26. March 2014
(re)introducing Mark Côté, Bugzilla Assistant Project Lead
I’ve invited Mark Côté to step up to fill the Assistant Project Lead position vacated by Simon Green two months ago. He’ll also be taking on a role as a “Community Coordinator” to try to step up efforts to make new community members feel welcome and encourage more involvement.
You probably all know him most recently for his leadership in the project to move our source control from bzr to git. He’s a long-time developer outside of Bugzilla, and has been heavily involved with Bugzilla the last year or so via his participation in maintaining bugzilla.mozilla.org. He’s mainly been in the role of a project manager for BMO, and that’s really what Bugzilla needs right now. We haven’t had a really good project manager or community coordinator in a long time, and the state of the project kinda shows it. In another first (in recent history), “approval” rights aren’t initially coming with the job. Any patches that need commit approval can continue to be directed towards Byron (glob) or myself (justdave).
I’ve had a long-standing policy of trying to avoid having the entire senior leadership team being employed by Mozilla, in order to try to keep it a real community project and not feel like it was being controlled by Mozilla, but the reality is that nobody else from outside of Mozilla has been involved enough to step into this kind of role in the recent past, and it’s better to have it filled and get things done than to leave it vacant and let the project stagnate even further. If he’s an effective community builder, that problem will probably solve itself eventually.
We’re going to try to set up another real-time project meeting soon either on IRC or Air Mozilla or in Google Hangouts again (that wasn’t too bad when we did it) so we can regroup on where we are and where we plan to go. Expect to be hearing from Mark on that soon.
For more information about Mark, see his Mozillians profile at https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/mcote/ or his LinkedIn profile at https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=27908882 or find him in the #bugzilla channel on IRC as mcote.