“Free and open source from the roots up. “Open source” can be much more than a development methodology. For me, it also constitutes a world view that upends institutionalized notions of competitive advantage that saw their apex in the twentieth century.”

Excerpt from Paul Kim‘s “Why I Joined Automattic” published September 9, 2009.

Freedom by Abnel Gonzalez, CC by, Flickr Hosted

I’ve come to think of the people who build open source and free culture into their businesses as not only having the creativity and resolve to put their values at the core of their businesses, but also the foresight and humility to know that the future is always built on the past, that the future is outside of their control, but possibly not their contribution.

This is one of the main reasons I so enjoy working with Matt Mullenweg, Toni Schneider, the rest of the Automattic crew, and the WordPress.com VIPs and WordPress businesses I get to so regularly interact with. I’m ecstatic that Paul has joined us!

My first project is to help Mozilla Central/Eastern European communities and raise the awareness of what’s going there in Mozilla project. ) It means that I consider myself as a kind of evangelist, strengthening Mozilla signal in Central and Eastern Europe and on the other hand strengthening the signal from those countries inside Mozilla.

It sounds like he will have a similar community role combining evangelism and technical leadership in internalization and localization there. It seems like a natural progression in his career. He will be continuing his work that was previous volunteering for Mozilla and combining it with a mandate. He is a incredible addition to the Mozilla Corp team!

Zbiggy is a lot of fun to work and hang out with. His energy and passion for open source and helping everyone (around the world) get access to great software and web services is infectious.

I’m not surprised that he studies sociology at university. He really cares about people and tries to improve things on the greatest scales. He is one of my inspirations.

Zbigniew was generous enough to answer some of my questions about his transition over email.

If one has recently read “not-invented-here syndrome in Mozilla” they might be very surprised by you joining Mozilla Corp, except if they really know you. If they know you then they would appreciate the article as your usual candor, and that you were and are as passionate and positive about Mozilla as ever.

This isn’t the first time that Mozilla has considered hiring you and you considering joining their team as an employee, what made the union successful this time?

Tricky question. I can’t say there is a single reason, it’s more that I have grown. I consider any projects as a kind of adventure, a challenge. It has to have the excitement factor, it has to be worth taking, but on the other hand, you have to be mature enough to be a useful part of the team — not the one dangling at the rear of the group. It’s much easier to just stay a volunteer. Mozilla is a unique kind of organization, successfully experimenting with merging corporate business with community and openness to the extend not tested before. It’s unwise to jump in, scream a lot and try to influence the direction of such a huge and tremendous effort, when you don’t feel ready yet. And it’s not worth jumping in to sit down in the corner. So now I feel I can at least whisper something from time to time

Another factor is that Mozilla is reaching the first major creative reorganization since Firefox was accepted as the flagship product. With David Ascher leading a new communication-focused effort, John Lilly taking over the CEO role, stronger investigation of mobile zone and what’s most important, Mozilla 2 project shaping up, there’s a lot of exciting things going to happen I spent the last years volunteering in Mozilla, and, honestly, Flock was the place where much more exciting things were happening for me – as it always happens with pre-1.0 startups. Thanks to the Flock team, I had a chance to participate in the birth of a new web browser, focused on the social web, free to experiment with each and every part of the UI… that was amazing – you should remember that too

So post 1.0 “My World” is much more reliable, and I’m so happy to see that Flock 1.0, Flock 1.1, and Flock 1.2 are all pretty much ready in terms of internationalization without me spending sleepless nights on it

The last factor is the right project. I’m studying sociology, I’m fascinated in how the community works, and while being a member of Mozilla Europe board, I was always pushing in the direction of human social studies on the communities. To understand them better and help them help us So it seems that I managed to get my proposal through

Who will you be reporting to?

I’m extremely proud that Paul Kim, who was always extremely helpful to me, agreed to be my manager Besides that, I am, of course, reporting to, and cooperating with Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, and Jane Finette, who’s Director of European Marketing at MoCo

What new opportunities and challenges ahead are you most excited by?

Everything. I’m diving through Mozilla’s corporate culture, routines, learning new names, I must say a lot has changed in Mozilla since the Firefox 1.0 days. Jane is extremely helpful in guiding me through the first weeks, and, what’s maybe even more important, she’s very patient. Thank you, Jane!

I hope to start blogging much more often about my major project in Mozilla, but first I need to prepare for FOSDEM and do the backlog after my exam session.

No one would question your integrity, but many people appreciated your independence, is there anyone else that will provide your previous perspective straddling the Mozillas?

I’m surrounded by extraordinary people, who’re participating in one of the biggest open projects in the history of the Internet. I know many of them for almost 8 years now. I don’t feel that anything changes here. For last 2 years I’ve been a member of the board in Mozilla Europe, so I don’t feel like I’m getting any new inclusive view.

I also hope that my friends, who know me, will be able to kick my butt if they feel like I’m getting conformist It includes you!

Who will be asking all the interesting questions?

Hey, I can promise there are no brain washes on the way into Mozilla. Noone asks you to sign any chirography and nobody “proofreads” my blog posts. Everything is still the same

I don’t expect my questions to stop appearing, I expect myself to have a bit more influence on causes of those questions. As I mentioned at the beginning. It’s a responsibility. I’m joining people like Axel, Pascal, Seth who’re on the first line of communication with our community. This is a kind of role that requires a lot of pushing here and there to get things working better for outsiders.

Don’t worry, there’s always this kick-in-the-butt or slap-with-the-trout whistleblowing system applied in case of emergency

What will your legacy at Flock be?

Flock can be localized to zillion+one language. And Flock has localizers that are localizing the trunk. If one is in the l10n business, he knows what that means.

Besides, I think I was the initial concept author for what’s now called My World, and there are some other small things that were shaped when I was around. I think I brought the coffee for Chris when he doing some nice mockups – that counts, right?

Have you found any time for working on Bugzilla lately?

Nah. I’m still in the very same point with this: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/gandui/ being quite a good concept IMHO

I’m not going to promise that I’ll find time for this. I won’t work on the dashboard until I feel I have a lot of time for my girl, hobbies, job and life

Zbigniew responses share his usual exuberance, humor, and humility. He is too modest. I remember him championing the My World experience based on Netvibes and similar experiences long ago. It became one of my favorite ideas, and I still am looking forward to a more customizable experience being in Flock, a related experience being part of all web browsers, and tighter integration of widgets in desktop OSs, but I digress.

When I asked Clayton Stark, Flock’s VP of Engineering, who would be filling Zbiggy’s big shoes, he said that the responsibilities would be shared among various folks. He had nothing, but extreme appreciation to his work and contribution at Flock:

Gandalf has been a major contributor to Flock for a very long time, and he has been instrumental in securing localizers to create the long list of language versions we now have. Beyond this, Gandalf has always been an active voice in the evolution of Flock, and a great person to work with. I congratulate him in his official move to Mozilla — in my opinion, Mozilla Europe has lucked out to get such a great person on their team.

Definitely, this is great news for Mozilla. Congratulations Zbigniew! Congratulations Mozilla!

PS. Zbiggy has created a Open Projects community survey. Please take the little time to help him in this project.