managers, in theory, don't face these pressures.
That's one reason they can continue to distribute decision making to the community, open-source style. Indeed, Baker seems convinced not only that Firefox devotees deserve to be involved in everything Mozilla does, but that they will do a better job than can a small group of clever managers. "I have a very optimistic view of the social fabric," she says.
This, of course, poses some tricky management questions--issues that go beyond the obvious ones of long time frames and a lack of confidentiality. Baker points out two such problems: "stop energy" and "loners." Stop energy, as she describes it, is a sort of gravity that permeates group decision making, the inertia that sends good ideas crashing down to earth, stifling innovation in the process.
Loners, by contrast, are like unguided missiles--they simply take it on themselves to push ahead, without regard for what others think. Loners may get a lot done, but unchecked, they can take a toll on the community by creating resentment and divisiveness that ultimately slow progress.
To counter these problems, Baker has championed an approach she calls "layers of the onion." New decisions start off in small, relatively specialized groups that spring up informally within the community as needed. These groups can filter out weaker ideas and improve promising ones and gather information that can inform decision making.
Since the groups are self-selecting and likely to contain highly motivated members, they're resistant to stop energy or loner behavior. The best ideas from these smaller groups are then passed on to a somewhat larger group that can further refine them. Only then are the most promising ideas and most important questions put before the entire community.
The result is a hybrid organization, one that relies heavily on open-source models of distributed decision making and transparency but that is also, when necessary, capable of keeping secrets and of making quick and potentially controversial decisions.
Baker acknowledges that the model is far from perfect. "Mozilla is inventing a new sort of entity, one that's different from organizations we know," she says. At one point in 2005, criticism from the community that Mozilla managers were being too secretive led Baker to hold a moratorium on all corporate-only meetings for several months; it only ended when managers needed to discuss a human resources question too personal to share with everyone.
"One of the biggest management challenges is to not let this core of Mozilla employees take over," Baker says. In other words, Baker is struggling to limit the influence of her own management team--not the typical goal of corporate executives.
So far, however, the model seems to be working. One way to gauge its success has been Mozilla's continuing ability to draw more and more marketing volunteers. A contest to come up with promotional videos drew 300 entries, some of which have garnered millions of views on YouTube.
The Firefox logo has been etched into the lawns in college quads, spray-painted on highway overpasses, baked into pancakes, sent up 100,000 feet on a weather balloon, and crayoned onto countless human faces. Seventy thousand websites have put up a "Download Firefox" button. *******
