Foundation/Core

These are the raw notes from the team meeting and discussions w/ others. My next step is to process them and come up w. a proposal.

Team meetings notes

"Mozilla Core" is stuff that needs to get done at the Mozilla Foundation no matter what else gets done. It's often taken for granted by the board and others, and seen simply as overhead.

Three questions around Mozilla Core:

• Is it worth thinking about and defining Mozilla Core as a category? (Consensus was, yes it is.)
• What activities do we think are part of Mozilla Core?
• Can we express in one sentence what Mozilla Core is?
• What specific activities are (or should be) part of Mozilla Core?

The overall goal in discussing Mozilla Core is to define a baseline set of tasks and an associated budget for 2010 and beyond.

Attempts at defining Mozilla Core in one sentence:

• Support other Mozilla organizations and the Mozilla community.
• It's horizontal (vs. vertical) activities, filling in gaps, a thin layer of oversight, etc., on top.
• Supporting ourselves, i.e., the Mozilla community.
• Keeping the Mozilla project going in spirit and in fact.

What's inside Mozilla Core? Some ideas:

• Being the sole shareholder (i.e., of the Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Messaging)
• Dealing with legal and fiduciary issues (e.g., dealing with IRS, publishing financial statements and tax returns)
• Maintaining and enhancing www.mozilla.org
• Trademark ownership and management, brand stewardship (e.g., present "one Mozilla")
• Defining, managing, and overseeing "one Mozilla" grant process
• Supporting smaller Mozilla-related projects (e.g., Bugzilla, Seamonkey, Camino)
• Supporting and helping to maintain project governance
• Fundraising
• Representing Mozilla to audiences and in regions where being nonprofit matters (David Ascher)
• Playing a core thought leadership role on issues related to web (Brendan Eich)
• Promoting public benefit aspects of the Mozilla project and Mozilla organizations (John Lilly)
• Representing mozilla to governments, NGOs (public policy aspect)

Question: Is Strategy 1 stuff part of Mozilla Core? Consensus was that it was not: Strategy 1 programs (e.g., Mozilla Education) are not critical in same sense as governance, etc. (Per Mark, Brendan also thinks we should have a separate Strategy 1 component.)

Proposed priorities (ranked by number of people mentioning):

• legal and fiduciary stuff
• www.mozilla.org
• governance
• promoting Mozilla public benefit aspects
• supporting smaller Mozilla projects
• community leadership

Other notes

• big picture path dependent problems (radar)
• looking at where we're putting attention
• org structure
• umbrella brand
• being a fdny public face
• connection between product and mission (narrative)