Mozilla launches ‘Impact Mozilla’ program
Mozilla, the makers of the wonderful Firefox browser (and many other good things), launched a new community initiative called ‘Impact Mozilla‘ a few days ago.
As many of you know, Mozilla is one of the most active open source initiatives with many thousand contributors who volunteer to work on topics such as development (coding), bug testing, localization and spreading the word (grass-roots marketing). With ‘Impact Mozilla’ the guys at Mozilla headquarter pushed this concept a couple of notches up and into a new direction: ‘Impact Mozilla’ is a contest where Mozilla asks for ideas on how to improve activation (i.e. turning people who download Firefox into people who actually use Firefox). The person with the best idea not only wins $3,000 in price money but also gets the chance to see his idea being put into reality; effectively he will get the budget and the resources to realize his proposal.
Sounds like a good idea? Well, for me this is one of the most interesting initiatives which I have seen in the last year in terms of community involvement: Most open source projects (including Mozilla I assume) might have a strong community on the tech side (as most of the volunteering work is based on writing code or doing other, fairly technical jobs) but lack on the side of marketing, business development, etc. The reason - at least from my perspective - for this lies in the very nature of open source. At the end of the day (ah, I love this phrase - nearly as good as ‘This is so third quarter 1999′… but we are getting side-tracked) open source is something mainly for geeks (this is not meant in a decremental way!) or at least rather tech savvy people. Marketing and Biz Dev monkeys like myself usually have little to contribute - and even if I would like to contribute, I wouldn’t even know where to start. I’m not a coder, I’m not a localizer and bug testing might be something I could do, but have little interest in. But - I have done quite a bit of marketing in my life, thought long and hard about activation problems in numerous jobs and here I have a chance to make a difference for an open source project. With my skills. As a non-coder. Great!
I believe that this is a wonderful opportunity for tons of people out there to stick their teeth into a real-world problem which is not easy to solve. One where a solution could make a huge difference. And one where the winner even gets to implement the solution himself. If you ask me - if I would be still in university, this would be something I would rally a small team together, apply all my theoretical knowledge to and come up with some cool ideas.
Now - how does this make any difference to anyone else but Mozilla? Quite frankly - if you have a startup (which automatically means you are notoriouly short on resources) and have somewhat of a community - Why don’t you go out and try to get your community involved into your business. Who knows what happens and you might find your perfect VP Marketing through something like this.