First thing in the morning, I reached to the office and open my mailbox, received a newsletter from The McKinsey Quarterly. The topic is related to “Succeeding at open-source innovation: An interview with Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker”
Open source development has contributed much to my career path, putting a number of veteran IT proffesionals in my Center of IT aside. In fact, open source development too have put me a head from the rest. It is maybe to the nature of knowledge, where in the behaviourial science, open source tends to adopt rapid prototype due to the activities level in the community.
But, there are still seniors are still afraid to move on due to the open source development. One of main reasons is due to level of support. Apparently, I have started playing with open source software, such as Wordpress, Joomla and others, I fine that helps a lot in my getting my objective.
Anyway, in ths article, Mitchell Baker shares with us on his experience.
- Few organizations have as much experience harnessing the talents of people outside their corporate walls as does Mozilla Corporation, the developer of the open-source Firefox Web browser. The company depends on volunteers for product-development decisions, software coding, distribution, and promotion.
- Mitchell Baker has helped lead the project to develop the browser since its origins, in the late 1990s. In this interview, she talks about the balance between maintaining control and letting motivated people run with their passions.
- As the Firefox browser has gained market share, it has become a prominent example of a successful open-source project. Baker says that a traditional organization could not have achieved this success.
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The Quarterly: How do you think about your role in enabling innovation in the communities?
Mitchell Baker: Sometimes, just giving people permission does wonders. Consider our quality control process. We have a public process for finding, tracking, and correcting bugs in the code we’re developing, and thousands of people are involved. When several people within the community began to take leadership in that effort, someone who worked with me said, “All we need to do is tell these people it’s OK.” So that’s what we did. We said to the leader, “You’re awesome; keep doing what you’re doing.” And after that, he became our release driver. There are more people like that than you would expect.
Second, we create scaffolding for people to work from, so that even if we’re not innovating ourselves, other people can. You can see, with the extensions and the customization, that there are thousands of people doing interesting things we haven’t thought of, and they don’t have to tell us or ask us.
Third, we’ve assembled a set of people here who are really motivated by seeing other people do interesting things. So if somebody appears, out in another community, doing something interesting, we don’t have a not-invented-here culture; we just say, “Wow!”
Another thing: not just celebrating when people do great things but knowing how to react when people do things that are troublesome. There are days when somebody’s done something and you wonder, “What were they thinking?” At that point, you have to look really carefully and evaluate what’s just uncomfortable and what really must be fixed. And then you try to keep that latter category to a minimum. A healthy community will do a lot of self-correction.
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We got our own book 2.0 element in Singapore. It is called bookjetty.com. This site is build by a local asian, 
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