I’m not sure if you recall, but a couple of months back, I wrote a post entitled How To: Receiving Customer Feedback. Some of my favourite points in that list, such as, “Try not to take negative feedback personally” and “Ego doesn’t belong here”, run rampant in organizations where the employees spend too much time looking inwards and getting self-congratulatory. The higher the eagle is flying, the more likely there will be knee-jerk defensive responses to criticism and an outright dismissal of ideas that aren’t yours.
We’ve spent loads of time talking to Chris Beard of Mozilla and I find that he’s a pretty open guy, has a good dose of humility and enjoys a good debate from time to time. That’s why I was quite surprised to see the responses by other Mozilla employees & core community members (and especially those who run the ‘community’ site, SpreadFirefox) to Chris’ latest post. Responses like:
- What’s your point dude? … Are you bored? (Ian - community member)
- “So it’s great that you can mouth off but if you’re not willing to help out, file bugs, be active in spreadfirefox, what you say doesn’t really matter.” (Rafael - ex-Mozilla employee, now community member)
- “Ian, I’m sure you all would love a free lunch, (Flock did too,) but that ain’t how Open Source works or what being a member of the community means.” (Asa, mozilla employee)
- “Chris Messina, as I said to Ian, no free lunches here. If you think Mozilla’s mission is important, then put something on the line for it.” (Asa, mozilla employee)
Whoah. Out of the 47 some-odd responses, many from the Mozilla volunteer developer community, the defensive ones came from Mozilla core people, some who are paid to interact with community members/issues.
Now, some background about Chris himself…he’s never been a paid employee of Mozilla. He moved to SF 3 years ago, a bright-eyed hopeful and heard a call for volunteers on this Open Source browser called Firefox, which he enthusiastically answered and subsequently spent many late nights and weekends donating his time for the launch and early growth of the SpreadFirefox campaign. From what he tells me, he didn’t realize that the people he was working alongside, like Asa and Rafael, were actually being paid for their work. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that Chris was dedicated then and continues to be dedicated to a bright future of Firefox - without any ulterior motives other than he believes in the original stated mission of creating source on the net.
After finding out that Mozilla was hiring for the team, he interviewed with people. For whatever reason, they passed him over and, needing to actually pay the rent, he was coaxed into working at a company called Round Two that would become Flock…but only under the condition that Flock would work with Firefox and not in competition to Firefox. (and, although he hasn’t stated it, I believe that Flock’s lack of playing nice in the OS sphere had a lot to do with his leaving - his heart wasn’t in creating a MySpace browser)
I’m often frustrated with Chris because we have clients and bills to pay of our own, but he continues to spend a great deal of ‘mind space’ and energy on Firefox (as well as his disappointment with Flock). Each hour he spends thinking about this stuff is an hour we can’t bill for. So, to Asa and Rafael, who have told him to put his money where his mouth is…he does. Too much of it IMO. So much of it that I worry about his inevitable broken heart on this subject.
He gives a damn, which is the greatest gift a project (and especially one that makes good money) could hope for. You should be so lucky as to having people that still give a damn after leaving scathing comments like that on someone’s blog post. Man, maybe I should talk smack to him so that he cares more about the projects I want him to give a damn about. 
[p.s. yes, of course I'm biased. But I think I know a bit of the inside track and can 'translate' Chris' rants into the passion they represent. As a positive and, generally, thoughtful - as in paused in thought - guy, he only spends this kind of time on the projects he loves]
View Tara Hunt's profile
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"the defensive ones came from Mozilla paid staff…people who are paid to interact with community members/issues."Heh, as long as you keep posting this, I’ll keep gently correcting you, Tara.
Rafael and Ian, while members of the Mozilla Community, aren’t paid to interact with community members and issues. I really have no excuse for Asa, other than to say that his passion often gets the better of him, and he tends to give as good as he feels like he was getting. Also, I’d mention that he seemed to be responding more to snide comments from Ian McKellar that expressed a sense of entitlement (why either of them chose to debate this on Chris’ blog is a mystery to me!) Asa’s comment about a “free lunch” was basically in response to Ian’s implication that the Mozilla Project is responsible for maintaining a platform that is consumed by application builders who aren’t willing to contribute back to that platform, which, to be fair, isn’t really in the share-alike spirit, but is entirely viable under the MPL.
I’m also a little dismayed that you chose to not highlight how many of the Mozilla Corporation staff took time to not only think carefully and critically about Chris’ points, but also took the time to try and engage him in discussion.
Right…your comment was awesome. But it must have shown up while I was posting this…and also showed up after we had a little Twitter-to-Twitter.
I’ll correct the error. I thought Rafael and Ian were part of the SFX team, are they not? Maybe you can tell me who has hired them. Are they full volunteers?
Well said. I was surprised (a bit disappointed, but mostly surprised) by the negativity that came from those folks…never mind WHO they were, but that they were so much on the defense. Chris wasn’t overly critical of any of them directly, and while he WAS critical, the criticism remained high level when it was appropriate, and then got detailed when it was necessary. For all of the thoughtless rants out there on the internet, we should consider ones like the Chris published a gift: they’re thoughtful, well stated, and offer suggestions. It wasn’t THIS SUCKS CHANGE IT. It wasn’t THIS IS BETTER DO THIS. It was, “here’s something that’s been eating at me, and I wanted to share”. If the rest of the internet wrote that thoughtfully, instead of “FRIST P0ST!!!11OMG”, we’d all be that much further along for it.
I’m wondering how this all turned into Mozilla vs Messina.
I certainly understand from the MoFoCo peeps point of view of “Hey, here’s this guy who thinks we have an obligation to the community, who seems to think that what we’re doing isn’t as worthwhile as these 10-15 things he outlined. We’re busy okay? Why don’t you take up the fight for these things that you so strongly believe in? We’ve got our hands full, thank you very much.”
But at the same time, I also agree with many of Chris’s points. I think that despite what Mozilla and Co think their obligation to the community is, the community obviously has a different perception. Chris simply stepped up to say what many people I’m certain were thinking. Mozilla took millions of users under their wing, offering a “Better, More Secure Web Experience”, and while they’re giving away their product for free, they still have to support their customer base, and part of this (as Chris described) is to keep the web open and free by stepping up to the challenge of proprietary and closed frameworks such as Apollo, Silverlight and Java FX. By failing to do so they fail the millions of people they liberated from closed proprietary products such as IE that they worked so hard to free people from.
Also, they may be a particularly progressive organization, but they need to do a better job of reacting to such criticisms. Especially when paid employees who are supposed to foster community around their product react negatively to community feedback. Yes, I’m talking specifically about Asa Dotzler. Instead of saying “Messina, no free lunch here.” he should be saying “Okay, we hear you, would you like to help us reach these goals? What about others who feel the same, is there enough interest in the community, or is this an important enough issue that we need to start forming a community strategy around it?”
Sorry, after reading my comment I realized how poorly it was written!
About three years ago I was asked by SFX to start spreading the word. This was before 1.0 and the app and marketing message was way too geeky. I wrote a detailed piece explaining why Firefox had to grow up before I’d recommend it. That really brought out the fanboi in a lot of people, and I ended up with 288 comments (plus dozens more that were so hate and profanity laden that I deleted them).
To many people Firefox has become a religion. You can’t criticize someone’s religion.
I came across another great example of how NOT to handle customer complaints the other day. Nothing like posting fake positive comments from inside your own office.
Your SO spent 50 minutes rambling about Firefox. He was called out on why he isn’t contributing. It stunk of self promotion and little else.
I kept running into this problem, too: I would (and still do) spend tons of time on projects that I cannot bill for. So much so that I have begun to organize my business more around the projects I am working on, and people I am working with and trying to find a way to create wealth around those (which is where Open Business Models and barcampbank, P2P money, etc come from).
So, maybe Chris could be creating a whole new business around OSS browser technology? I don’t know. Bet he’d make something pretty awesome…
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