The Inside Track on Firefox Development.
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July 1, 2006
Creativity
Today, Mitchell writes about creativity, and touches on some other issues such as openness etc.
It’s good to have ideas, and prototype them. This philosophy is the core of the Mozilla project that I love – it’s how I’ve tried to operate myself much of the time… to not let myself get bogged down in all the negatives and suffer what some call “analysis paralysis”… not all of my adventures have succeeded: some of the code I have written has never gone anywhere – Vixen, Manticore, etc. It’s why I love extensions. They give people the ability to play with something that could be impractical, but who cares, it won’t hurt anything… there’s a chance it could be really useful so what’s there to lose?
I see the benefit of a process surrounding out-of-band innovation as a useful step to take in a corporate environment where people need to be able to spend some amount of their time doing some more novel/long term research. It's a good thing to establish culturally so that you don't get the "angry boss man" type of situation we had at Netscape. Personally, creativity and exploration has always been my modus operandi - it's how I begun working on this project, and I think I share this trait with at least a few volunteers.
On the topic of communication I fundamentally agree with what she says. Opening your idea to comment from the start may not always be the right thing to do, depending on what you’re trying to achieve. Often, there are two outcomes – your plan gets mired down in a bunch of negative or “stop” energy, or you get no useful feedback at all. Over my history contributing to Mozilla, I’ve experienced both, a lot of the time.
The trick is where the rubber meets the road. When you do go public – and eventually you will if your code makes it in to Firefox – you need to be prepared to provide justification for what you’re proposing. Hopefully, your idea will stand on its own merits, and little explanation will be necessary, but you should prepare for it all the same. If you have the courage of your convictions, you should be able to stick to your guns. Maybe you learn a thing or two in the process. Good contributors in a healthy community ask questions and make reasonable suggestions for improvement. When it's time to tell more people about your concept, the important thing is not to go into it with a finished product. Some people say you should always show UI mockups as sketches, because it presents them as being more accessible to modification based on feedback since the work to actually implement them hasn't been done. A few of us have had pretty bad experiences in the past when organizations have arbitrarily pushed fully formed visions on the rest of us without much explanation, and little recourse. Remember we don’t just do things because we can, or just for concepts like “the good of the web” because they’re nice to say.
Posted by ben at July 1, 2006 10:03 PM
Comments
Posted by: romeo at July 26, 2006 11:00 PM
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