I realized, as I went through the process of installing an Ubuntu machine that Canonical takes pains many times throughout the process to remind me, the user, that Ubuntu is made by people “just like you.” That it isn’t some product produced by a company with source-code available - such as Red Hat & Fedora Core or Novell and openSUSE.
There’s nothing about the Mozilla installation process that (insofar as I noticed) demonstrated or illustrated the fact that FireFox is the output of a gigantic community and Mozilla.com/.org is but Io to the (unwieldy) cloud of people who make FireFox happen for real.
David Eaves has been talking about Mozilla’s place as standard-bearer for the open web; I’ve taken some issues with the term but the principle of leadership to maintain interoperability and moreover, promote the distribution of open source software writ large is something both I, and the Mozilla Manifesto, agree with. While David is tackling the huge, grand-strategic issues of Mozilla’s self-image and purpose; I seek to redress some pretty basic things that would go a long way to transforming Mozilla from re-branded Netscape to serious(ly welcomed) member of the open source community.
With that in mind I think there are some tweaks Mozilla can make to the overall flow of user-experience to encourage people to take notice of the greater open-n community.
Firstly, rename the link on the “get firefox” page. ‘100% organic software’ doesn’t tell you where that link’s going and thus is a bad candidate for a link name. On the landing page don’t make contradictions within the same paragraph:
As software companies go, we’re a little unusual.
is followed by:
And as a non-profit, public benefit organization, we define success in terms of building communities and enriching people’s lives.
in the margin there is a FAQ asking “what is Mozilla?” which gets this answer:
We’re a global community, a public benefit organization and an open source software project.
If you’re three things there should be three links to three different resources with clear boundaries between each describing what each facet of Mozilla is, why it’s important to the other two and what I, the person just landed there, can do to get involved in any one of the three. This reinforces the salient point that they should drop the notion and pretense of being a software company - either the community builds Firefox or Mozilla does; you cannot have it both ways.
This raises the point that it’s okay for Mozilla to be a company, Red Hat is a company and it’s a pillar of the open source community - they’re profit motivated and people respect them for it. Red Hat is touted as a major source of open source success because it enabled the view that F/LOSS can be a viable business model. Sun blends FLOSS with business in a genuine way, as does Zend. It’s not okay for Mozilla to pretend it’s a civil society actor because it’s cheaper to market than a full-fledged corporation and gives their users warm-fuzzies (they should move offices from Mountain View to Cupertino if they want to do that).
So 1) improve the installation process to make it more obvious that Mozilla is a steering group, not a software factory. Giving away source-code does not a community make, nor does having a bunch of users squawking about your product/company (like I’m doing now). It takes shared interests, values, history and risk to make a community - currently Mozilla calls the shots on all four and calls it “cooperation.”
2) Fix the getting started page to include a call-to-action for involvement. Even if it’s just adding a name to a list of newly minted users, or some other token gesture it’s about establishing a connection which you can capitalize on later. Google knows that search is just the beginning but they’ve got to get users typing text into a form first. Using locale info, IP-tables and other info it’s fairly trivial to isolate the country of origin for a user and showing people the active Mozilla participants from around them would go a long way to making the community a reality rather than a brand-promise.
Since Mozilla is about openness / Libre software, why is it almost closed source proprietary platforms (Google (yeah, like they need the traffic), Remember the Milk, LinkedIn, Topix, HowStuffWorks, Answers, YouTube (Google again), Hype Machine, craigslist, yelp!, Facebook (ha! a MSFT investment!) versus Miro and Wikipedia.
What was the rationale behind picking those sites? Brand recognition? (where’s MySpace, Yahoo! or Hotmail?) Introduction to new things? (Why Facebook, YouTube or Google Docs?) My assumption is they nabbed an “average user” and looked at their bookmarks.
Whatever the reasons, there are libre alternatives which Mozilla could promote instead of shilling the work of their scariest competitor (hint: this competitor is right beside the Landings Dr office).
Also, the actions “Work, Learn, Play, Connect” should have “Participate” added on there with appropriate information for involvement.
3) The Mozilla homepage - the default homepage for a fresh Firefox and the homepage (I would imagine) for a fairly significant chunks of the boxes running FireFox. It’s a branded Google search page. Ubuntu has swapped it out for an Ubuntu about page (very smart move) but Mozilla instead hands over their product (very quickly after boot thanks to speed and caching improvements) over to Google without so much as a second glance at the user except to encourage them to buy their crap, which has horrendous, jaw-dropping shipping charges. While Mozilla probably does a tidy business with the swag - or GatewayCDI does anyway (I’m assuming this is some sinicure, if it was a competitive bid - switch to Spreadshirt and save everyone some money)
So there are three points of contact with a user in which Mozilla could toot the horn of the open web and instead hands business over to closed, proprietary groups (some of them) antithetical to the premise of the open-web (I’m looking at you Zuckerberg). I’m sure there’s a litany of other “tweaks” Mozilla could make but if they were to implement just these three the total ‘conversion’ or ‘up-take’ or ‘evolution’ rate would likely increase - which is the metric for success when you give away your product - you need constituents not customers.