The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

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March 26, 2006

Producing Open Source Software

I've been reading Karl Fogel's excellent Producing Open Source Software.

Karl's book is very well written, nice and compact (272 pages), and contains useful information for anyone doing anything in the Open Source world: both developers and managers.

It will help people new to Open Source get a better understanding of how OSS projects are run. It will help people familiar with Open Source to get a better understanding of how to contribute more effectively.

It's definitely a "must read."

Posted by ben at 3:03 PM

Writing for Busy People

Back when I was in University, many of the lecturers stressed time and time again the importance of succinct, well organized writing. They said over and over that this was the best way to have your thoughts read and understood by decision makers. In fact, they scared us by saying that 70% of us would become managers sooner or later!

Well, I can tell you that's sage advice. It's great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it's even better when they're written for busy people. Here are some examples:

Making important points up front
Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them
Writing clearly and succinctly
No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear

These days, I find I don't have a lot of time to read everything carefully, so the better structured a document is, the more I get out of it. I frequently find I miss entire subsections or points of documents, even when there's relatively little text, because of incomplete organization. My eyes definitely glaze over when i see a large block of unbroken text with few headings. At the very least, it'd be very helpful if folk would structure their thoughts into: "Problem" and "Proposed Solution".

Before you post, stop and think if you've written something in a way that'll allow others to get the most out of it. Communicating your ideas effectively means you may get a clearer and quicker response from other people.

Posted by ben at 2:48 PM | Comments (39)

March 22, 2006

Step 2: Ask Questions

A healthy project is one where active contributors are always evaluating the project's progress, making sure it is headed in the right direction (usually stated in the project mission or goals).

I think we could be better at this in Mozilla. I'm not suggesting people be assholes or anything, but I think some more pan-project analysis would be useful.

Historically, I can point at a couple of groups of people who have attempted to do something like this. The drivers@ group is one that looked beyond individual modules within Gecko to make sure that the right thing for the shipping products as a whole happened. The Firefox team is another example. By taking a holistic view, user experience was enhanced.

I think contributors should not be afraid to poke their nose in other parts of the project and see how things are going. Ask questions. Learn more. Get involved in governance and management. If things don't seem intuitive, or a little arbitrary, ask, rather than assume it's for a good reason. One of the benefits of having an open, referencable set of discussion forums means that once you've answered a question once on the public forums, when someone else asks you can just give them a URL.

Posted by ben at 5:27 PM | Comments (19)

March 20, 2006

Step 1: Public Discussions

The first step on the pathway to open source project happiness is to have our discussions in the public.

One of the things people have (rightly) criticized about Firefox and Mozilla development in the past is that too much happens mysteriously, behind closed doors. This was for a number of reasons that sounded sufficient at the time - it was expedient, people were sitting within shouting distance, mental laziness, etc.

What poor communication breeds is a lack of understanding of procedures, priorities and such like. A healthy project is one where the contributors understanding where things are headed, and what parts they can play. It is one where newcomers can visit the project website and within the space of a few minutes get a decent understanding of how things work, and find out opportunities for them to participate.

People don't want to contribute to projects where things happen "magically". I've learned this lesson in the past.

To this end, I've been encouraging everyone to have public discussions on the Mozilla Newsgroups/Mailing Lists. For Firefox, the list is dev-apps-firefox@, and the newsgroup is mozilla.dev.apps.firefox. They are mirrored through Google Groups for ease of browsing. We're planning on improving the theme for Firefox2, and rather than pursue this effort in a walled garden like last time, we're going to proceed in dev-themes@/mozilla.dev.themes. Come on over and join in!

At the same time, we've been encouraging other projects to use the newsgroups/lists too. Decisions made in private email, IRC (which isn't archived anywhere) even in public bugs etc make it very difficult for people who aren't central to the project to find out more or participate. I think we should strive to strike a better balance between convenience and accessibility/referencability.

On top of this, there is a need to make the contact portions of the web site more accurate, relevant and easy to find, so people can easily find the list they want, and the person or group to contact.

We've been having discussions about all of this in mozilla.dev.general, in these threads. Rather than talk in a vacuum of only ourselves, I really hope that those of you that have experienced difficulty in the past in some of these areas will come forward and contribute to the discussion.

Posted by ben at 9:23 AM | Comments (15)

March 19, 2006

Reflection

I've been doing a bit of it lately. All manner of topics. We recently moved and things have been chaotic so it's been nice to take the time to think. I've had a chance to look at how far we've come, and form some ideas about what we might need to do to go the right places.

The past couple of years have brought some immense highs, and some considerable angst. With success has come the realization that true now as ever: the spirit of open source is expressed through the creative freedom of the many. The surest way to navigate the murky waters of increased attention and marketshare and such like is, as Leslie has been saying for some time, to keep your karma clean. Do the right thing, not only in technical matters but also relationships.

For the Mozilla project, what we need to do (I think) is:

Better define the things that are important to us. The things that define who we are. Impart the positive aspects of open development culture and practice on everyone involved because they're effective, and as a safeguard against recurrence of some of the troubles of the past.
Engage the community more effectively. Create and maintain an infrastructure of open communication to remove the "mystery" behind the decision making process. Organize our contributor materials better to make the project more accessible to newcomers. These are just a couple of examples.

For my part, I'm starting out this year by doing things a little differently. I think we need to grow more as a project. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to achieve some positive change.

I understand that this post might seem a little abstract. I think what I'm saying might become a bit more clear after I talk about some tangible efforts, which I will do in future entries.

Posted by ben at 2:00 AM | Comments (9)

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