Innovation/Projects/Open Innovation Strategy

MoCo Open Innovation Strategy Project

“Openness” defines Mozilla more than any other characteristic, in both the products and technologies the organisation builds and in how it operates.

In 2017, the Open Innovation team conducted a research project to help Mozilla (MoCo) revitalize participation and broader external engagement to be a source of competitive advantage for our products and technologies. The project analysed how effective Mozilla is in its open practices across both staff and contributor communities as well as how other industry actors use openness for competitive advantage. Based upon these findings, the project made recommendations for how MoCo can better invest in and execute on being “open.”

Although the project was focused on MoCo, it was conducted in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation.

Methodology

In order to begin from an evidence-based, shared understanding of the problem, the project researched three perspectives:

Internal Research

We documented internal perspectives on open source and external collaboration at Mozilla by interviewing numerous employees, particularly those working most directly with communities.

Communities and Contributors Research

This component analyzed Mozilla communities to understand who they are, how and what they engage with, their motivations, and how they’re connected to one another as well as to other open source and open Web projects. This was done through a survey of over 1000 community members as well as an analysis of 16 years of contribution data (Bugzilla, GitHub, and more), which was driven by Bitergia. The research also built on and extended related historical work.

External Research

In partnership with the Copenhagen Institute of Design, (CIID), we conducted case studies of six organizations for inspiration and lessons. Target organizations were Sage Bionetworks, 23andme, Arduino, Aleph Objects, Automattic, NASA, and Kubernetes. They were chosen because they varied in market sector and met selective criteria such as being mission-focused, reliant upon external participation in ways fundamental to strategy and product, and supported by vital, growing communities.

This was the first time Mozilla undertook such a comprehensive analysis of its community efforts, and we expect to revisit the communities and contributors research annually.

Although the project was focused on MoCo, it was run in coordination with MoFo.

Results

Internal Research

Interviews covered opportunities and challenges with external community engagement as well as day-to-day management of relationships and communities. Mozilla employees firmly believe in 'open' as a core Mozilla value and that ‘working open’ can provide benefit to the organisation; however, they described many challenges to working more effectively with participants and communities. A summary of these challenges is that Mozilla has generally not kept up with market developments and opportunities around open, collaborative methods, nor has it consistently and strategically invested in participation and collaboration.

Communities and Contributors Research

Mozilla’s position with community and participation is stronger than perhaps believed. While there are problematic areas – such as an overall contribution decrease in SUMO and L10N, and areas like Web Compatibility where retention and engagement can be improved – the data on actual code contribution is solid. The organization has a very visible industry profile, attracting thousands of global code authors every year (almost 2,400 new code authors in 2017 alone), which is notable relative to other mature FOSS projects. Non-employee contribution to Firefox and Gecko has grown and appears reasonably stable, and the communities around Emerging Technologies projects are growing. In addition, the data show that Mozilla is quicker than other open source projects to respond and act on pull requests.

Mozilla has strived to make its operational processes transparent and to provide engagement opportunities beyond open source co-development. Although there's room for improvement, Mozilla community participation seems well distributed across coding and non-coding projects. The qualitative survey found participation focused around events, localization, marketing, and teaching, as well as coding, with most participation occurring later in the product lifecycle. This points to an opportunity to work more effectively with our communities earlier in the product lifecycle. Mozilla certainly needs to work on gender diversity in its communities, but the age and geographical distribution was better than expected.

Other key community research findings include:

• Mozilla often perceives its large group of volunteers as ‘the Mozilla community’ -- as an entity somehow definably singular. However, the research showed that there is not one singular Mozilla community, but many. Differences are related not only to project focus and personal interest but also to motivations, operational norms, social capital and density, feelings of affiliation, and more. Understanding the differences and the reasons behind them is foundational to improving engagement, retention, and collaboration opportunities of mutual benefit.

• There are clear gaps in Mozilla’s collective knowledge about its community activities and health. The Open Innovation team is already addressing these areas for improvement.

• There are likely interesting opportunities for Mozilla to build a stronger alliance for the open web through the broader open source networks of Mozilla contributors. The research identified that the 1,000 Mozilla contributors who made at least 5 commits in Mozilla projects over the past 3 years also participated in more than 35,000 non-Mozilla GitHub repositories between 2010 and 2016 (as defined by pull requests).

External Research

The case studies presented a rich set of findings, despite different products, markets, and organizational size. They also presented common themes in their approach to participation and external engagement.

The Open Innovation team has been posting summaries of the external research on our Open Innovation blog. We encourage you to follow our blog for more details on this aspect of the project.

Recommendations

The research made clear that while Mozilla's baseline is open, if the desired effects of this openness are unclear, the organisation's actions are prone to be unfocused and weak in impact. In order to be open effectively, Mozilla needs to be more deliberate about what it's aiming to accomplish and to design for that effect: Mozilla needs to be open by design.

Open by design builds on the open nature and participatory culture that is core to Mozilla. Amplifying the organisation's ‘openness’ (code, culture, workflows, communities), open by design means being more intentional in how Mozilla builds communities and external engagements in order to achieve a desired market impact and, ultimately, a collective vision for the open web.

There are several long-term recommendations for how Mozilla can be open by design to improve its position in key areas of competition and create attractive communities that provide the most benefit possible to participants (see image). The recommendations' implications differ across Mozilla. For example, the Firefox and Emerging Tech organizations operate under different conditions, with different areas of opportunity for open by design. In addition, these open by design recommendations will help Mozilla find a new, shared sense of the value of community and participation.

(image from Jim to come - will be the graphic we use in the consolidated report that doesn't have the foundational aspect)

Implementation of Open by Design Recommendations

Mozilla began implementing these recommendations through several prototype projects in 2H 2017. The organisation is identifying additional projects as part of 2018 planning, and we'll work in other ways to better align our structure, processes, people, and incentives to support open by design.

In addition to these project-focused, 'teaching by doing' collaborations, the Open Innovation team is acting on some of the foundational items required to support an open by design organisation:

• Our Service Design team is working to improve the contributor experience in Mozilla’s open source and open innovation programs.
• We have implemented Bitergia’s GrimoireLab to provide community analytics at Mozilla, and we're collaborating with other open source projects to identify best practices in contribution metrics. In addition, we're creating a Community Support Software Product (CoSS) to lay the systems foundation to ensure Mozilla has broad access to the community data we need to make sound programmatic decisions.
• We're creating a set of guidelines for tools used in community work -- in particular, how to use closed tools in an open process. We recognize the inherent conflict, and we also recognize that many may feel it's an impossible conflict to resolve. Nonetheless, until there are enough open source tools that meet the specific needs of Mozilla's various projects, it's a conflict we'll have to manage. Open Innovation is working to minimize one aspect of this problem with a unified access management system (project IAM), which will allow all Mozillians (employees and contributors) to access Mozilla services through a unified, authoritative, and integrated identity system.
• In collaboration with Mozilla's Diversity & Inclusion team, we've created a process for handling community behavior complaints.
• We're reaching out to new sources of experts and advocates through the Open Source Student Network.
• The Open Innovation team is also considering how to better approach the subset of Mozilla communities that have similar skillsets, goals, and needs. Although there are indeed many communities at Mozilla, there are enough similarities across this particular 'generalist group' that a more integrated, common interface and approach is merited.

Who

The project’s Steering Committee provided oversight and included:

• Katharina Borchert • Chief Innovation Officer
• Patrick Finch • Director, Open Innovation
• John Jensen • Director, Organization Strategy
• David Herman • Director of Strategy, Emerging Technologies
• Nick Nguyen • VP, Firefox
• George Roter • Director, Open Innovation

The project’s Core Team members drive the project and include:

• Patrick Finch • Responsible
• Susy Struble • Strategic advisor & Internal research
• Pierros Papadeas • Open source expert
• Rina Tambo Jensen • Lead researcher
• Ruben Martin • Communities and contributors research
• Alex Klepel • Internal communications
• David B. Schwartz (Princeton) • Researcher

External Partners

• Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design (CIID)
• Bitergia

Timeline

The project launched in March 2017. Broadly, the timeline is:

• End of March: Finalize analytical framework
• April - May: Internal interviews, community survey and research, & external research; also internal communications about any useful findings as the project progresses
• Late May: Synthesis of findings & more internal communication
• Late June: Presentation of project findings
• Starting in July: General recommendations as well as a subset of recommendations which we’ll prototype with internal partners in 2H 2017

How to Participate

If you want to learn more about the project or have thoughts, suggestions, relevant research, or would like to directly participate, please contact the project Core Team. We will also communicate when we’re hosting internal discussions and meetings.

Past Research

This project will be informed by related research, historical and current, such as the D&I study and Open Source Experiments. Please contact the project team if you have relevant research that you can share.

About the Open Innovation team

The Open Innovation team exists to help product and technology groups make effective use of open methods across all phases of the lifecycle.

Our tactic is to prove internally that open methods work.

Our role is to be a centre of competence for:

• Shaping strategy for delivering value through open methods
• Being practitioners of open methods
• Delivering excellence in engaging external stakeholders