5 comments

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  Rafael

  2 years ago

  Great post. You're going to hate me but my question is what's happening with Thunderbird? A decision for it is taking quite long and really want to see what a full team around it could do.
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  John

  2 years ago

  hey rafael -- it's a good question, no problem. we've released thunderbird 2 last month, and there's no current roadmap going forward. mitchell's going to blog about this, i think, in the next few days, and hopefully we'll be able to get some renewed momentum & direction -- thunderbird can & should be a more lively project...
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  Chris Messina

  2 years ago

  Hey John, I think you're right --- for the most part. I certainly could have framed my thoughts in a more productive, less accusatory manner; for better or worse, as I said in the video, I tend to be harshest on the things I care about most. I also threw that video together in those 50 minutes -- no prep beyond the IM conversation I'd had earlier in the day... and I'm glad that I got it out there, "ums" and all since I've been working on a follow-up post and I'm about a week late on that because I'm trying to actually self-edit and be a little more reflective. Ppff. Oh well.
  
  As for folks taking things personally -- I think that's okay as long as they can detach their ego from the feedback. It's not helpful when folks lash out because they don't want to hear the feedback, whether true or not, simply because they have a weak ego. Many folks actually responded directly, in very open, honest and constructive ways, and I was thrilled to have that kind of feedback. It's really changed my thinking and alerted me to things that were invisible to me.
  
  At the same time, now that these issues are out there, I'm still having a hard time tracking the conversation. It's like I feel like a lot of people have been talking about this stuff, but besides a couple dozen posts from a small subset of authors, I've not seen the widespread discussions that I've seen mentioned a number of times. That suggests to me that there is still an underground current of conversation that is not being aired and could be put out there more prominently.
  
  So, I'll attempt to get my post out there sooner than later; the longer I wait, the more stale it gets. And I appreciate all that you've added to the discussion so far; it's certainly been helpful and refreshing.
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  John

  2 years ago

  hi chris -- you're right, the conversation is tough to track. it's happening in several places that i know of, only some syndicated to planet, some on places like peer pressure, some on places like dave eaves' site. i suspect that it's much like anything else where there's a 90/10 proportion of readers to writers.
  
  but there are lots of conversations that happen in the space between blogs, of course. some from xul developers, some not. joost, for example, is mostly heads down doing work on the platform and not getting too involved in this discussion.
  
  conversations are happening every single day in japanese (check mozillagumi) and chinese and polish, but they're not getting centralized, either.
  
  there are a ton of voices that i know of -- the folks that are most in the echo chamber here tend to be English-speaking, Silicon Valley-oriented, engineering types -- one of our most important groups of people (and i'm one of them), but i'm not too sure how to be both completely decentralized and wholly knowable. it's something we struggle some with.
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  raiph

  2 years ago

  "i’m not too sure how to be both completely decentralized and wholly knowable. it’s something we struggle some with."
  
  Indeed. But I think you could get a lot closer in one jump if Mozilla made a loud noise for a while asking mozillans to add at least two tags, 'mozilla' plus at least one more of their choosing, to any new thread of discussion appearing anywhere online.
  
  In combination with Yahoo pipes that output one unified feed that merges all the various outputs (a feed from del.icio.us, a feed from technorati, etc.), you'd get decentralized discourse with centralized visibility.
  
  If you wanted to monitor worldwide discussion of, say, 'mozilla' + 'platform', just click on the pipe...
  
  love, raiph
  
  Mozilla Foundation
  "What Would You Do?"
  
  (No, I'm not a MoFo staffer. Just pitching a slogan idea...)
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