Being Knowable

Posted by chris on Tue, 05/22/2007 - 03:39Personal

As anyone close to the Mozilla project knows, we're a really different kind of animal and one that is particularly hard to describe.  I've tried in the past by saying that "We are a global community and a public benefit organization dedicated to improving the Internet experience for people everywhere." But that misses the mark and doesn't capture the fact that Mozilla is many things to many people, and we're made up of a multitude of voices, interests and passions. (And it also sounds like corporate-speak.)

To make it that much harder, Mozilla has a long and storied history and only recently gained its independence, both organizationally and financially.  To compound the matter, it turns out that the unique legal structure required to fit Mozilla's context and support that independence is complex and easily misunderstood. [1]

For example, I often wish we had chosen a name for what is now the "Corporation" (the wholly-owned taxable subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation) that wasn't so highly charged and full of implicit negative meaning to so many people. It hasn't been an easy starting point when trying to help someone understand Mozilla.

At the end of the day, we're unique and imperfect (as anyone close to us can attest), but so far have collectively accomplished things that many believed impossible. 

I don't know if we will ever be able to make Mozilla understandable to the whole world, but I do believe that we need to now make ourselves increasingly knowable to a wider audience so that we can grow as a community (and as a movement) to meet the challenges that lie ahead.

Recent press articles and blog posts suggest that our public weekly project meetings, DevNews blog, Developer Days, Spread Firefox and so on, are only the beginning of what's needed.

- cbeard

[1]  Much more detail on how Mozilla is organized and its legal structure can be found in the detailed FAQ on the reorganizaton and in Mozilla's legal and tax documents.


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What Would You Do?
Submitted by raiph on Wed, 05/23/2007 - 20:23.

I don't know if we will ever be able to make Mozilla understandable
to the whole world, but I do believe that we need to now make ourselves
increasingly knowable to a wider audience

I can parse the above in several ways. One parse has the words "understandable" and "knowable" being interchangeable and suggests you mean "deepen our branding elaboration to assist understanding by those exposed to our brand". Another parse suggests "broaden our branding exposure to help more people recognize and trust our brand(s)". I'd appreciate clarification.

When looking at things like this I often try to boil things down to a slogan. The first thing that popped into my head as I wrote this paragraph was "What Would You Do?" as a slogan for MoFo analogous to Google's unofficial internal "Do No Evil". Hmm. Now I've got that, I immediately see what my intuition tells me would likely be a great way to drive things toward what I think you want. But I'll wait to see if we're on the same page first.

love, raiph

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