Mozilla Roles and Leadership
The Mozilla project is governed by a virtual management team made up of experts from various parts of the community. Some people with leadership roles are employed to work on Mozilla and others are not. Leadership roles are granted based on how active an individual is within the community as well as the quality and nature of his or her contributions. This meritocracy is a resilient and effective way to guide our global community. The different community leadership roles include:
- Module Owners and Peers
- Module owners are responsible for leading the development of a module of code or a community activity. This role requires a range of tasks, including approving patches to be checked into the module or resolving conflicts among community members. Lists of code module owners and non-code module owners are available.
- Super-Reviewers
- Super-reviewers are a designated group of strong hackers who review code for its effects on the overall state of the tree and adherence to Mozilla coding guidelines. Super-review generally follows code review by the module owner, and the approval of a super-reviewer is generally required to check in code. More information on code review can be found in the mozilla.org code review FAQ.
- Release Drivers
- Release drivers provide project management for milestone releases. The drivers provide guidance to developers as to which bug fixes are important for a given release and also make a range of tree management decisions.
- Bugzilla Component Owners
- Bugzilla component owners are the default recipient of bugs filed against that component. Component owners are expected to review bug reports regularly, reassign bugs to correct owners, ensure test cases exist, track the progress toward resolving important fixes, and otherwise manage the bugs in the component. The Bugzilla component owner and the related module owner may be the same person, but in many cases they will be different.
- Benevolent Dictators
- Benevolent dictators are trusted members of the community who have the final say in the case of disputes. This is a model followed by many successful open source projects, although most of those communities only have one person in this role. Mozilla has evolved to have two people in this role—Brendan Eich has the final say in any technical disputes and Mitchell Baker has the final say in any non-technical dispute.