Product and User Experience Design in Open Communities

So you've gone off and built a wildly successful open source product and have a loyal user and contributor base. Well done! It's time to start planning That Great Thing v2.0, and your problem isn't a lack of ideas, it's a surfeit of them, each with its own passionate lobby, many in sharp contrast to each other. How does a product leader pick and choose without alienating part of the community that is the product's lifeblood? How does one design a coherent product from a random bag of ideas? This talk will share some ideas on how to deal with these questions, building on experiences learned from planning and delivering Firefox 2.0 and the upcoming Firefox release.

Mike Beltzner, Director of User Experience, Mozilla Corporation Mike Beltzner is a teacher and cognitive scientist by training, a skeptic and pragmatist by upbringing, and an optimist and compromise- seeker by nationality, and a usability specialist and product manager by employment. He holds the title of Phenomenologist at the Mozilla Corporation, and lives in Toronto with his wife and his cat.