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October 28, 2007
Yet Another Fascinating Long Now Talk
I just listened to the podcast of the recent long-term thinking seminar by Alex Wright, entitled The Deep History of the Information Age. Lots of good ideas in this one: networks coalescing into hierarchies, taxonomies as family tree hierarchies, the web as more akin to an oral culture than a literate one. Particularly interesting was also some history of individual contributions to information organization (some well known, and some completely new to me). As always when listening to these talks, I find all sorts of food for thought as I try and relate the various ideas to things in my life, Mozilla and otherwise.Posted by dmose at 3:42 PM
October 8, 2007
Organizational Stuff and MailCo
Over the weekend, I saw glazou's blog entry wondering about Scott and David's very succinct goodbye messages to the Mozilla Corporation. My reaction was a bit similar to his, in the sense that it felt like there was a severe lack of transparency here about what was going on. As folks who know me can attest, I feel very strongly that the Mozilla organizations have a special need to be as transparent as they reasonably can, since they are intended in many ways to be instruments of the larger Mozilla community. So I was pleased when I saw Mitchell's posts discussing the MailCo spinout in much more detail yesterday. Obviously, she can't speak for Scott and David about their perspective, but that is for them to discuss more (or not) as they choose.
As often happens when there is significant change, there has been a certain amount of angst about what it all means for the future (as evidenced by some of the blogosphere comments I've seen recently). As someone who has devoted a number of years to both Thunderbird and Calendar code, as well as seen the Mozilla project weather many ups, downs, and personnel changes, I think this angst is pretty overblown. My feeling is that the spinout of MailCo to work full-time with and as part of those projects is a great chance to help them shine. Are there difficult issues to be worked out still? Sure. But over the years, Mozillians have demonstrated repeatedly that we've got what it takes to push through those issues and ship great software.
I have more thoughts on how things might want to move forward which I hope to post when I'm slightly less busy (post M9, at the very least...).
Posted by dmose at 2:49 PM