I'm not a Mozilla insider or anything but I took a look at their bylaws and afaict they have a self-perpetuating board, which means they're not formally accountable to anyone.
I prefer a member elected board (like the PSF has). It's hard for leadership to stray too far from member values when they're elected by members.
I know too many self-perpetuating boards who destroyed what they were supposed to be safeguarding, or even enabled abuse.
Governance matters.
@shauna I would guess the hard problem for orgs like Mozilla and others is how do you define “members” in a way that matches the mission and is resistant to bad actors abusing it (in science fiction circles the Hugo awards/WorldCon’s have struggled with this at times as a real world fairly recent example). Especially when an organization has real revenues (and perhaps in some cases a substantial endowment) as well as influence in the large world
Curious how the Poetry Foundation navigates this
@shauna (poetry foundation is in reference to them receiving a massive endowment in 2003. I see that in 2022 they changed from an operating to a non-operating foundation and now make grants so guessing they are still 20+ years later navigating how to manage it. Successfully it seems.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/about-us
(I often find examples from other industries can offer useful cases)
@Rycaut yeah there's of course no one-size-fits-all solution, and being member-elected is no panacea, but overall I've found member elected nonprofits to be more effective and truer to their missions than self-perpetuating non-profits. PSF has a big influence on the world but not big revenues to manage, so their system (you can become a member by being an individual small donor, a contributor of some kind, or being named as a fellow) might not be a good fit for Mozilla.
@thatandromeda @shauna I remember thinking at the time (I lived in a Chicago when the bequest happened) either this means the creation of a perpetual (in a positive sense) supporter for poetry and writing.
Or it would be a huge scandal and disaster where too much money created new problems and attracted bad actors (glad that as best I can tell this didn’t happen)
I'd be interested in talking to someone at Poetry Foundation too if you can connect me. It sounds like they navigated their issues fairly well; I'd love to help them share what they've learned.
@shauna @thatandromeda I don’t think I know anyone there but I can check (I do know a lot of Chicago based writers, poets and folks with an interest in non-profits so non-zero chance someone I know has an affiliation with them) I’ve been looking for more coverage of how they have navigated things - on a quick first take seems like their switch to a non-operating/grant making foundation was fairly recent and in part due to some pressure on them to make grants vs “sit” on their endowment
@shauna add another wrinkle and MZLA (the Mozilla entity that houses Thunderbird) - has a co-governance model between a board and a Council, elected from contributors. This gives the community immense power (we can't approve a yearly budget without the Council's input, for instance). While it has been hard to have so many different stakeholders, I believe it has kept us honest and true to the mission of great open source communication software that champions open standards.
@ryanleesipes is MZLA part of Mozilla Foundation or legally separate?
@shauna we're a subsidiary. But we have our own distinct board and bylaws.
@ryanleesipes gotcha, so there's accountability and community governance in this subset of the MF. Actually I'd love to interview you (& anyone else involved in MZLA who'd be up for it) about your model sometime.
@shauna absolutely, I'd love to share our story. When we started doing things this way (after Thunderbird nearly died), folks were skeptical of this model. But we've seen revenue grow 1108% under it, and we've grown our daily active users by more than 1 million in the past year alone. So I'd say that something is working right.
Ping me at ryan@thunderbird.net
@ryanleesipes Awesome, I've written down your contact info and will follow up soon
@shauna Looking forward to it!
@ryanleesipes @shauna can't wait to read about it!
@ryanleesipes what is MZLA's business model? Is it just donations or something else? I was always confused if donations covered everything or if I was missing something.
@wwahammy @ryanleesipes Currently, we're 100% funded by donations.
@ryanleesipes @shauna amazing achievement! I would love to read this interview! If you could tag me or something like that, it would be amazing!
@ryanleesipes @shauna Hmmm maybe I should use Thunderbird again
@ryanleesipes @shauna Sounds like MZLA should take over Firefox from Mozilla...
That seems like a problem.
Those of us using firefox should probably get to elect some or all board members.
My ideal version would probably be a combo of seats elected by employees, seats elected by contributors, and seats elected by users.
Sounds like a great plan to me
@shauna very well spoken. Now their bad decisions makes a lot more sense.
@shauna I was a Mozilla Corp employee for almost nine years and I completely agree.
@shauna Like you reference later in the thread, a member elected board is important, but not a panacea.
I've seen member elected boards stray because they took a "one board, one voice" approach which effectively squashed democracy and turned them into a self-perpetuating board.
The board needs to have its debates out in public so that the members can see who supports what ideas and make their choices in the next board election accordingly.
I think it's very natural and understandable to fear airing conflicts in public (and to fear conflicts in general) but overall it tends not to be healthy for projects and communities. Conflict is inevitable and if approached in the right way - with transparency but also grace - can make you stronger rather than weaker.
@shauna Agreed. In the library world, I think I'd have considerably better relations with OCLC, which has sometimes styled itself as a cooperative, if its board were member-elected. (As it is, the board is majority self-perpetuated, with members indirectly electing a 6-director minority. A number of the board members are also paid by the organization.)
@shauna What if Firefox made an opt-in "phone home" feature available where all it did was announce to Mozilla that this user would like to be a member of the electorate that votes for the Board?
Too easy to game? Potential sock-puppetry? But there could be other qualifying steps after that, maybe. Thinking out loud, and perhaps carelessly... But I take seriously your comment about "it's hard for leadership to stray too far from member values when they're elected by members". (On the other hand, maybe what we'd find out is that most Firefox users don't prioritize the values we want them to prioritize!)
The approach I'd favor in most situations is multistakeholder governance. I'd want elected representatives of staff, contributors, and users. So user values/priorities would be balanced through compromise with the values/priorities of contributors and staff. But yeah Firefox could do outreach to potential user-voters through a browser tweak.
In this theoretical alternative world where the existing self-perpetuating board is willing to give up power to become community-governed.
@nichtich @shauna Mmm, +1, yeah! Wikipedia (as a whole, meaning both the huge & crucial volunteer community and the Foundation) and the Debian Project to me have in common this interesting quality -- I don't have a good word or phrase for it, and suggestions welcome -- of always appearing to be in dysfunctional chaos and yet at the same time continuing to fulfill their mission stably and well for many years. To anyone glancing in from the outside, it must seem amazing that anything gets done; and yet to those on the inside, it's the most natural thing in the world.
I think it might be good for Mozilla to move a bit more toward that style of operating? It'd be a huge culture shift, though.
@kfogel @nichtich @shauna sorry to burst your bubble a bit, but the Wikimedia Foundation is explicitly not a membership organization and only a minority of board seats are elected by the community.
Recently the WMF board vetoed a charter that would've partially divested power and resources to a more community-accountable body (among other things): <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_Charter/Ratification/Voting#Results>.
In short, WMF also needs a major governance overhaul.