I spent most of last week in Mountain View, California, getting oriented to my new job at Mozilla. Going forward, I'll be working from home in Austin on developer documentation and community for the Mozilla Developer Center. Mozilla, in case you weren't aware, is the people who make the Firefox web browser for desktops and mobile devices, the Thunderbird e-mail client, and a bunch of other cool open-source, web-related technologies. I've barely scratched the surface of what I need to learn in order to be most effective, but I've learned enough to have some idea of where, how, and who to ask my questions.
Mozilla is all about as much openness and transparency as possible. That is reflected in the layout of the Mountain View offices, which are all open-plan desks, with no private offices, even for executives. There aren't even cubicles per se, since the dividers intersect at 120-degree angles, so it's a loose honeycomb of desks. There are lots of small and large conference rooms, which anyone can grab for impromptu as well as scheduled meetings, or phone calls, or just to get away from others' hubbub. All but one of these meeting rooms have glass walls to the rest of the space — transparency again. (The one closed meeting room is because there are always some confidential matters, even in a company dedicated to openness.)
I'm on the Evangelism team, which is part of Engagement, which is
In the short term, I'll be working on documentation related to Firefox 4, which goes beta later this month. In the longer term, I'll also be working on the transformation of the Mozilla Developer Center into the Mozilla Developer Network — that is, from a collection of documentation into a hub of community and information for the various types of developers that Mozilla serves.
And just in case you're wondering, documentation for ordinary users is provided by the Support at Mozilla (SuMo) team and community. As I said in my article in Open Source Business Resource in January, users don't know and don't care about the difference between documentation and support, as long as they get answers to their questions. Michael Verdi has recently joined that team to manage and enhance the content in the Support Knowledgebase. His post about his first week at Mozilla is much cooler than this one.