Money for Nothing, and the Chicks (work) for Free

Ada Initiative reached its goal fundraising banner

Fundraising is almost as hard for me as self-promotion.  In fact, it’s easier for me to do the broadcasting I did around the Ada fundraising than I imagine it would be for me to do my own seed round for an idea I felt excited about.  I express with regularity how grateful I am for the people who practice social work in our society, doing outreach to the outcasts & downtrodden. I am also ever so thankful for people who can ask more times than I for contributions to important causes. No matter how valiant the mission, it’s such redundant communication, keep-your-chin-up, bright-siding, and a task this introvert, who merely has bouts of extroversion, finds very taxing.  So major kudos, fireworks, and many many pats on the back to Val Aurora and Mary Gardiner who held their own idea up and asked repeatedly for community contributions to support its very bright future. Thanks are due in advance for what they will continue to do now that there are some funds, to move forward and amplify the mission of getting more women, empowered women into all levels of Open Source communities.

I’ve observed that all these self-starting, entrepreneurial men act *entitled* to having people (often other men) throw (and put at risk) huge wads of cash on barely-developed ideas that appear promising on the surface.  And don’t a huge percentage of them fail?  And don’t many of those same men dust themselves off, move on to their next idea, and run the same game again?

Now, there’s some major class privilege here – these are generally very privileged men we are talking about. Men who have various safety nets, and often no dependents. Also they are the golden boys of capitalism (especially right now, and especially in the Bay Area) and that type of money lending/growing is not our game at orgs like the Ada Initiative.

BUT.

When it seemed like the Ada Initiative’s fundraising goals wouldn’t be met, I found myself questioning the expectation of the Ada Initiative to get funds, to be a ‘we pay people’ organization.  There is a lot of messaging out there that tells women who care about outreach and diversity initiatives that this work should be extra, volunteer, and passion-driven (and can’t you just eat passion for breakfast?) kind of work.  I had to look hard to double-down my resolve to believe in (and broadcast) the opposite.  We should be able to ask for this, expect it, drive this point home repeatedly WITHOUT SHAME.  At this point I don’t care if someone thinks we’re asking too much, too often and I have not yet actually HEARD someone say that, I just made it up in my head. Then I had to notice it, and figure out how to tell that voice to shut the fuck up.

So here’s what I tell myself (and the other Ada Initiative advisers on our mailing list):

  • What you’re doing matters.
  • You should get paid for doing it.
  • You’re creating tremendous value.
  • It is fair to ask people to kick back a portion of their income (esp. earned in the tech industry) to help with outreach and diversity efforts.

The point of sharing my internal voice re-write here, and pointing out how others manage to do it without shame when working on capitalist models is to say:

As much as humanly possible (and your strength to do so will vary day to day, understandably) – please fake it.  Fake that sense of entitlement.  Pretend sometimes that you’re one of those guys who think people should give you millions just cause you made some little piece of plastic on a 3-D printer and you’re going to take your idea over to China and mass-produce more plastic for people who make too much money to buy from you in droves.  Fake that confidence as much as you can until it’s real – because our mission sure as hell is and the value of this project is bigger than their million-dollar, landfill-feeding crap any day.

Isn’t “hack” a bad word?

This past weekend I led another soft circuits 101 workshop as a Mozilla Rep at a women’s music festival near SF called Fabulosa. I had one hour to teach people really basic electricity, circuits, and how to ‘hack’ their clothes/sculptures/lives with a 3V battery and some LEDs.

The reason I love to do this workshop is because I find it gives participants a physical representation of the hacker spirit Mozilla aims to embody for the web.  Learning soft circuits is just the tip of the iceberg and I always stress that the web has much more info for them to continue exploring, learning, being curious about how to create and modify technology in their lives.  In one hour, I just show them how to make light.

This workshop was smaller than the ~80 girls who came through at Dare 2B Digital.  The festival setting meant there were more conflicts of interest so I had 6 participants instead of the 20-25 I had planned for. The 6 participants were all very enthusiastic though, and we started off with a go-around to hear why people were interested in learning soft circuitry.  One person was hoping to learn how to light up her clay sculptures, another wanted to make art for Burning Man, and a few had costume ideas in mind.

I spent the first 10-15 minutes explaining electricity, how a circuit works, and what kind of circuit they would be creating with their 3V batteries and LEDs – their circuits would be made using conductive thread sewn into felt (or some other material if they brought it).  With only 40 minutes left, we got to work – everyone started in on their first circuit.

While we were casually chatting during the building time, one woman said “I thought ‘hack’ was a bad word” (I had written a large “HACK” on the whiteboard to inspire).  I’m so glad she brought this up and we had a chance to discuss the very reason for workshops like these, and for Mozilla. I explained to her that while it might once have been a vilified term, it has now been largely reclaimed as people work to make sure that they have full ownership of the things they buy, or make.  Encouraging people to open their minds up to the potential of hacking their lives – whether on the web or in the physical world – always feels great.  I was happy that even in this small gathering, we got to discuss this very key issue for technology going into the future, and that there are now 6 new hackers in the world.

App Marketplace Ratings

Woot!  Our recently release re-vamp of Firefox for Android is climbing the Top Free chart over on the Google Play Store (as it should, it’s frickin’ awesome).  We’ve gone from #96 to #81 in the past 3 days and I have no doubt we will continue to climb as we gain users and get a chance to impress them with the Native UI which is responsive, beautiful, and support Flash.  Our rating in the store is also slowly climbing, but that’s going to be a much harder slog because our current rating still reflects the total collected in the entire life of this product being on the store.  We can’t remove ratings from our previous Firefox for Android and so even though we’ve had 5,000 5-star reviews in the first 10 days of the re-written version being online, our average rating is a 3.7. The only way to get a fresh start would have been to put up a ‘new’ product and call it something else and I’m sure you can understand that Firefox can’t go by any other name.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the Google Play store and how it could be better because I interact with its administrative backend regularly, uploading new builds of the mobile products release after release.  I was just sitting through a presentation by Dees at ReMo Camp 2012 in Berlin and he was sharing with us the strategies behind the Mozilla Marketplace. This will be our open-source contribution to mobile/desktop app distribution and seeing the mockups started me thinking about how we could improve the rating system and not just repeat what Google and Apple do with user feedback.

I’d like to see the following:

  1. User leaves rating, gives stars + writes text feedback
  2. App developer can select reviews to flag as ‘bug report/feedback’ which requires them to write text that will be presented to the user.  The developer can write a message either letting the reporter know that a bug is on file now for the issue or provide help with the issues/questions raised by the user.
  3. User gets a notification when the review is flagged and that there is a response ready for them. They can check out the bug report that got filed as a result of their feedback and perhaps they will cc themselves to know when it gets fixed or they might get a chance to try out the suggested solutions from the dev to deal with issues or questions they raised in their original review.
  4. User, now that they have gotten feedback, gets prompted to revise their review.
  5. Repeat 1-4 as needed

This would be beneficial for many reasons:

  • Users get to be a part of helping improve the product
  • Users get support from the developer without needing a different forum or login
  • Users get visibility into software development process, awareness of upcoming features & improvements, and they become participants in open source community
  • App developers have a channel to communicate with users about upcoming dev plans, feature requests, and bug tracking
  • App developers get a collected feedback average that is more accurate and representative
  • App developers have a channel to communicate with users about upcoming dev plans, feature requests, and bug tracking

I’m used to Mozilla’s collaborative environment, the values of open source, and I’m accustomed to getting feedback in our open bug tracker, Bugzilla.  There are so many companies whose products I use who do not have public bug trackers and this causes me a lot of frustration when I find bugs with their software.  I want to tell their devs about the bugs I find.  Software has bugs!  Have a bug tracker! Let people see and understand that software is a continuous improvement process so we get less reviews like this:

firefox feedback in google play store, lamenting the lack of tablet support

I’d love to let Brian know that we are sooooo close to having our tablet support ready, that we have a few outstanding bugs but it’s on-track to ship with Firefox 15 in a mere 7 weeks. We’re a tiny team compared to the Gopplesoft mobile dev teams, give us a chance to prioritize and push each goal to the finish line. With only 20% of our Firefox mobile users on tablets, we had to focus on the 80% small device folks first and then – remember, only 8 weeks later – we got our tablet ducks in a row and ready for our fabulous tablet users.

Alex should get to see a bug filed on the pinch zoom (if there’s not already one) and as one of the admins of the Firefox product, I should get a chance to interact with the folks who leave 1 or 2 star reviews since they are often based on one or two issues that are real but fixable.  I want our rating to be reflective of the work we do as we do it, incrementally improving over time. Of course, our marketplace code is open source so I suppose I should do what Paul Rouget suggested earlier today and make up some prototypes 🙂