Wrangler Doodles, green.

Building a Better World through Technology

co-founder Mozilla

( from the LizardWrangling Archive )

Category: Mozilla

  • Copyright law and technical advancement

    In a funny coincidence, two separate articles evaluating the effect of copyright law came through my reading stream this week:

    The first is the Ars Technica discussion of the theory that weak copyright laws in the 1700s and 1800s helped Germany catch up technologically.

    The second is a book review in this week’s New York Times. The book review is written by Lewis Hyde and called “A Republic of Letters” and the book is “Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership.” Apparently Thomas Jefferson wondered whether copyright should exist at all when writing the US Constitution, but was persuaded by Madison that a very limited law would be the best balance.

    Of course, there’s nothing new about the topic of how much intellectual property protection encourages creativity and innovation, and when IP protection backfires and stifles intellectual development. Even so, it’s a relief to see new works articulate the importance of evaluating our intellectual property laws in light of the things they are preventing, not just how much protection they can give. Now it’s time to read the actual book instead of the review 🙂

  • Brief Update — CEO Search

    A while back we announced that we were starting to look for a new CEO for the Mozilla Corporation as John Lilly moves to Greylock Partners sometime later this year. Here’s an update of what’s going on.

    First, there are a lot of exceptional people interested in Mozilla. Mozilla is in an exciting and challenging place. There’s a lot to do, the opportunities in front of us are immense, and the need for excellent leadership and execution is as great as it has ever been. Firefox on the desktop is strong and effective, we’re moving into the mobile space (Firefox Home for iPhone release this month, Firefox browser on Android phones coming later this year), Sync in Firefox 4 and related services in development. The Internet environment is changing, and Mozilla has a unique role.

    Second, we know that a great CEO needs a combination of a bunch of different characteristics, such as:

    • great executive skills — able to cause us to get things done, to get the right things done, and to get them done effectively and efficiently
    • able to lead in a complex strategic environment
    • collaborative, good at making others better
    • great technology sense
    • and of course, phenomenally attuned to the nature of Mozilla — who we are, why we do things, the centrality of the mission and the community building it

    We decided to start by getting to know people across a wide range of backgrounds skill sets. We’re fortunate that we have flexibility and aren’t pushed into making a hasty decision so we can do this. This means that our recruiters are talking to people with software backgrounds, Internet backgrounds, consumer backgrounds, open source backgrounds, platform backgrounds, engineering, strategy, start-up, big company and community backgrounds. The recruiters and John also spend a lot of time working together, and John has talked to a broad set of people as well.

    A few people have been surprised that John is so central to this process. I think that’s because it’s a bit rare to let the world know what’s happening at this stage. Often the first hint is the announcement of a new CEO, or that the old CEO is gone. In our case John is still here, still deeply engaged day-to-day and still our CEO in fact as well as name. He’s also the person closest to the CEO role and so a really good source for the candidates and recruiters.

    The next step in the transition process is to bring a much smaller number of people in to meet members of the MoCo Steering Committee — the management and leadership and strategy group for our product efforts, and if that goes well, to expand the number of people a candidate meets from there. We’re still in the very early stages of this part of the process. Members of the Steering Committee have met a handful of people and we expect to meet more in the coming weeks. So far this step has helped us figure out that a few candidates don’t fit, and some we’re quite eager to talk to more. It’s hard to predict what the right set of traits will turn out to be; the search is highly individualistic. John is fond of saying that he wouldn’t have looked like a particularly good candidate on paper either. That’s in part why we want to meet a wide variety of people.

  • ICUC 2010

    Last weekend I attended the Internet Cowboy UnConference in Wyoming, organized by Yossi Vardi. It’s a collection of people hand-picked for some combination of technology or media or advertising or investment savvy and so it’s wildly eccentric. It’s an “unconference” meaning that rooms and times and projectors and organization are provided, but all content is created by the participants by adding your topic to the schedule, which is kept on erasable whiteboards. Since this is in Wyoming the mornings are optional outdoor activities, and the afternoons and evenings are “school.” It starts Thursday evening and goes through Monday morning, though I leave Sunday night because Monday is generally a busy day at Mozilla.

    Some of the sessions are tightly related to the Internet, technology and media industries, and some wander wildly afield depending on who brings things — last year there was a fascinating video of a dance club and its members in Israel for example, plus some “let’s go do interesting photography” sessions. This year included Segway sessions, education for the modern world, the nature of conferences and events, and “21st century statecraft” in addition to the Internet-focused sessions. Plus an evening talent show, a gadget-a-thon and the local rodeo. It’s amazing what one learns about people while watching them paddle on a raft in (mild) white-water!

    Last year there was a lot of erasing and rearranging and combining of topics, this year it seemed much less so to me. Last year I joined Don Levy of Sony and Rachel Masters in jointly hosting a session on creativity and synthesis — I even took a piece of in process fabric artwork with me since it had caused the topic to be top-of-mind for me. This year I didn’t expect to lead a session until I got there and a few people were disappointed.

    I decided to host a session on a topic of interest to me where I’m still thinking things through. This leads to more of a discussion than a presentation, and allows me to learn at least as much as anyone else. I opted for what I called “Delivering the Internet Experience — browsers, “apps,” TV, the “web.” I wanted to explore the question of how we get the characteristics that have made the “web” so innovative and explosive as new use cases develop. The session turned out to fit in well with a few of the other sessions. We started with one on big trends — search, social, for example, what has made search so successful, how do the underlying concepts relate to today’s big trends. Then Jeff Pulver lead a session on the real-time web called “Connected Me.” Then my session, and then one on the ways in which “the titans” of different areas of the industry are likely to end up competing more and more with each other. It was a pretty interesting set of conversations. In part because a similar group of people self-selected to attend this arc and so we could push ideas around from different perspectives over the course of a few days.

    A good part of the discussion about apps, browsers, the web was not surprising — local execution is fast, it’s easy to like the current “app” model as long as there’s only one platform, much harder if the Internet remains heterogeneous or new technologies/ platforms develop, web platform not (yet) as rich in accessing capabilities of the devices.

    Much less crisp (and also more interesting to me) was the discussion about the traits of the web that we don’t have with the current app model, ranging from the ability of developers to reach a potential audience without centralized control to the ease with which one can move from consumption to creation on the web. We also talked a bit about how and where a human being has the ability to integrate, mange, filter, change and “own” his or her online life. To me, this is an often-hidden but essential aspect of a browser. The obvious part of a browser is that it delivers the web, and this is a massive task. The less obvious piece of the browser is its ability to give an individual the ability to integrate, manage, and change our experiences across the range of sites we visit and apps we use.

    Thought-provoking and fun as well.

  • Mozilla Drumbeat Festival: Barcelona Nov 3 – 5

    Mozilla has always been about building openness, participation and individual empowerment into the infrastructure of the Internet. Our products are very powerful ways of doing this.

    Mozilla Drumbeat is a new initiative for people who want to use the open infrastructure of the Internet to bring openness, participation and individual empowerment to other aspects of online life. One such area is education and learning. We know that the Internet can make new types of learning possible. It’s also an area where individual empowerment makes a lot of sense – so many people are eager for education but don’t have good options within the existing systems.

    Learning, Freedom and the Web     is the theme for this year’s Drumbeat Festival, which will be held in Barcelona Nov 3 to 5. Take a look, and if you’re active in this area please do let us know.

  • My Interpretation of a “Baby Quilt”

    I just can’t make myself make the traditional baby-themed quilts. This one is on its way to Germany, though the baby in question is 5 months old now!

    For those interested in process:most of this started out as white silk which I painted with acrylic paints, with the exception of a few of the rays which are commercial prints.

  • Planned Leadership Transition

    When John Lilly joined Mozilla, he told me he expected to contribute as an employee for two years. At the time John had originally been planning to join the investing world as a venture capitalist. That was five years ago.

    Sometime this year John will step down from his role as CEO at Mozilla to join the venture firm Greylock Partners, returning to his original plan of investing. John will remain on the Board of the Mozilla Corporation. And he will also remain at Mozilla during the transition. The timing of this announcement — just as we begin a formal search for a new CEO — is to make this process more open than is generally the case and is a reflection of the uniqueness of Mozilla as a public benefit organization dedicated to openness and participation in Internet life.

    It’s been a pleasure to work with John in building an organization that marries our public benefit mission with extraordinary reach and excellence in execution. Mozilla is now on a path to reaching half a billion people (400 million so far) around the world in more than 78 languages, Firefox on mobile is coming to life — and Mozilla’s global community and organization is bringing individual empowerment to more people and more areas of Internet life than ever before.

    As we work through this transition, we have confidence that the Mozilla community will continue working to advance our core purpose — building openness and individual empowerment into the fabric of the Internet.

  • Heartfelt moment of the week

    Discussion of what “open” means to Mozillians in Drumbeat group leads to this (emphasis added):

    Open is:

    Equal accessibility for all, without barriers, regardless of person’s mental or physical abilities, financial status, education, or native language.

    I learned that from Mozilla.

  • Let’s speak up about Mozilla’s public benefit status

    Last weekend I had an extra half day in San Diego while waiting for a gymnastics meet (entry level boys competition) to start. I had an experience that makes me feel even more strongly that we should be telling everyone we touch that Mozilla is a public benefit organization, existing to build the Internet as a global resource; open, accessible and “hackable” by all. I’d like to see most or all Mozilla websites make this clear, and I’d like to see our products make this very clear as well.

    At the hotel I saw a brochure for “Quail Botanical Gardens” in a rack with brochures featuring San Diego’s many visitor attractions. I love gardens so I took a look. It sounded potentially interesting but I was also wary of finding a “tourist trap” where someone has planted a few basic plants and is trying to find newbies who will pay to see them. So I went poking around their web site.

    The first thing I noticed after the photos was the statement, “The mission of the Garden is to inspire people of all ages to connect with plants and nature.”

    “Hmm,” I thought, “that sounds a lot like a non-profit mission statement.” It soon became clear that this is the case – the garden is a non-profit organization. My worry about the tourist trap immediately decreased, and I felt better about the chances of something worthwhile coming of a visit. Non-profit organizations can make mistakes. They can be boring and ineffective just like anything else. But the chance that the whole thing was just something dumb designed to get people there to extract money felt much, much lower.

    As it turns out, the garden is great. Lots of bamboo, subtropical fruit, cactus and other fun items, and I’ll go back next time I am in the San Diego area.

  • The Mozilla Polish Community

    The Mozilla community in Poland is one of the earliest and strongest Mozilla communities. MozillaPL has been active for a decade — well before Firefox, before the Mozilla Foundation was established and before we shipped our first product (the Mozilla Application Suite) in 2001.

    In the dark, difficult days of Mozilla before we were a “success” the MozillaPL team was a clear indicator to me that we were on the right track. In those days — before RSS, before social networking, before personal blogs — our only project wide news source was an independently run fanzine called “Mozillazine.” The first time I saw an item about MozillaPL I was astonished. And the items kept coming. Mozilla PL did this, MozillaPL provides support, MozillaPL had this great idea and is making it happen.

    The creativity, dedication and leadership of MozillaPL made it clear to a bunch of Mozilla contributors that the difficult days of Mozilla could lead to something better, something much brighter.

    Yesterday Poland suffered a tragic loss as many of its national leaders were lost in a plane crash. A partial list, from the New York Times:

    “Among them, the Polish government said, were Mr. Kaczynski; his wife, Maria; Ryszard Kaczorowski, who led a government in exile during the Communist era; the deputy speaker of Poland’s Parliament, Jerzy Szmajdzinski; the head of the president’s chancellery, Wladyslaw Stasiak; the head of the National Security Bureau, Aleksander Szczyglo; the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Andrzej Kremer; the chief of the general staff of the Polish Army, Franciszek Gagor; the president of Poland’s national bank, Slawomir Skrzypek; and the commissioner for civil rights protection, Janusz Kochanowski. . .”

    plus a hero of the Solidarity movement, and dozens of other people heading to a memorial of national significance itself.

    Our hearts are with you.

  • Meeting the California Secretary of State

    Last week at an Open Source Digital Voting Foundation event I had the chance to meet Debra Bowen, the California Secretary of State. The Secretary of State is the elected official responsible for the integrity of the electoral process — making sure that our voting system is accurate and honest and counts every vote correctly.

    After talking to Secretary Bowen I ended up quite happy that she was elected to this role. Secretary Bowen is deeply interested in transparency, openness, and privacy. She is also a strong advocate for using open source software as the basis for digital voting equipment. Not long after she was elected she commissioned an independent review of the reliability of voting equipment and the auditing process, and found some disturbing facts. She’s been active in trying to fix these to bring more accuracy and trustworthiness to our system.

    It was really fun to meet an elected official who understands implicitly that software code can effect our lives in much the same way as legal codes can.

    I also learned that one of the big surprises I had at my local polling place recently is due to Secretary Bowen. The average age of the people who donate their time to run the polls in California is — again according to Secretary Bowen — 77 years old. But last time I went to vote there was a young woman there. We talked to her a bit — she was a high school student. It turns out that Secretary Bowen has a program to encourage high school and college students to participate in making the voting process possible. It seems a giant step forward from how I grew up, which was simply taking the whole process for granted.