It turns out that extrinsic incentives — the old “carrots and sticks” system of punishments and rewards — really don’t motivate us very much at all. This isn’t to say that things like money, benefits, promotions, and bonuses aren’t important, but science tells us that after a certain level (i.e. when pay is already fair and equitable), extrinsic motivators aren’t really all that effective.

True motivation is something at once more simple and more complex. Intrinsic incentives — those motivations that come from within and are part of our fundamental character and make up — are the real reason we strive to excel, why we take such satisfaction in producing exceptional work, and are what lie behind our real passions and drives.

Pink postulates that there are three elements to intrinsic motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

The first element, Autonomy, is based on the observation that people are more likely to be engaged in and passionate about something if they are free to be self-directed — allowed not only to choose what they work on, but to find their own solutions, strategies, and approaches to the work involved. Pink puts forth “four Ts” where autonomy and self-direction matter: task, time, technique, and team.

Compare these two situations: In the first, you are asked to work on a project you select, on your own schedule, using methods you choose, and with a team that you recruit. In the second, you are asked to work on something you’re not interested in, on a schedule someone else sets, using methods you have no influence over, and with people you can’t trust, don’t like, and find difficult to work with. Which would you find more motivating? Where would you do your best work? Autonomy is an absolutely fundamental part of motivation.

Mastery, Pink’s second element, is based on his belief that we each have an innate “desire to get better and better at something that matters”. This drive is what lies behind that seemingly magical state known as “flow” — where time falls away when you’re working on a clear task that is just challenging enough without being frustratingly difficult. When our tasks are just slightly beyond our current level of mastery we are inspired to push ourselves to get better and accomplish ever greater things.

The third element, Purpose, provides a grounding context for the other two. “Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do it in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more.” If you believe that what you’re doing has a purpose larger than yourself — say, as an example, ensuring there is choice and innovation on the internet and safeguarding the future of the open web — you’re going to be even more motivated to accomplish amazing things.

The book mentions both Wikipedia and Firefox as examples of what people can accomplish when driven solely by intrinsic motivation. All three elements are present: contributors are autonomous (entirely self-selecting and able to scratch whatever itches they like), highly skilled and driven to continually get better at what they do, and they usually have a pretty fundamental belief in the purpose and importance of the larger project. Working together over several years, the people involved with these projects have accomplished what most sane people would have believed was impossible only a few years ago. Intrinsic motivation is powerful, powerful thing.

If you’re interested in understanding the power of intrinsic incentives (and, to some extent, the dangers of extrinsic incentives) and harnessing those to motivate your team or open source community to even greater feats of awesome, I think Drive is definitely worth reading.

Luckily Rob taught me a trick to open up some space in my Firefox toolbar. Just right-click in the space beside your search bar, select Customize…, then add some “Spacers” where you want some extra space. Here’s a step by step guide, using the Two Little Birds persona:

1. Sad birdies, search bar in the way.

2. Right click beside the search bar and select Customize…

3. Open up the Customize menu…

4. Add some spacers, and remove some buttons to free up space…

5. Ta dah! No more sad birdies.

This is something the Planet team was discussing prior to the holidays, but we hadn’t picked it up again until prompted by Matt’s post. It turns out that we should be able to rig the existing Planet software to do more or less what Matt suggests, we’re just not currently sure how well the software will deal with a large number of channels.

I figure we may as well start by defining the ideal and work backwards from it if we run into technical limitations. I’ve expanded upon Matt’s proposed category list, and started defining a set of keywords and keyphrases that the Planet software would use to filter posts into each category.

I’ve posted that list on the Mozilla wiki, and would like your feedback and help. What categories are missing? Which could be safely consolidated? What other keywords should we filter on for each? Etc. You can edit that page directly if you like, or leave a comment on this post. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla policies

The policies are minimal and relatively straightforward, but if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment here or to email any/all of the Planet Mozilla team (listed on the wiki page).

If you’ve never heard of it, Project Gutenberg (Wikipedia page) is an almost entirely volunteer-driven effort to digitize, archive, and distribute “cultural works” (mostly books). It was established in 1971 and now includes over 30,000 free ebooks that you can read on a wide variety of devices including computers, cellphones, various mobile devices, and ebook readers.

Project Gutenberg contains some amazing, unparalleled works of literature and it is an incredibly valuable resource that just doesn’t seem to get the credit (and support) it deserves. This challenge has two purposes:

1) To inspire people to read some of these wonderful old classics, and
2) To support Project Gutenberg.

Here’s the challenge

1) Set a goal: Pick a number of Project Gutenberg books you think you could read over the next year. This can be anything from a conservative 2 or 3, a more ambitious one per month, or a hardcore no-holds-barred one per week. The number is entirely up to you. Post a quick comment here if you would like to make your goal public!

2) Make a donation: Donate a few dollars to Project Gutenberg. I’m going to donate $2 for each book in my goal, but that’s just a suggestion. Just try to send ‘em a couple of bucks if you can.

3) Find some books and start reading. Each time you finish a book, blog a quick review of it, fire off a tweet about it, or post to Facebook about it. Encourage other folks to play along, donate a few dollars, and read some of these amazing pieces of literature. Project Gutenberg is a great and under-appreciated project that is doing some fantastic work, so let’s show ‘em some love.

Not sure where to start?
Here’s a quick baker’s dozen of some of the fantastic books available through Project Gutenberg:

• Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
• Walden, Henry David Thoreau
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin
• Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• Dracula, Bram Stoker
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
• Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Jacob and Whilhelm Grimm
• Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
• Harvard Classics bookshelf (for a real challenge)

Stickers!

Here are some stickers you can put on your weblog if you decide to participate. Link the sticker to this blog post, and we’ll see how many people we can get reading some old classics and supporting Project Gutenberg.

* Disclaimers: I’m doing this just for fun. I am in no way associated with Project Gutenberg, and they have no idea I’m doing this. Having read their legalese I think I’m ok calling this the “Project Gutenberg Project”, but I didn’t ask for their permission (so the name may change!) If you decide to donate, please go to the Project Gutenberg site, and follow their directions.

Very cool original stamp graphic is from Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

Happy reading!

Planet Mozilla survey.

Thanks!

The Planet Mozilla team would like your help. Planet Mozilla is a central and vital part of the Mozilla Community, but we think it could be better. We’re looking for your input on what you think Planet is (or should be) for, how well it’s fulfilling that purpose, and how it could be improved or augmented to better serve our community.

Please take a few minutes of your time to answer our three short questions about Planet Mozilla. We really want as much feedback as possible, so you can also leave comments on this blog post if you have other questions, comments or insights about Planet or other Planet-related things. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla survey.

The Planet Mozilla team would like your help. Planet Mozilla is a central and vital part of the Mozilla Community, but we think it could be better. We’re looking for your input on what you think Planet is (or should be) for, how well it’s fulfilling that purpose, and how it could be improved or augmented to better serve our community.

Please take a few minutes of your time to answer our three short questions about Planet Mozilla. We really want as much feedback as possible, so you can also leave comments on this blog post if you have other questions, comments or insights about Planet or other Planet-related things. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla survey.

Please take a few minutes of your time to answer our three short questions about Planet Mozilla. We really want as much feedback as possible, so you can also leave comments on this blog post if you have other questions, comments or insights about Planet or other Planet-related things. Thanks!

Planet Mozilla survey.

Thanks!

“One of the tough truths of management is that we all have trouble making choices. While older and supposedly wiser, we still often act like kids in the candy store who want everything. Some of the best CEOs and managers are those who stop things and get their companies or their teams focused. GE’s Chief Learning Officer, Susan Peters, notes that for successful managers at GE ‘prioritization and focus are keys to doing well. Sure there are other things that are not on the priority list, but you do them differently or more slowly.’”

Motivation – you’re doing it wrong (TEDTalk)

Dan Pink’s TED Talk about the science of motivation, and how there is a mismatch between what science knows and what businesses often do to motivate people. “Dan’s point is that rewarding performance mostly doesn’t work and often leads to worse performance.” The interesting part really starts around the 12:00m mark, where he stops talking about how rewards don’t work and starts talking about what does — autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

How to Escape Perfectionism (Harvard Business blogs)

“Critical feedback is helpful as long as it’s offered with care and support. But the feedback that comes from jealousy or insecurity or arrogance or without any real knowledge of you? Ignore it. And if you’re a manager, your first duty is to do no harm. As managers, we’re often the ones who stand in judgment of other people and their work. And when we’re too hard on someone or watch too closely or correct too often or focus on the mistakes more than the successes, then we sap their confidence. And without confidence, no one can achieve much.”

Anyhow, the problem is that it turns out that asking for and giving feedback can be difficult. Asking a good question is a lot harder than I thought, and giving useful and constructive feedback is complicated by a whole variety of factors. I generally learn by reading, so I’ve started digging around and reading as much as I can about feedback. I figured I’d start linking to the interesting stuff I find, in case other people might find it useful as well.

A bunch of this first batch are from the Rypple weblog, which is a good place to poke around — there’s lots of interesting stuff over there.

• Good vs. Bad Questions (Rypple)
• How to avoid dead-end questions (Rypple)
• How will I be perceived if I ask for feedback? (Rypple)
• Good feedback, bad feedback (Rypple)
• The double meaning of ‘feedback’ (HBR)
• Find the gold in toxic feedback (HBR)

Promotion and growth

Recently, Alix Franquet arranged for the about:mozilla newsletter to be featured as one of the Firefox Start Page snippets. Prior to this, the newsletter had plateaued at around 2800 email subscribers (plus an unknown number of readers via the web and feeds), increasing by maybe 10-20 subs per week. Since being added to the start page, however, the number of email subscribers has exploded to 6800, and the number continues to grow by 300-500 subscribers every week. A million, million thanks to Alix for helping promote the newsletter like this.

Content and length

The newsletter has also been getting longer as the Mozilla Project continues to grow both in the sheer number of contributors and the number of projects being undertaken. I’m going to experiment with slightly increasing the number of stories mentioned while paring down a little on the number of words I write per piece, to see how that works.

Experimental source feed

I’ve also started an experimental “Source feed” of sorts. Each week, while I read through the various Mozilla-related news sources, I flag possible items for newsletter inclusion by starring them in Google Reader. A few weeks ago I also started “sharing” those items, so you can now see a raw feed of Mozilla news stories, mentions, and blog posts that I’m thinking about including in the newsletter. I’m not sure whether it will be useful or not, but someone asked if I could put it together, so here it is.

That’s about it for now. If you have any questions or suggestions about the newsletter, please feel free to leave a comment here or email me at deb-at-mozilla-dot-com.

1. What is your reading schedule? Do you have a schedule?

When I first get up in the morning, I start reading through email while the coffee brews. Once I get a coffee, I finish email (flagging stuff for later response, not responding as I go), then move on to read Twitter scrollback (rarely all of it), then forums, then finally moving on to feeds.

Feeds are the bulk of incoming stuff, and I have them cordoned off into folders that are ordered by general relevance. High priority stuff (work-related, generally, and friends/smart people) I check in on several times a day, Mid priority stuff is once a day or once every couple of days, and Low priority is once/wk at best. Low priority stuff often gets dumped unread when I declare a “Mark All Read” day :)

I don’t have a formal schedule — I’m online more or less all day, every day (except for the gym and the pub) and I just dive in and out of various communications streams randomly.

2. What do you read daily, and how often?

• Email: many times/day, usually flipping to that tab once or twice per hour.
• IRC: Constantly. I realized the other day that except for vacations and whatnot, I’ve been on IRC more or less every day since sometime in 1993. And I’m OK with that. IRC is like Twitter — profoundly simple, and so much more than the sum of its parts.
• Twitter: I am utterly fascinated by Twitter and I love it and I’m not sure why. Its immediacy and continual flow creates a sense of connectedness that strikes me as somewhat magical. I’ve been feeling these wires for a long time, and Twitter is something brand new that feels oldskool and important. The ambient awareness it enables is quite something. Very interested to see what develops there. Anyhow, I’m on Twitter all the damned time. Even out and about (but not at the gym).
• IM: When they come in. IM is real time, and I wish people used it more. It’s basically private IRC.
• Planet Mozilla + other Mozilla-related feeds: 4-5 times/day. I flag items for inclusion in the weekly about:mozilla newsletter throughout the week as I do this, compiling the final selection and writing it up every Monday.
• “Friends”, “People”, “Smart”, and “Work stuff” folders: once or twice/day. “Friends” stuff I generally read then and there (and has a pretty deep overlap between ‘work’ and ‘non-work’), but other stuff I’ll flag for later reading in bulk. (”People” and “Smart” is stuff that isn’t directly work related, but that is peripherally so; “Work stuff” is non-Mozilla stuff that is relevant to my specific job.)
• “Fun” folder: I’ll flip through my “Fun” folder if I have 5 mins to kill or need a break. It’s full of internet awesomeness like Cute Overload, I Can Has Cheeseburger, Overheard in NY, Passive-aggressive notes, etc. Pretty much guaranteed to make me laugh at least a few times/day, which is more valuable than gold.

3. What do you read more than once / week? How often?

• Stuff I’ve flagged for later reading when skimming through feeds.
• “Tech”, “Tech blogs”, “Web”, and “News” folders. There is way too damned much traffic in these to try to stay on top of them daily, but I usually skim through them a couple of times/wk. I skim pretty brutally, tho, and probably flag maybe 1 or 2 posts for every 50-100 that come in.

4. What blogs, feeds, and newsgroups do you read?
Blogs + feeds + newsgroups are all basically feeds for me, and I’m currently subscribed to over 200. My “Mozilla” folder contains:

• Above the Fold
• Foxkeh’s Blog
• Metrics Blog
• Mozilla Dot Org
• Mozilla Foundation Futures
• Mozilla Links
• Planet Mozilla
• QMO – quality.mozilla.org
• The irc.mozilla.org QDB
• The Mozilla Blog
• Web Tech Blog
• …and a handful of other personal blogs by Mozillians

Yes, I know it contains duplicates, I do that on purpose.

5. Lastly, name a guilty pleasure in your feedreader.
Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. She’s insanely awesome.

Bonus question: What do you use to read feeds?
Google reader, although I’d kill for something that would help me organize things better and deal gracefully with significantly more volume. I have to keep my feeds down to around 200, which is really a pain in the butt, since I’d like to follow hundreds (thousands?) more.

Taggees!

• Johnath Nightingale
• Gavin Sharp
• Mike Shaver
• Ben Hearsum

http://twitter.com/planetmozilla

Follow along @planetmozilla.

I’ve added the archives to the about:mozilla weblog, on their very own Newsletters archives page. The blog itself hasn’t been in use for quite some time, but I’m re-evaluating that now and there will likely be activity there again soon.

The about:mozilla newsletter needs to evolve. It launched about 14 months ago and hasn’t changed at all in that time while the Mozilla project has continued to grow and expand. Based on the feedback I’ve received from a few people, I’m proposing that the newsletter morph from a “light and quick overview of a handful of interesting items” to a “full-blown newspaper for Mozilla project contributors”.

This is going to involve a lot more research and editorial work, and it could end up being longer, but it will have better structure and organization making it easier to skim and digest. As something targeted at project contributors, I think it will be more useful overall.

The following static sections were suggested:

Firefox
* Feature development, major changes, demos, etc.

Labs and add-ons
* Labs, labs projects, AMO, add-on news (Firebug, etc)

Other products and projects
* Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, etc.

Upcoming releases
* Shortform list of all known/announced upcoming releases

Security notes
* Quicklist of recent security issues and information

Infrastructure and IT
* All project-infrastructure related news – upcoming planned outages, upgrades, changes, etc. Bugzilla, tinderbox, graphserver, etc.

Project coordination
* Upcoming bugdays, testdays, l10n events/deadlines, community marketing events, etc.

Events and conferences
* Devdays, barcamps, meetups, labs nights, Mozilla-involved conferences, etc. Bullet-pointy.

Meetings and meeting notes
* Standard reminder about the Community Calendar and all the goodness that resides there. Link to meeting notes blog + rss feed.

In the media
* Recent important media mentions or other PR-related things of interest

Mozilla
* MoCo/MoFo/MoMo related news. EC stuff, goals setting, education program, governance, awards, etc.

Etcetera/Miscellaneous
* Anything else that’s interesting enough to include.

What do you think? Good idea? Terrible idea? Do the proposed sections cover everything? Are there other things that would be useful in a weekly project newsletter? What else could/should be included?

I really want this newsletter to be as useful as possible for our project contributors, so your feedback is really important. Please leave your comments here or email me privately at deb-at-mozilla-dot-com. Thanks!

1) Web feeds
2) Email gateway for reading/replying
3) Threaded discussions

Partial points for two out of three.

The Mozilla Labs team is launching a grand experiment towards rethinking, redesigning, and redeploying the Labs website, and we need your help. All the details are over on the Labs weblog, and you can join the discussion in the Labs forums.

This is going to be a fun and crazy project, and everyone is welcome and encouraged to take part. We want to build something amazing, and we need your help figuring out what that is, what it looks like, and how it all fits together.

As the Mozilla project grows ever larger, it’s increasingly difficult to stay abreast of the latest news and goings-on throughout the community. A little over a year ago I started the about:mozilla newsletter in an attempt to make it slightly easier to get a general overview of the project, writing about releases, events, and announcements about Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, the Foundation, the Corporation, Mozilla Messaging…etc., etc., etc.

The newsletter has been a pretty solid success, but it’s time to step things up a little, so I have three questions for you, dear reader:

More news than space

1) There are always more news-worthy stories than will fit in a single edition of the newsletter, and the number is increasing. Do you have any ideas about how I could cover more news without making the newsletter too long and unweildy?

Promotion and reach

2) How do you think I could better promote the newsletter? I’ve had comments recently that while useful, it just doesn’t seem to have the reach and impact that it could.

Overall quality

3) In general, what do you think of the about:mozilla newsletter? What do you think it does well? What do you think could be improved?

I’d really love to get your feedback on these things, or any other ideas or thoughts you have about the newsletter. Please leave a comment here or send me email at deb@mozilla.com. Thanks :)

The Rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
• Let them know they’ve been tagged. (you’ll just have to trust me)

The Seven Things

1) I figure skated for many years as a kid and was pretty good at it. I quit when I was 17.

2) I haven’t driven since sometime in 1994. Until this year I just never lived somewhere where I needed a car. My license has since expired, so right now I find myself in the interesting position of owning a vehicle (a second-hand van I got for a song) but not being able to drive it.

3) I used to collect comic books. I still have two decent-sized boxes, most of which are old X-Men and related mutie titles. I am an annoying person to watch the X-Men movies with.

4) I didn’t get interested in food until around 2001 and didn’t really start cooking at all until 2002-2003. In 2001 I was living in Montreal, and it was there that I discovered that food can be f&*%ing incredible. The combination of cheap rent, high salary, and a city full of insanely awesome restaurants expanded my epicurean horizons by several orders of magnitude. Until then I’d largely lived on ramen, kraft dinner, and boiled potatoes with butter. I am not joking.

5) I was addicted to the Asheron’s Call MMORPG (an early precursor of World of Warcraft), and played it with obsessive-compulsive fervour for two years. Funnily enough, the game is still going, having recently celebrated their 100th monthly update. I hope they leave it going forever, if only so I never have to completely say goodbye to Dereth. Holtburg, represent.

6) I was a total goth in highschool (more of an early precursor to goth since goth wasn’t goth then). There is no photographic evidence of this that I am aware of, and I would like it to stay that way.

7) I really love camping, but never get a chance to go any more. I’ve even gone winter camping, which is crazy fun although your feet are basically wet the whole time.

Seven People

• Shaver – Because he introduced me to Asheron’s Call.
• Lilly – Because he’s fun.
• Melissa – Because she’s awesome.
• Mary – Because she’s also awesome.
• Zab – Because he’s Zab.
• Peter Rukvina – To get this meme over to PEI.
• Nicholas McDowell – Because I’ve known him since something stupid like 1994 but haven’t actually met him yet. Yay internet.

Until a few days ago I have been using the Vienna feed reader for Mac OS X. It’s a pretty decent workhorse of a reader with a standard email-client-like user interface, the ability to group feeds into folders and subfolders (and sub-subfolders), and all that. It has always frustrated me, however, that my feedreader — through which I consume the majority of my Web content — wasn’t part of Firefox. In fact, I could go so far as to say that Vienna was on close to equal footing to Firefox as my core tool for accessing the Web. This has always struck me as somewhat ridiculous, so I’ve played with all sorts of tools for reading feeds via Firefox, whether they be add-ons or web-applications or what have you. None have ever been compelling enough to switch me away from Vienna until now.

I’ve discovered Feedly, you see, an incredibly slick Firefox 3 add-on that’s been in development for quite some time.

While I’ve only been using Feedly for just over a week now, it has already completely streamlined how I manage, view, and deal with my feeds. Brilliantly, Feedly leverages the existing Google Reader web application as its back end, and throws in added functionality, other service integration points, and a significantly improved UI for good measure. It installs as quickly and easily as any Firefox add-on, displays your feeds in their own tab, and essentially integrates your entire feed reading experience right into your Firefox. Feedly is almost exactly the sort of tool I was hoping to find, and while it does still have a few bugs and rough edges, it’s by far the best feed reader I’ve used to date.

Check it out: Feedly at Mozilla Add-ons.

I like that definition a lot.

about:mozilla is a blog and weekly newsletter that focuses on the major news items related to the Mozilla Project. These news items can really be about any aspect of the Project, ranging from development news and schedules through marketing and community events. For an idea of what sort of news we cover, just check out the blog or the past issues.

We’re looking for help. Do you follow or are you involved in a particular part of the Mozilla Project? Do you think there’s news and information about that part of the Project that deserves to be included in the about:mozilla blog and newsletter? If so, please send a note to about-mozilla at mozilla.com. Ideally you will include a snappy headline, a short version of the story you’re submitting (a few sentences is sufficient, really — the newsletter needs to be short and to the point), and at least one link where readers can get more information.

This is the painful dichotomy of working with a distributed community, I guess. The global nature of our community means that we get to work with some of the best and brightest people working on the Web anywhere in the world. The global nature of our community, however, also means that we very rarely have an opportunity to meet face-to-face and talk about things in person. When we do, it’s incredible — this Summit was just mind-blowing in that it gave so many of us a chance to meet people we’ve been working with remotely for years. Online collaboration is great, of course, and is an astonishingly powerful tool that allows us to do what we do, but there’s something deeper you get from in-person meetings. Finally seeing the faces and hearing the voices of long-time friends is…something. I’m not sure how even to describe it. But it’s valuable. Immeasurably so.

I’m already looking forward to the next Summit, whenever and wherever it ends up being. I also think I will try to travel more (if I can) — more conferences, more visits, more chances to meet other Mozillians face-to-face and to talk about things. I have so many ideas swimming around my head from just three days of chatting with folks — making it a regular thing can only be even more generative, creative, and energizing.

Update! Rob has posted some pictures, too.

I’ve had a chance to meet lots of other folks as well, and have had tons of great, inspiring, and amazingly energizing conversations over the past three days. Being in a room with 400 brilliant, dedicated, passionate, and incredibly hard-working Mozillians is humbling. I am astonishingly lucky to be part of this community. So, even though there were bears, and a rockslide that blocked the road, and a power outage, and even snow in July — this has been the best Summit ever.