Public dev meeting / Collaboration / The challenges in documenting history of large open-source projects - inspired by the Mozilla case
Reference
- Reference meeting: "a06-380 — minisites — mgalli — writing — collaborative writing projects and the case of mozilla — 8f6c1232-2a5d-42da-9b6f-bc48cb5b98e8 Friday, January 17⋅3:00 – 4:00pm"
- Parent projects: Collaboration
- Participants: Marcio S Galli
- Text language: en-us
- Tags: transparency, openness, collaboration, mozilla, oralhistory, interviews, about:mozilla, mozilla the book.
- Document status: Copyright, draft.
Summary of quest
Every time I learn about a major Mozilla event I reflect about what would take for a community or a group of individuals to try to make a book about Mozilla, the possible impossible thing. Exactly because of the too many interpretations, too many layers, too many people. Too many voices, too many Mozillas. I even find funny, or a paradox, to think that the Mozilla community was able to create Firefox, or a lot of things behind that gave birth to Firefox (if it was not Firefox would be probably something else like Bugzilla as a Service) but writing its own history seems to be a challenge at another level.
Anyway, in part this subject bothers me not because Mozilla needs really any historical timeline to be done urgently. But because Mozilla serves as inspiration, a case, of a very complex open-source project with too many narratives. In this context, at least I finally stumbled a this project http://mozillamemory.org thanks to a post from a ex-Mozilla colleague.
Resources
Interview with Stephen Donner example of historical interview.
Draft writing about the challenges in buildig any narrative about Mozilla - Celebrating the 21 years of Mozilla, and articulating a design strategy for the Book of Mozilla