Le 12/09/2012 16:38, Boris Zbarsky a écrit :
On 9/12/12 2:07 PM, David Bruant wrote:
Are they doomed to stay outside of the room of people who make strategic
decisions?
I think there's a basic assumption here: that there is such a room.
I'm not sure there is.I think that the major strategic shifts I've
seen in this project in the last 11 years have all started with a
random small group with a vision that then goes around convincing
others piecemeal.
That's an interesting piece of information that may be worth being
explained. Now that I'm reading it, I realize I have seen this pattern
emerge. It seems to be part of the Mozilla culture, but it's pretty hard
to grasp.
Maybe there should be more formal strategic planning, of course!
Indeed. The danger of going too far down that road is to think that
decisions are only taken once a year, but there is probably a
middle-ground to be found.
Do they have to be hired to be part of strategic discussions?
Just fyi, I've been both a volunteer and an employee, and I don't
think there was any change in my ability to contribute to strategic
discussion when I was hired. In some aspects of strategy, it's really
easy to get involved as a volunteer or employee. In some aspects of
strategy it's hard to be involved as a volunteer or employee.
I asked as an example and my guess was your answer, that being hired is
hardly more helpful.
Talking with other contributors, it is my understanding that a lot of
people are frustrated to not be included in any important decision
discussion.
This is not limited to volunteer contributors, I should not. I'm
assuming you implied that by your use of unqualified "contributor",
which I applaud.
Indeed. I'm careful to be precise between "volunteer", "paid employee"
and "contributor" (which can be both). Every once in a while, I may make
a mistake, but I'm trying hard not to.
Not that they want to necessarily make the decisions, but
they just feel that's they're being imposed something.
That's the key issue, yes. This is the part I was having problems
with in your older posts in this thread, actually. Imposition of
goals or values is just as bad as imposition of strategic direction....
Oh ok. I really didn't meant to impose strategic decisions. I wish that
the situation with strategic decisions to be the same with values. No
one is being imposed to agree with the Manifesto, but we all share its
values. It could be the same with priorities, but it seems it is not.
One difference between values and strategic decisions is that to a large
extent, agreeing with the Manifesto is a personal endeavour while
agreeing on priorities is a collective effort.
Also, every single contributor was holding his/her breath during the
last MozCampEU last November in Berlin, not knowing what would happen to
Mozilla financially at the end of the partnership with Google.
Again, applies to "contributors" in general, as you say.
But money really is a sensitive topic and to my
knowledge, currently, volunteers are all excluded from any discussion
that would relate to money.
I don't think they're any more excluded than employees, just FYI.
That's what I thought. To a large extent, I'm not that concerned about
differences between employees and volunteers. Much less that others can
be. I've had discussions with some employees at many occasions and I
know some of the things I'm saying are shared by some employees too. I
have been very careful to not describe the divide as "volunteers VS
employees", because I don't think it's the problem.
I know if I were interested in discussing the topic I'd start by
mailing people (which ones, I'm not quite certain yet, because I
haven't put thought into it!) and offering my thoughts. Perhaps
non-employees feel like this is not an option open for them?
It might be it. The path to contributing code is very hard, but tools
(Bugzilla, IRC, Mercurial...) to get to it are known and open (there is
even some doc :-p). The path to start a discussion on business model
with the relevant people (including those who can turn ideas into
actions) is unknown. To some extent, it's reassuring to learn that this
path is unobvious to long-term contributors like you are.
Besides that, it has never seemed to be a topic where the community was
welcome to contribute on. What I'm saying here is a feeling and not
based on facts. But for instance, if I wanted to hold a session on this
topic at a later event, I would start by "so, the current business model
is based on partnership with search engines, Google made the biggest
part of it in the past, it seems it's still true... but we don't know
the exact terms. So what alternative sources of revenue?". Is it even
worth investigating what new sources?
One sure thing, I'm not a business expert, but holding your breath every
3 years is not a sustainable situation.
I'm focusing on business model, but we could be talking about Mozilla
Spaces or other topics.
If so, that's definitely something we should fix.
I need to think about the "how".
I certainly didn't have that feeling when I wasn't an employee...
I don't think that everyone must agree on priorities, but I'm confident
involving as many people as possible early in the decision-making
process will end up in a better alignment in priorities
That's possible, yes. Again, I think strategic decisions seem to
arise out of discussions that are only viewed as strategic after the fact.
Good to know.
Thanks for your detailed and insightful answer,
David
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