How volunteers contribute to 40 percent of Mozilla's work

The Economic Times

There's a cool new video player in the Firefox Web browser that Mozilla released on June 30. But the onscreen buttons used to control it are too small for some visually impaired users to see. So Ken Saunders, a 41-year-old, legally blind volunteer for Mozilla, took it upon himself to create a tool that makes the player easier to use for people with vision problems.

Saunders is among hundreds of people who donate time and skills to Mozilla, the Mountain View (Calif.) company that releases Firefox and other open-source software. Even as Mozilla's internal staff has grown to 250, from 15 in 2005, an army of volunteers still contributes about 40 percent of the company's work, which ranges from tweaks to the programming code to designing the Firefox logo.

How Mozilla channels those efforts is a model for a growing number of companies trying to tap into the collective talents of large pools of software developers and other enthusiasts of a product, brand, or idea. "There's structure in it," says Mike Beltzner, who runs Firefox. "But at the same time you allow people to innovate and to explore and [give them] the freedom to do what they want along those edges—that's where innovation tends to happen in startling and unexpected ways."

At Firefox, Beltzer calls it "leading from behind." His team makes only the highest, direction-setting decisions, such as the date each new version of Firefox has to ship. It's up to Mozilla staff and volunteers to meet those deadlines through a process of identifying specific tasks that need to be done and accomplishing them. A system of recognition has formed among volunteers, who can be designated as "module owners" and given authority over certain areas, such as the layout.

LinkedIn Query Vexed a Lot of Users

Companies would like to follow the examples of Mozilla and online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which relies on unpaid contributors, as well as Linux, the open-source operating system developed by programmers who work for no pay. "There's no easy way to copy Mozilla," says Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. "But I do think that companies are increasingly going to look for ways to motivate their users to be participants."

Not all of these efforts go smoothly. In June, business networking site LinkedIn polled 12,000 of its users who had identified themselves as translators to find out what would motivate them to help translate the site's content into other languages. While 18 percent said they would do it "for fun" and about half of the respondents wanted some form of recognition, many took umbrage at the request. The American Translators Assn. even sent a letter to LinkedIn's CEO calling the aim of the survey "misguided" and "troubling." Company spokeswoman Kay Luo says LinkedIn wasn't trying to solicit free labor. "Our intention was to survey our members to see what level of interest there was," she says.

Google (GOOG) recently came under comparable criticism from artists after issuing an open call to use their work as decorative skins for the company's Web browser. Google wasn't willing to pay, but emphasized the opportunity for exposure. "We believe these projects provide a unique and exciting opportunity for artists to display their work in front of millions of people," the company said in a statement.