It'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.


๐Ÿ’ฌ Comments from the original post

[...] ile under: Asides Chris Messina, one of the guys who built Spread Firefox, has announced he’s moving on due to the direction the site is going. Of course, watch what you say about [...]
craig · 2005-04-19 17:33:22
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.
Tom · 2005-04-19 20:42:23
I support your move even though it's a saddening one. Hopefully things won't suck in the future.
anthonymcg.com · 2005-04-20 12:19:23
SFX loses Chris Messina For those who don't know of SpreadFirefox.com, it's a site dedicated to spreading news about the open source browser and has been very popular. This week they have lost one of their admins, Chris Messina, who has decided to move on from the project a...
lai-san · 2005-05-06 18:37:50
Hello Chris: I ran across this today. Am just poking in my head and saying hello.
[...] y old haunt, Spread Firefox. It wasn’t perfect and it hasn’t had much going on since I left this past spring, but it did feel more alive to me than the community that [...]
Sublimating at FactoryCity · 2006-03-20 01:15:50
[...] So this bit about sublimating… here’s what convinced me that this is the right thing for me right now: the cycle that I go through with jobs and structure and so on is like the ice รขโ€ โ€™ vapor sublimation process. I started out at Flock as vapor, all energy, busting with ideas and ready to take on the world. Over time, I learned the ropes, slowed down a bit, condensed into water: amorphous and flowing, moving from one thing to the next. And now, as has happened with previous projects, I’ve turned to an idle form of ice, ready to sublimate into a new form of volatility, ready to take on the next challenges, to surface the next horizon, my next big thing. Tags: factorycity, flock, sublimation [...]
[...] I can’t help but notice that not much has happened with Spread Firefox since I left, even though my good friend Jamey continues to feed me mockups and possible redesigns of the site. [...]

Passing the torch