Passing the torch

SFX TeamIt’s time for me to move on from the Spread Firefox admin team. I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks considering this decision, and the time has come. I’ve weighed my interests and where my passion lies with what I can offer the SFX community and my effort is better spent hacking at the systemic problems and challenges in organizing, leveraging and empowering grassroots and open-source communities than in simply spreading Firefox.

I intend to stay involved as a contributor since my next project will be directly beneficial to and influenced by the Mozilla community, but I am no longer interested in the day to day operations of SFX. I simply do not have the same enthusiasm for the project that I had when I volunteered over seven months ago and think that the community would be better served by someone with fresh ideas, new motivation and more time.

The community has and always will mean a great deal to me and the fact that my work has been received so well by so many people gives me a wonderful sense of pride and purpose. I’ve been a volunteer from the beginning and I have great hope that I can channel my experience towards the greater purpose of spreading open source principles and culture beyond the Firefox community and focus my efforts on building tools that empower and encourage individuals.

To be clear, this was wholly my decision motivated by the direction in which the team has been moving lately. When it became clear to me that Spread Firefox was to be 100% about spreading Firefox and less about spreading the open source ideals through lifting up the whole open source community, I knew I had to give serious thought to how to I could continue to be an effective advocate while remaining consistent and authentic with my true hopes and aspirations.

Author: Chris Messina

Head of West Coast Business Development at Republic. Ever-curious product designer and technologist. Hashtag inventor. Previously: Molly.com (YC W18), Uber, Google.

8 thoughts on “Passing the torch”

  1. Best of luck to you, Chris. I’m glad that there are people like you out there willing to wave the flag for open source in general. It’s something which I only discovered myself in late 2003 when I found WordPress. Up to that time, I thought that “open source” was the domain of the alpha-geeks.

    I’m now a big supporter of open source, and now I look for an open source solution before a commercial source.

    Keep up the good work.

  2. I support your move even though it’s a saddening one. Hopefully things won’t suck in the future.

  3. Pingback: anthonymcg.com
  4. Hello Chris:

    I ran across this today. Am just poking in my head and saying hello.

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