p2p news / p2pnet: “The Economist has a story about a trapeze artist who, in her spare time, is the Chief Lizard Wrangler at a non-profit,” writes Sara Chan on slashdot. She goes on, “You perhaps know her as Mitchell Baker, leader of Firefox. From the article:

“Ms Baker gradually found herself the leader of this project. Perhaps this is because she is a somewhat unusual member of the Netscape diaspora. For a start, she is a woman in a community populated, as one (male) colleague puts it, by geeky males with ’spare time and no social life’. Ms Baker herself has never even written code. She studied Chinese at Berkeley, and then became a lawyer – her role at the old Netscape was in software licensing. On all technical matters, she defers to Brendan Eich, her chief geek.”

The Economist piece is headed up Firefox swings to the rescue and says “Mitchell Baker, trapeze artist and leader of an open-source web browser, is on a mission to keep the internet free”. It has Mitchell, “, whose asymmetrically cut swoosh of red hair is reminiscent (“by coincidence”) of the Firefox logo,” saying, among other things:

“The browser matters; it’s the piece [of the internet] that touches human beings. This area shouldn’t be stagnant; it should be exciting.”

One of the secret of Firefox’s success is, of course, the fact that it’s open source and the slashdot item also points to a Q&A Roblimo had with Mrs Baker in March.

[clip]

Roblimo: I’m going to add a question in here that isn’t on this list of reader-generated questions, but more than one reader said, ‘Help, I want to help, I’m offering support.’ What’s their best way to get involved?

Mitchell: That depends on where that person’s expertise is and how advanced it is. So if this person or anyone else is actually at a point to write useful patches, then that’s the single best way.

Now, of course there’s a set of people who want to be involved and aren’t yet accustomed to our code or need to learn more about it. For those people, there’s another series of steps. Some of those – and again it depends on what people want to do – some people find a good way in through the QA process: defining bugs and then doing test cases and fixing them. Other people find a good way in through writing extensions.

And there’s a number of people – since the technology necessary to write extensions is a subset of our total technology pool – who get a good handle on that and write interesting extensions that catch people’s eyes and then, through that, look deeper into the product. If someone, for example, already had Toolkit or Cairo or, you know, Mac OS X experience and was able to just jump right in and do things, that’s always the single best way.

Back to The Economist write-up on Mitchell, it concludes:

“Ms Baker considers it a success that Firefox has already spurred Microsoft to invest again in browser innovation. This is crucial if the internet is to evolve to its next phase, she argues. Often dubbed ‘Web 2.0′, this will enhance users’ experiences of the internet. For instance, technologies such as AJAX (short for “asynchronous JavaScript and XML”) supply applications that run on the internet with the same look and feel as applications that sit on the computer. And user-generated media such as blogs, podcasts and wikis are on the verge of mainstream adoption, promising an age of creativity. ‘Web 2.0 could have happened a lot earlier, if Microsoft had not had a monopoly for a decade,’ says Ms Baker.

“Firefox, simply by existing, has done its bit to fix that.”

The pic of Mitchell (upper right) is from Cdibona’s photostream on flickr.

Read:-
slashdot – The Economist on Mitchell Baker, December 16, 2005
The Economist – Firefox swings to the rescue, December 14, 2005

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