An interview with a Mozilla evangelist

The Evangelism team at Mozilla has quite a few roles to play. We handle a lot of external communications, including some amount of press, although there's a separate press team that handles most of that. Sometimes it's tactical – responding to a bad blog entry or press result and repairing misleading facts or conclusions when that's possible. But it's strategic as well in the sense that we try and understand and compose the story of Mozilla into a consumable form and then try and tell that to the world. Mozilla has a good story to tell and helping people understand who we are and what we're doing opens doors both for us and for others. It's an important role in any organization, but especially ours.

We also do a bit of internal communications facilitating as well. As the project and the company grow past certain sizes that kind of "internal understanding" role is going to be more and more critical. Organizations that don't understand themselves get into trouble in pretty short order. We're around to keep that from happening as best we can. Think of it as guarding the culture as new people come on board.

We also do a lot of technical evangelism as well. Just as examples you can see that work in Mark Finkle's weblog where he does a lot of work describing add-ons and extensions and what's going on in that area. John Resig also does a lot of work telling the story of JavaScript and the upcoming ES4 work to the world as well. Asa Dotzler and Seth Bindernagel do a lot of work with the community directly while Deb Richardson and Eric Shepherd both do a lot of work on documentation and external communications.

We're a diverse group with a lot of different roles, but that's the nature of the audiences we face.

My role is really to figure out how to work with other open source projects and help them figure out how to properly leverage what we're doing in Mozilla. This includes organizational development. For example, we are a non-profit, public benefit organization that acts like a business. But we are also an open source project with a very active non-corporate contributor base, targets a consumer market and has a strong product focus and over 100 million users - we would love to see that replicated in other places as well and we would love the chance to teach others how to do it.

We also share a common alignment with a huge number of other open source projects. Open source projects require an open playing field to build on. These usually take the form of "open standards" and right now form the basis of the web that we see today, and many of the forms of communication used on the Internet. HTTP, HTML, CSS, SMTP, Jabber, etc. These were standards that anyone was able to implement and saw an explosive growth in use as a result. But these systems are under attack by companies like Microsoft and Adobe, attempting to replace them with a proprietary platform under the control of a single company. These represent an attack on the web itself, and should be taken very seriously. Remember that the web is still the killer app, and keeping that open and protected is paramount.

Our role has to be larger than just delivering a browser that normal people can use. We also have to push the web itself forward to make sure that it remains competitive against other platforms and is the platform of choice for development. This means evolving the languages that the web uses, adding capabilities to the browser itself (video, audio, canvas, SVG, others) and then putting it into a consumable package that people love to use on the widest possible set of platforms.

That's the context for my role. What I will try and do is to make sure that well-aligned open source projects understand this story and know what we're doing on the ground so that we can help them and they can help us. Mozilla has a huge footprint of users and we want to make sure that other open source projects know how to take advantage of that. What this actually means in terms of actions is still something that's being figured out but we'll start to see movement in the next few weeks.

There are some easy first steps. First steps include helping with our embedded and mobile stories (where open source and Linux have a lot of leverage) and sparking discussions on performance and footprint. I will also continue with my Linux role and act as a contact for the Linux distributions that are shipping Firefox and Mozilla technologies today.

I was at Red Hat for nearly 9 years, and I am a vastly changed person as a result of that time, so of course! But a lot of the work that I did there will be used indirectly. I learned a lot of things at Red Hat. I learned to think strategically, how to build and run teams, what makes successful projects and a nearly rabid devotion to building products that really help the people who are using them. How important design and a user focus is to building a successful product. The incredible importance of brand in the development of products and how to build messaging around that. I learned some important lessons about how to mix business and open source projects. That recognizing companies is an incredibly important part of making many projects successful and cultivating those relationships can create wins on both sides. I learned that open source itself isn't a business model, but requires a different way to think about how you deliver value to people and organizations. But the most important thing that I probably walked away with was that the most important factor that seems to make an organization successful (aside from having a market to work in!) is the people that you bring to the table. Red Hat was filled with wonderful people, and still is. I take that lesson to heart in choosing the people around me and who I will try and bring to Mozilla as well. It's incredibly important.

I certainly won't be involved to the same level I was. I had day to day involvement in the software development and design process and what OLPC will deliver to the public is something that I both deserve much of the credit and much of the blame for. There are still some touch points with OLPC from time to time, largely around the browser that's included on the OLPC machine, but I'm not that involved with them right now.

The answer to that question is complicated and deeply personal. Some small part of it was just employment diversification. I had been there for 9 years, which is a huge portion of my young life, and I felt like I should experience something else.

But it was also a question of leverage for me. Red Hat is an enterprise company. They are doing well in that market and are doing a great job of developing value for that customer segment and bringing the story of open source along with them. The are a committed organization and are well-liked and continue to make good decisions.

But they aren't going to be able to change the world from the back office and have become far too conservative over the years to go out and touch human beings directly. And they aren't going to be large enough any time soon to be able to have credible experiments to grow into a "consumer" market. I learned that the hard way with both OLPC and Mugshot and I decided it was time to go somewhere that would let me affect a lot of people and create some leverage for open source. Mozilla is that place.

But, really, that question should be "why Mozilla?" Mozilla is still a pretty small organization, less than 150 people. I feel like I have a lot to bring to the organization, both based on my experience inside of Mozilla (which is longer than my Red Hat experience!) and from my work at Red Hat. Mozilla is trying to create change in the world in a very real way by touching people directly, and doing so using open source methodologies under the umbrella of a public benefit company. They have a fantastic team from the top to the bottom of the organization, want to compete and want to keep their users winning by creating a great product that protects the web. It's unique in the market, and I hope to do my part to keep it that way.

I've always been pretty happy with the desktop work that happened at Red Hat. These days Ubuntu gets most of the credit for the Linux Desktop but it was _clearly_ Red Hat (and Ximian/Novell!) that did much of the heavy lifting to get it from where it was in the mid-1990s to where it is today, and that is still the case. GNOME in particular would have not gotten past the stages of its infancy without Red Hat's early involvement, and I like where it's gotten today. (Anyone else remember GNOME 0.27?) I had a part to play there with my early Mozilla development work, which I very carefully selected for that reason, and I think that helped things get on the right track. It was a good decision and I really like the outcome.

The OLPC work was quite satisfying. If not only because of the proposed effect - helping millions of poor kids gain a foothold in the world of knowledge that I take for granted every day - but also because I was able to take that decade of knowledge of what was broken in computing and apply it. A lot of what you will see in OLPC is a result of that, sometimes with me acting as the guy driving ideas and sometimes acting as a champion for the ideas of others. I can take some solace that even though I'm not working on it today, a lot of that work I can point at as my own. I hope that many of the other team members feel the same way.

But I made a huge number of mistakes. I passed on some very early leadership opportunities where I probably could have made an earlier difference and pushed things harder. Failing to grow out of an early engineering position and thinking about wider issues around teams, users, strategy, markets and business. I should have done that earlier and I think that if I had, we would all be a little better off.

But on reflection, it would be hard to point to many things that I would want to change. It's still a good company and I am happy to have worked there.