Moving Forward

Initially, one of the issues that arose about the Community Giving program related to whether or not Mozilla Corporation could legally give in-kind support to volunteers who would then might use the donation to work on matters related directly to Mozilla and its software. Although we suspected we were OK, we thought it would be good to check if there were any conflicts of interest.

Today, we had a call with Mozilla’s lawyers who helped us think about this issue. They advised us that this program likely aligns with our corporate mission and would probably not result in any conflicts of interest. In many corporate giving programs, donations of money or in-kind support may raise some issues because that support might be used by the recipient to benefit the business entity that gave the donation. However, because Mozilla’s mission is so unique, what we will do with this program advances our mission, which has always related directly to the community. The lawyers advised us that we should not consider this a charity program, it is a business expense. Therefore, it should *not* be treated as a charitable expense. We are working with Mozilla’s CFO to set up the accounting procedures for the program. I am glad we resolved this issue because in my prior grant-making experiences, properly documenting how support is given was a big issue and potential liability…believe it or not.

The second issue that came up during our call was how to move forward if our support somehow placed a tax burden on the volunteer recipients. (One example, for instance, if we gave a grant to someone, what possible financial burdens to the recipients would there be?) We decided to create a list of the things that Mozilla Corporation might provide to its volunteers and send it to the lawyers for their review. They can help us think about how to document everything so our volunteers are faced with little to no burden related to income or reporting. Although it is something the Giving program should not worry too much about right now, the lawyers did say that everything we do will have some tax consequence and we should think about it.

QA Responses

As a first step, we emailed a small sample of volunteers from the QA community to understand their needs and have been collecting their responses. As mentioned in an earlier post, we will continue to reach out across our the community to see how we can help everyone. But, for now, I thought it would be good to share a summary of some of the responses to a few of the questions.

N.B. This was a small sample and does not represent the whole community…just the responses from the first people we emailed. Also, in cases where it was necessary, I summarized answers. The responses below do not represent exactly how we have decided to help. Our next step is getting back to each person to get a specific idea on how Mozilla can provide support.

What are your biggest obstacles to working on the Mozilla Project?

• Hardware requirements.
• In need of professional development support (i.e. conference attendance, workshops, travel support).
• Software requirements.
• Free time!
• It would be nice if it were possible to get some of the main web tool developers together in the same room at some point.

What do you think Mozilla should/can do to help remove those obstacles?

• Nada.
• Not necessarily pay [people], but maybe find some other companies [or] certain development efforts to fund.
• I don’t know how much Mozilla would be able to help in terms of getting enough developers to participate long enough to become reviewers.
• As for getting the developers together, helping to cover travel expenses seems to be the biggest issue.
• Provide software and/or hardware that is needed.

Specifically, what could you use to overcome your daily challenges related to working on Mozilla?

• Nothing the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation could really provide.
• More time! Seriously though, having access to hardware for testing and building are essential. Also, tools such as version control and source management (many of which are developed in house) are also a challenge. Upgrades to some of these systems are long over due.
• I think best would be getting paid for doing Mozilla related work. Preferably part time and as a contractor. I understand that this way this is no longer a “volunteer” or “community” thing anymore but as long as money makes the world go around this is one of those harsh truths of life.
• The increased human resourced required to get patches reviewed and landed in time.
• Working part time only to have more free time to contribute to Bugzilla/Mozilla? But this means earning less money, which is not acceptable.

Do you have any thoughts about how money should be used by Mozilla to support the volunteer community?

• Indifferent.
• Given properly, some type of support is acceptable and will be received well by the open-source community.
• I am generally skeptical of involving grants, donations or in-kind support open-source. It may cause disruption.

If you have any particular responses to these questions or responses to the answers that I summarized above, please post a comment.

Up next: we are working out exactly how Mozilla can legally support to people. There may be some initial challenges, given our organizational structure. But, we will know more once we chat with the legal team…more later.

Community Giving Program Mission Statement

“The Community Giving Program will use a portion of Mozilla revenue to support and strengthen the activities of the Mozilla community. We will start by reaching out to our dedicated community contributors. As the program grows, we will look to expand to supporting new contributors and new projects.”

As always, I encourage everyone to comment and refine this. For now, I’ll post this as its own page link on this blog.

Community Giving Program Mission Statement

We have been thinking lately about writing a very clear mission statement for the giving program that will help guide us going forward. From one of Mitchell’s earlier posts, she wrote:

“The goal of such a program is to learn if and how we can use some of the Firefox revenue to support and strengthen the activities of the Mozilla community beyond those people employed by the Foundation and Mozilla Corporation.”

(Read more here)

Recently, we started to look at groups of volunteers who are contributing to the project and reach out to them to find ways to support them by asking them directly. That is happening now. However, it seems like it would be beneficial to have a purpose statement that we can refer to when we are describing the program. More importantly, we need a statement that we can turn to when we have questions now and in the future about what might and might not be part of this program. We want it to be descriptive enough to answer what we are trying to do, but also have some timelessness so that it is still relevant 2-3 years from now, or way beyond that.

I would gladly accept any thoughts on this. I will post something soon that we have been working on and will call for more suggestions at that point. However, if there are initial responses to what has been written regarding the mission of this giving program, please feel free to post some suggestions.

Updated FAQs

I have updated the FAQ post with some new questions. Some of my answers are intentionally left open-ended because I would really like to hear what you think. As we iterate, I will gather all the ideas and gain consensus on how we move forward. Please review the FAQ post.