“Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.” — Jesus

It has been said that “Mozilla has a long history of gathering people with a wide diversity of political, social, and religious beliefs to work with Mozilla.” This is very true (although perhaps not all beliefs are represented in the proportions they are in the wider world). And so, like any collection of people who agree on some things and disagree on others, we have historically needed to figure out how that works in practice, and how we can avoid being a “kingdom divided”.

Our most recent attempt to write this down was the Community Participation Guidelines. As I see it, the principle behind the CPGs was, in regard to non-mission things: leave it outside. We agreed to agree on the mission, and agreed to disagree on everything else. And, the hope was, that created a safe space for everyone to collaborate on what we agreed on, and put our combined efforts into keeping the Internet open and free.

That principle has taken a few knocks recently, and from more than one direction.

I suggest that, to move forward, we need to again figure out, as Debbie Cohen describes it, “how we are going to be, together”. In TRIBE terms, we need a Designed Alliance. And we need to understand its consequences, commit to it as a united community, and back it up forcefully when challenged. Is that CPG principle still the right one? Are the CPGs the best expression of it?

But before we figure out how to be, we need to figure out who we are. What is the mission around which we are uniting? What’s included, and what’s excluded? Does Mozilla have a strict or expansive interpretation of the Mozilla Manifesto? I have read many articles over the past few weeks which simply assume the answer to this question – and go on to draw quite far-reaching conclusions. But the assumptions made in various quarters have been significantly different, and therefore so have the conclusions.

Now everyone has had a chance to take a breath after recent events, and with an interim MoCo CEO in place and Mozilla moving forward, I think it’s time to start this conversation. I hope to post more over the next few days about who I think we are and how I think we should be, and I encourage others to do the same.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HackingForChrist/~3/P5xDqnNwVwg/