Unveiling the Tree
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
The Mozilla tree has undergone a lot of evolution over the last several months, and it was really amazing to see the final version unveiled on Tuesday morning at the keynote. When I first started working at Mozilla, Mitchell handed me a doodle with a tree on it. She didn’t know exactly what it was for, but she asked me to look at it and see if it could be cleaned up or developed in a way that might be useful. My reaction to this image isn’t any different now than it was then. I thought it was a solid concept when I first saw the rough draft, and watching it grow and evolve has been a lot of fun.
Mozilla’s structure and vision is drastically different from that of most companies, eschewing a top-down, pyramidal structure for a more organic approach to creating software. Mozilla functions far more like a fruit tree, with numerous useful branches carefully grafted in to create a dynamic, cooperative organization that takes a holistic approach to the internet.
The rootstock of Mozilla are its broad reach into the online community and the basic inspirations for our work. Leadership by Reputation, Distributed Authority, Collaboration, License to Participate, Peer Review, Transparency, Public Benefit, and a Shared Work Product all spread like roots in the virtual world, drawing on the talents and abilities of users and giving back to them in the same way that tree roots both draw nourishment from the soil and act as nitrogen fixers, benefiting other organisms outside itself. This aspect of Mozilla, like the roots of a tree, are the most difficult to see, but they are critically important. Tree roots spread just as far and deep as the branches above spread wide and tall. Without a firm anchor in the community, relying on it for input and collaboration, none of Mozilla’s products would be possible to create.
The most visible part of a tree are its branches, which nourish the trunk and roots through their leaves in return for nutrients and support given from below. It is here that Mozilla’s most recognizable features– End User Consumer Products like Firefox and Thunderbird, the employees of the Mozilla Corporation, the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, and revenues brought in from numerous sources– are found. Each of these are like a healthy, productive branch grafted into the rootstalk, each bringing unique attributes and yielding results that benefit the entire organism as a whole. The success of each of these grafts depends upon the constant support of Mozilla’s roots in open source development. Without nourishment in the form of peer review and global community collaboration, none of Mozilla’s products would bear fruit.
Initially, the difference between the roots and branches may not be that evident, but if you take a closer look, you can see that while branches can be trimmed, grafted, trained, altered, and even removed, roots cannot. The core values that keep us anchored to our purpose cannot be changed. But Revenue can vary. Employees can come and go, and the fruit the tree bears can vary in quality and quantity. The roots offer stability; the branches flexibility.
The trunk of Mozilla’s tree is the vital connection between human beings and technology, allowing an ongoing human connection through the internet. This is where the flow of input and output of energy and creative power intermingle and work together for the benefit of the whole.
This image taken from nature is a much more accurate way to describe Mozilla, its structure, and its goals than a simple map or diagram. To dissect Mozilla along hard lines would do nothing but slice it into useless chunks. Mozilla functions as a living organism, with every part of itself equally important and critical to the success of the whole. The result is organic software– products that respond to and are sculpted by the people who use them.
We just concluded the discussion of Mozilla identity led by Mitchell and Mark Surman. The conversation focused on community. What is it? How do you define it? Who gets to be included in the concept of “community”? This discussion made the relevance of the biological metaphor even greater. “Community” is a collective word, in the same way “ecosystem” is. Just as nutrients are cycled through the various parts of an ecosystem, so is code, the end user, the contributor, and the decision maker in the Mozilla Project. Define it, dissect it, and it ceases to exist.
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