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Building a Better World through Technology

co-founder Mozilla

( from the LizardWrangling Archive )

Category: Mozilla

  • Executive Director Search Update

    The Mozilla Foundation is looking for an Executive Director. We’ve been doing this for a while now. We suspected that the number of people who can understand and lead something of Mozilla’s complexity and history would be small and hard to find, and we were right. Here’s where we are.

    We’ve had three or four meetings of the search committee where we talked to a number of potential candidates. So far we haven’t found a candidate the search committee thinks is close enough to introduce to the broader Mozilla group. (And of course, this process is sensitive for the candidates, so we only want to introduce candidates who we think have a reasonable chance of making sense for Mozilla.)

    One important thing we’ve learned so far: It’s hard to find someone who understands both open source software and the consumer space. This is an area where Mozilla is truly a pioneer and this has been clear in the search process. We’ve talked to a number of people who understand software and open source software in particular. We’ve found that many of these folks are almost exclusively focused on things like conferences for open source developers, understanding the various open source stacks and so on. Most of these folks have not spent time living in a consumer world, or building consumer software or trying to talk to consumers. I think our massive contact with consumers is one of the unusual — almost unique — characteristics that Mozilla brings to the effort to promote openness, interoperability and participation on the web.

    Another set of people understand consumers well but don’t have much background in software or open source development. Some of these folks are very smart, understand the Mozilla mission and could do a lot to help us bring the Mozilla vision to a broader set of people. For these folks the issue is generally: do they understand — or can learn – enough about Mozilla and Internet technology to be effective? That includes both being accepted by our developer community as a viable leader and understanding enough about Internet technology to be creative in our world.

    We’ve come across a couple of people who seem likely to bridge this gap, although there have been setbacks. One potential candidate had to withdraw due to family circumstances. But we haven’t given up by any means.

    I’ll try to do updates more frequently, and/or encourage another member of the Search Committee to do so. When we have a candidate who looks promising there will certainly be public discussion.

  • EFF Pioneer Award

    EFF Pioneer AwardThat’s a photo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award awarded to the Mozilla Foundation and Mitchell Baker.

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a nonprofit organization that defends consumer and citizens’ rights in the digital world, primarily through the judicial system. Each year the EFF presents its Pioneer Awards, recognizing “individuals and organizations that have made significant and influential contributions to the development of computer-mediated communications and to the empowerment of individuals in using computers and the Internet.”

    The award ceremony was last Tuesday at the O’Reilly ETech conference in San Diego, California. There was a brief introduction for each award winner. John Perry Barlow, one of the original co-founders of the EFF, introduced Mozilla. He spoke about the significance of the name — the Electronic Frontier. He said they choose this name believing that there will be a frontier in the digital world for a long time to come. He also said that the Pioneer Awards reflect the ongoing presence of a frontier and its pioneers. There are vast new territories before us — unknown, wildly exciting and yet potentially dangerous. The future of the electronic frontier is unclear, we are defining its character as we go along. And thus, the pioneers today are no less pioneers than those of 20 years ago.

    This is of course great to hear. It’s personally satisfying, but it’s also a perfect lead-in to talk about Mozilla. Each recipient was asked to speak for about 5 minutes (or, more precisely, “more than one minute, less than 20 minutes, and somewhere between 3 and 7 minutes.”) John’s introduction let me jump right into what makes Mozilla work. Mostly I talked about how at Mozilla we know there are pioneers, because we see them every day. We have massive numbers of people working to build an Internet that has civic and social value — as well as personal economic gain — built into its fabric. I noted that we focus on interoperability, transparency, openness, participation as the social factors that build and define a great Internet experience as well as our products.

    In was a very rewarding evening, and an honor to be recognized.

  • 5 Days in Europe; Feb. 2008

    Here’s a brief report of my trip to Europe, which started on Saturday, February 9 and ended on Friday the 15th.

    Leave Saturday evening. Lose most of a night’s sleep. Arrive in London Sunday afternoon. Do some work, walk around a bit try to work out the kinks from the plane trip. Get a decent night’s sleep.

    Monday: Up at 6 to get some work done before meetings start at 8 a.m. Press meetings go until almost 7 p.m., with fortunately a break for lunch. We had four taped sessions, two video sessions and two sessions with photographers. One photographer literally took us walking around the streets and blocking sidewalks for photos. The questions ranged from introductory and general topics to a discussion of philosophical differences reflected in different open source and free software licenses. Jane Finette manages the logistics and keeps me where I’m supposed to be.

    Tuesday: Up at 5:30 for a flight to Munich. On the way Jane and I learn that the local city airport has cancelled many, many flights — including ours — due to heavy fog. In the cab Jane manages to get a new flight for us from a different airport and we head in a different direction. I was pretty surprised — I can’t really imagine being in a cab and being able to change a canceled flight from San Francisco airport to a different flight from the San Jose airport, all with a single phone call to a number gleaned from the airline’s website, but Jane and Lufthansa managed it. By the time we get to the airport (Heathrow this time) the fog has moved around and our new flight is a couple of hours late leaving.

    This would all be fine except that the journalists we’re meeting in Munich have flown in from other parts of Germany and have their own plane flights back. We arrive at the hotel in Munich to find one of the journalists on the hotel steps eager to get started so we have time to talk. I’m so tired I promptly spill a bunch of coffee all over the serving table. But I’m also clear that the hotel has seen this happen many times, so I blithely ignore the dismay of the organizer and plunge in. Mozilla’s market share in Germany is around 35% so this is not an introductory conversation. It’s pretty deep into the specifics of Mozilla and the kinds of questions that someone very familiar with Mozilla would ask. The most novel part of the discussion was a few questions on the interaction of Firefox 3’s offline capabilities with our Prism project. I love the chance to talk to journalists who have time to develop their own expertise and perspective — one never knows where the conversation will lead.

    Tuesday’s press meetings went until 7 p.m. or so. Jane and I managed to get a nice meal (my first actual meal of the day) about 8:30 p.m. I spent the rest of the evening thinking about the talk I would give on Thursday morning at the Netxplorateur Forum. I spent a few hours during the middle of the night thinking about this as well, since I wasn’t satisfied with my progress. I seem to be unable to develop a talk or a slide show or a presentation and give it over and over. Or even to take the same presentation and tweak it. I am compelled to prepare a talk for the specific audience and event. This means I am rarely really prepared until I have a sense of the event and the people. In other words, I am almost never prepared when I get on the plane. It adds a lot of extra stress but I’ve been unable to change this pattern.

    Wednesday I leave Munich and fly to Paris. Wednesday evening Tristan, Anne-Julie and I meet up for a bit. Then we enjoy a delightful dinner with a bunch of Mozilla contributors who have gathered in Paris. This is my first trip to Paris on behalf of Mozilla and thus my first time meeting a bunch of these folks. I know of them of course, and in many cases have long online working relationships but of course meeting people and seeing all these folks together is extraordinarily invigorating. I leave around 10 to get ready for the talk the next day.

    Thursday- get up early to get to the Netxplorateur Forum before it starts. Again, I am compelled to attend the early parts of an event where I’m speaking. I like to hear the introductory remarks and absorb the tenor of the event so I can speak more clearly to the audience. In general I like to hear the keynotes for this purpose. But today I am the keynote, so I have to gather the sense of things from smaller clues.

    The event was “designed to enable key political and business figures to grasp how Internet culture will transform the way our institutions and our companies are managed.” The audience was described to me as “400 French political, business and media decision-makers . . .” So the audience is clearly educated, in leadership positions but not necessarily particularly familiar with the ins and out of Internet technology. Firefox market share in France is around 25%, so I expected most of the audience to know of Firefox, but not necessarily to know much about the way it is created or how Mozilla is organized, or why so many participate. I was asked to speak for about 45 minutes and then to answer a few questions. The event was held at the French Senate. It was an odd setting because the buildings themselves are spectacular but they are not set up for an event like this. There was no place to get water for example, which is hard during a day of talking.

    I spoke about what Mozilla is, how we work, our public benefit basis, why we believe building public, civic and social benefit into the Internet is both important and possible, and about the techniques we have found that promote participation and individual motivation. These are topics that people are very interested in. A number of people stopped me afterward to say how encouraging and hopeful they find Mozilla and our ways of working. Many of these people are not remotely technical and are unlikely to build software. But they certainly understand the importance of the Internet, the desire to be able to participate, and the joys of an organization where doing things well relates clearly to one’s influence and leadership.

    Thursday afternoon was a series of meetings with French press. These conversations were detailed and deep, with journalists who know a great deal about Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird. We finished about 7 p.m. or so. Anne-Julie worked some miracles to get water, juice and even a good space where we didn’t have to keep changing rooms.

    Thursday night I had dinner with Tristan and we talked about Mozilla Europe and Mozilla in Europe and Europe’s influence on the Mozilla project in general. It was a funny evening. We realized that afternoon that Thursday was Valentine’s Day, and thus a bad day to try to find dinner without a reservation in Paris. We managed it at one place, but then learned that the meal was a special 4 course Valentine’s Day dinner, complete with Valentine’s Day decorations and wine and rose petals and such. So we ended up in the bar of my hotel where they said they could make some sort of vegetable soup. I was a bit distressed — it was another day where by 8:30 p.m. I hadn’t actually had a meal yet, just a lot of coffee and a snack here or there. But I forgot, I was in Paris, and even the makeshift vegetable soup was lovely. It wasn’t actually much of a meal for the day, but it certainly was tasty. Tristan and I managed to cover a lot of ground talking about Mozilla and making it even stronger and more effective at bringing openness and transparency to the Internet.

    Friday morning I got up and went to the airport. Actually, I got up early to go to the gym after so many hours sitting in uncomfortable settings. But the hotel had forgotten to mention their gym was under renovation and not available. So much for trying to stay healthy! I made it home Friday night on the edge of a flu, but managed to shake it off by doing nothing Saturday but sit around feeling exhausted.

    I was on vacation the week after the Europe trip, so haven’t had a chance to see the results of the various interviews. I’m feeling a bit out of touch still but hoping to get back into the swing of things in the next day or two.

  • Steering Committee

    Every now and then someone asks a question about the “Steering Committee” so I thought I’d give some background on what it is and how it came to be.

    The Steering Committee began early in the days of the Mozilla Foundation, sometime in 2004, I’m guessing. In these early days we were already trying to do a number of things- develop Firefox, develop Thunderbird, ship our then-current product known as “Mozilla Application Suite” or “Mozilla 1.x”, figure out a funding mechanism to sustain ourselves, establish relationships with other organizations, develop new communities (in particular, the visual identity team and the marketing communities), work with other industry organizations, to name a few. (In those days we had between 10 and 15 employees, plus a set of volunteers that was smaller than today but no less active or committed. The project was much smaller than now, but still trying to do many things.)

    We needed a way to make sure that these different activities were working towards the same general goals, that “the right hand knew what the left hand was doing” and that we had some sense of priorities for our resources. We also needed a way to think about “are we doing the right thing?” Is one set of activities getting too few resources? Too many? Causing difficulties in other areas of effort? Are we missing big opportunities? And we needed to do all this while still getting enormous- sometimes almost crushing- amounts of work done.

    It quickly became clear that most people could not keep track of all of these topics, effectively deliver their particular individual contributions and remain sane.

    We created the Steering Committee to deal with this. The Steering Committee is a set of people who both represent and provide leadership in the various types of activities we are working on. Over the years the individuals and number of people have changed, but it has always included Brendan Eich for overall technical leadership, a representative from the engineering and outreach / marketing parts of our efforts, and me, for overall organizational leadership. Today the term “Steering Committee” is used inside the Mozilla Corporation (“MoCo”). Mozilla Messaging may or may not use this term or mechanism, and the Mozilla Foundation doesn’t currently use this term.

    The goals of the Steering Committee are:

    • to track the overall progress of MoCo efforts;
    • to identify organization-wide activities and goals that move the Mozilla mission forward; and
    • to lead MoCo and the Mozilla project effectively towards meeting these goals.

    Thus the Steering Committee is responsible for a mixture of (1) empowering others to contribute most effectively; and (2) providing leadership in weaving the various strands of Mozilla together to bring the most possible benefit from our individual activities.

    I once had quite a heated discussion with someone who disliked the name “Steering Committee” intensely and felt that it should be called a “Management Committee” or “Executive Committee” as is common in many other organizations. In particular, the objection was that “Steering Committee” was too vague and seemed to ignore the leadership role. But the word “Steering” reflects a basic truth about Mozilla: we work differently than other organizations do. Yes, we need people to focus on the overall picture and to tie different functions together. Yes, we need people to think about the strategic goals and how to reach them. We need people who are world- class in competence and rare in creativity to do this. We need leaders in our mission, our goals for the Internet, our organization. We need them just as much we need leaders in code, in technical vision, in adoption, in local sensitivities, in analysis.

    But all leaders operate in the Mozilla context, including organizational and strategic leaders. These people must lead. They must motivate other people to join in the vision, to help create the means and the tools and the activities that allow us to succeed. Just like our module owners with code, these people must lead others who are not employees, and for whom the traditional management tools (salaries, promotion, etc) are irrelevant. This is not traditional management, it is something quite different. From the outside, from other companies, it may look a lot like traditional management. But within the Mozilla project the qualities that lead to success — respect, accomplishments, peer review, helping others to succeed, getting out of the way when someone with a good idea comes along, supporting new things based on mission and goals rather than personal style — must be reflected at all levels.

    In this sense “steering” is leadership. But it is leadership in the sense of helping people accomplish things themselves, of identifying which path is most likely to get us where we want to go and steering in that direction. It’s leadership though, and it’s hard. And there are some things about Mozilla which are unusual and make it hard in unusual ways. I’ll say more about this in a subsequent post.

    As I noted above, the Steering Committee is a set of people who both represent and provide leadership in the various types of activities we are working on, and who can work with others on topics that cross different types of activities. That’s a bit amorphous and doesn’t answer questions like “why type of activities” or “what level of leadership.” We try to have one person we can look to and hold responsible for each giant set of activities that we need to accomplish. In terms of titles, these people usually have a “chief” or a “vice-president” in their titles. Titles and management at Mozilla are a bit different than at other organizations, and so this isn’t a perfect way to map the Steering Committee to other organizations. But it’s generally close and probably the best “quick and dirty” way of thinking about the Steering Committee.

    Today the Steering Committee is:

    John Lilly, CEO
    Chris Beard, VP Mozilla Labs
    Mike Schroepfer, VP Engineering
    Paul Kim, VP Marketing
    Brendan Eich, CTO
    Harvey Anderson, General Counsel
    Mitchell Baker, Chairperson

    You can see that these are truly giant chunks of activities- engineering, marketing, overall technical direction, labs, legal. None of this is set in stone, we need flexibility everywhere at Mozilla.

  • 45,146 Miles

    I’ve been feeling very behind on a bunch of things lately. This isn’t so unusual, but I’ve felt more fragmented than usual. This is both in work and in the rest of life- we’ve had a water and mud leak into our house for this entire rainy season and are still trying to get contractors and such together to stop the rains from leaking in.

    So I looked at bit at my travel schedule. I sometimes say I don’t travel much, but I think that’s really a way of saying I don’t travel as much as I could, since Mozilla is an extraordinarily global project and I could spend all of my time traveling. In reality, I travel more than I realize. In December I was home for the weekends before and after Christmas, but I was sick for both of those. Really sick for one, which is rare for me. In January I was home for one weekend. I’ve been away for a bunch of February as well.

    With some poking around my airline milage account, it looks like I’ve flown something like 45,000 miles since Nov 23 — close to 500 miles a day for 3 straight months. It makes me feel a little better about being so behind, but not a lot 🙂

    So if I owe you a response, or it seems like I’ve started things and not finished them, I apologize. I think I’m traveling a bit less in the next couple of months and will turn to better follow-through.

  • The SQLite Consortium

    Yesterday Robert Accettura made an interesting post about the range of SQlite today titled “The Winner For Most Embedded Is: SQLite.” This reminds me I’ve been wanting to talk about SQLite Consortium for a while. Robert points out thatSQLite is an element of “Adobe Air, Mozilla Prism, Google Gears, Android, iPhone SDK (likely through Core Data API), Ruby On Rails (default DB in 2.0), PHP 5 (bundled but disabled in PHP.ini by default).” I personally would probably say Firefox as well as Prism. In addition, SQLite is an open source (actually, public domain) piece of software. At Mozilla we view SQLite as important both for our product and for advancing transparency, openness, innovation and participation in the Internet.

    Last December Symbian and Mozilla became the charter members of the SQLite Consortium. Last week Adobe announced that it has joined the SQLite Consortium, demonstrating Adobe’s recognition of the importance of Sqlite and its participation in various open source projects. Hopefully other organizations that rely on SQLite will do the same.

    Here’s a bit more on the history.

    A while back Richard Hipp contacted Mozilla to see if we had some time to talk to him about sustainability models. He had a problem we at Mozilla were familiar with — difficulty in getting organizations to fund the development of the core. At Mozilla we have seen this repeatedly — many companies understand why it’s important for them to fund development of the particular aspects of Mozilla that specifically benefit their business. It was much harder to find companies that would fund the core development applicable to all users of Mozilla code.

    Dr. Hipp was facing the same issue with SQLite. Many companies were willing — eager even — to enter into contracts to enhance SQLite to meet their needs. But few were funding the fundamental core of the offering. I was embarrassed to learn that Mozilla itself belonged to this group. We had entered a contract with Dr. Hipp some time before to do some work related to full-text indexing support. I knew about this of course but it never occurred to me to ask if the SQLite developers needed funding to maintain the core capabilities. (I should note that Richard didn’t raise this point with us; I asked directly and thus learned of my failing ). Fortunately the folks at Symbian were more perceptive. They had realized that providing stability and sustainability for long term development of the core of SQLite is important and were talking with Richard about how to do this. As a result Richard contacted Mozilla to see if any of our experiences could help him with his thinking.

    Once I got over my embarrassment I spent some time talking to Richard to understand his goals for SQLite and to see how best Mozilla could support Richard and SQLite. Richard was clear about the main goals: keeping SQLite an independent project, and freely available for anyone to use. On behalf of Mozilla I expressed a strong interest in the current developers (Richard and his colleague Dan Kennedy) retaining technical direction over the SQLite project and in developing a sustainability model that does not diminish the effectiveness of the technical leadership. The Symbian folks agreed completely, and Symbian and Mozilla became charter members of the Consortium, which was launched on December 12, 2007. The Consortium is described in general terms on the SQLite website, and the form of Consortium Agreement is also available online.

    The Consortium Agreement makes it clear that technical direction of SQLite remains solely in the hands of the developers. Consortium members receive access to the developers for support if desired. I noted that Mozilla would join without the support offering solely to provide support to the core developers to do what they think best (and I suspect the other early members might feel the same way). Dr. Hipp felt that it would be easier to attract additional members over time if the support component was retained. I don’t know that Mozilla will make use of this. But I hope that other organizations that use SQLite in their products will find this significant enough to help justify participating in the Consortium.

    Joining the Consortium was an easy decision for Mozilla. We use the technology, it advances the Mozilla mission and — most importantly — the SQLite developers themselves are people who combine a fierce dedication to the openness and technical excellence of their work with discipline and structure. Like many great open source (here, public domain) and free software projects, the key developers have enormous commitment to their work. In my discussions with Richard I’ve come to understand that this commitment is combined with integrity, modesty, and an exceptional consistency of focus and quality.

    It’s great to see the SQLite Consortium come to life. It’s great to see this grow out of Symbian’s very forward-looking thinking in supporting Dr. Hipp so early on; and great to see Adobe’s quick decision to join the Consortium. And I certainly hope that other companies who aren’t already supporting SQLite development will look closely at keeping SQLite independent and vibrant by becoming Consortium members.

  • February 23 — The Mozilla Organization

    [Note: I was traveling and unexpectedly without Internet access last week, so this post is a few days late.]

    Ten years ago Netscape planted a seed by launching an organization to create an open source development process for future generation browsers. At the time no one knew how that seed would grow, what kind of open source project would develop, how we would build the key aspects of open source and free software development — transparency, leadership through respect, peer review, participation — into the Mozilla project.

    Today we know. We’ve built a vibrant open-source project. We’ve built phenomenal products in an extraordinarily competitive environment. We’ve built communities of people who know that their participation makes a difference in their Internet experience. We’ve built opportunities for people to participate in improving their digital lives. We’ve built an organization that no one could have predicted, that has defied all manner of difficulties and flourished.

    We continue to build these things today.

    Here is the beginning of that organization:

    NETSCAPE ANNOUNCES MOZILLA.ORG, A DEDICATED TEAM AND WEB SITE SUPPORTING DEVELOPMENT OF FREE CLIENT SOURCE CODE

    DEVELOPER COMMUNITY WILL GAIN ACCESS TO FREE CLIENT SOURCE CODE, INFORMATION AND OPEN DIALOGUE; INTERNET ADVOCATES CALL MOVE A WIN-WIN FOR CUSTOMERS AND DEVELOPER COMMUNITY ALIKE

    MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (February 23, 1998) – Netscape Communications Corporation (NASDAQ:NSCP) today announced the creation of mozilla.org, a dedicated team within Netscape with an associated Web site that will promote, foster and guide open dialog and development of Netscape’s client source code. As a follow-on to Netscape’s recent announcement to make the first developer release of Communicator 5.0 source code available for free, mozilla.org will act as a focal point for developers who are interested in modifying and redistributing Netscape client source.Accessible today by going to www.mozilla.org, the Web site will provide a central point of contact and community by encouraging developers to download the client source code, post their enhancements, take part in newsgroup discussions, and obtain and share Communicator-related information with Netscape and others in the Internet community. The mozilla.org site is also accessible through Netscape’s developer Web site at developer.netscape.com.”By making our source code available to the Internet community, Netscape can expand its client software leadership by integrating the best enhancements from a broad array of developers,” said Marc Andreessen, executive vice president of products for Netscape. “This Netscape team will be dedicated to assisting developers in the development of the source code, building a community that addresses markets and needs we can’t address on our own and allowing our customers to reap the benefits through access to superior products.”

    “The popularity and success of Apache, the Linux operating system, the BSD version of UNIX and many other software applications prove the value and impact of open source development,” said Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux. “By introducing mozilla.org, Netscape has created an environment that will bring the best of the Internet to a common locale, encouraging developers to create quality products for end users.”

    “Netscape is the first major company to exploit the power of the open source strategy,” said Eric S. Raymond, open-source developer and advocate. “Making their client software source code free to developers is a bold move that will do great things for their products.”

    As previously announced, Netscape plans to make Netscape Communicator 5.0 source code available to developers and the Internet community beginning later this quarter with the first developer release of the product. More information is accessible today by going to www.mozilla.org or by accessing Netscape’s DevEdge site.

  • Welcome Mozilla Messaging

    Mozilla’s revitalized focus on mail and Internet communications takes flight today with the launch of Mozilla Messaging, Inc. Mozilla Messaging is a new Mozilla organization focused on email and Internet communications. Its first area of focus is Mozilla Thunderbird, bringing new features such as integrated calendaring as well as new attention to community development and involvement. We expect Mozilla Messaging to develop a broader scope as well, providing experimentation, innovation and improvements in various forms of Internet-based communications.

    Mozilla Messaging grows out of Mozilla’s long involvement with email. It is firmly rooted in the traits which make Mozilla unusual and effective. Mozilla Messaging lives within the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation. (Technically, it is a wholly owned subsidiary, a sister organization to the Mozilla Corporation.) It exists to advance the Mozilla Foundation’s public-benefit mission and promote the Mozilla Manifesto. It’s an open source organization that uses the organizational principles and tools of the Mozilla project.

    The decision to create a separate organization for Thunderbird and messaging was made last fall. During the summer we had a vigorous public discussion about how to make Thunderbird and Mozilla’s messaging efforts stronger, more innovative and involve more people. As a result of these discussions we found an excellent organizational leader for these efforts in David Ascher. In September we announced the decision to form a new Mozilla organization to focus on these goals.

    Today the organization comes to life. Mozilla Messaging has a small set of employees, both to do great things themselves and to serve as catalysts and scaffolding for a broad-based community effort. It has a high level roadmap for Thunderbird. It’s got an organizational leader with a long background in both mail and Mozilla technologies. It’s got millions of users who care vigorously about Thunderbird and mail. It’s looking at an enormous and fundamental aspect of our online lives. It’s got great challenges, great responsibility and even greater potential.

    I’m personally thrilled to see this happen. I am exceedingly eager to stop thinking so much about how to organize the Thunderbird / mail effort and to start seeing all that energy go to improving our product. That day has come. We have the tools to make email much, much better. I hope you’ll join me in celebrating. And then join the Mozilla Messaging effort and help make interesting things happen.

  • New Home for My Blog

    Welcome to the new home for this blog. If you have suggestions or find bugs, please let me know by adding a comment here.

    Thanks!

  • Two Weeks of Talking

    The last couple of weeks have been highly unusual in the number of people I’ve met and new people I’ve talked with about Mozilla, technology and hybrid organizations trying to achieve socially-oriented missions.

    I spent the last ten days of January in Switzerland, first at the gathering of the Schwab Social Entrepreneurs and then at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. I attended these events last year as well, and wrote a brief post about the entrepreneurs and the annual meeting. Mozilla attends the WEF Annual Meeting as a Technology Pioneer. We attend the Social Entrepreneurs event as an invited guest; Mozilla is not a Schwab Social Entrepreneur.

    Social Entrepreneurs Summit

    This year the Social Entrepreneurs event was quite different from last year. At the request of the social entrepreneurs, the large sessions where people came to speak to the social entrepreneurs were eliminated. The days were spent in a series of discussion groups. The intent was to get the people who are doing things together to learn from each other, and to stop thinking that outside experts were more valuable that the practicioners.

    I noticed that the discussions were also different than last year. There is a growing group of entrepreneurs that have found some way to use the market to promote their missions. This includes the Fair Trade groups — coffee, chocolate, handicrafts, the Rubicon folks in the San Francisco bay area, who are known for their bakery and landscape services, but whose goal is to provide jobs and eliminate poverty, to the Homeless World Cup, to the financing and provision of solar energy sources in rural India. A set of the discussions focused on how to build an operation at scale; how to develop depth in leadership so that the organization is bigger than the founder, how to ensure the mission remains paramount as the activities grow, and so on. These are all issues we think about at Mozilla. Mozilla is still a bit out of the mainstream as we are rooted in the ultra-modern technology world. Nevertheless, it is exciting to find a group of people solving a set of organizational topics that are so closely related to our own. The discussion groups were able to touch on these topics, not to delve in depth. Even two or three days is not enough time for in-depth solutions. So there is a constant feeling of starting to gain traction and then needing to stop. I see that as a mark of success though, indicating that good ideas have come out and there is far more to be done.

    World Economic Forum Annual Meeting

    The Social Entrepreneurs event is in Zurich and ends on a Tuesday afternoon. From there one gets on a train to the mountain town of Davos. The WEF Annual Meeting starts Tuesday evening and goes through Sunday. It’s an utterly exhausting week. The official events go from 8 or 9 am until 10pm. Then the unofficial events start, and go on into the morning.

    Mozilla was invited last year and this year as a Technology Pioneer program, which identifies organizations “that develop and apply the most innovative and transformational technologies in the fields of information technology, renewable energy and biotechnology / health.”

    We are a bit unusual as a Tech Pioneer though because we are so well known and our impact is so large. We’re not exactly like either the Social Entrepreneurs or the Tech Pioneers, although we are closely related to each.

    The main impressions I had this year include:

    • Mozilla Firefox is simply taken for granted as part of the Internet. There was barely any discussion of who we are, why we matter. Last year almost everyone recognized Mozilla Firefox, but there was still a sense of surprise about our place in the world. There was no surprise this time. Of course, this is Europe, where Firefox market share reaches 30 and 40% on a country by country level so this is not surprising.
    • Many people don’t know we’re a public benefit organization, but have high attachment to the product.
    • The general theme for this year’s Annual Meeting was Innovation in Collaboration. Mozilla has a lot to say here, we are among the very innovation forces here.
    • The Mobile Web is exploding. Last year there were discussions of things like “the Connected Life.” This year the discussions were more focused on mobile connections, and what that means.
    • Global Climate Change is a given at the Annual Meeting, the tenor of the discussion is still quite different from that I hear in the United States.
    • The concern that the sub-prime mortgage and general credit woes in the United States will lead to a world-wide recession were palpable.

    One of the main activities at Davos is meeting new people. It’s constant — at the coffee table, on the stairs, through introductions, at the events, on the shuttle from the convention center to the hotels, at the lunch and dinner discussions. The event is amazingly successful at getting people to open up, have varied discussions and share ideas. It’s valuable for Mozilla to have a presence and be represented as this sort of event.

    Mozilla Work Week

    I got back from Switzerland just in time for the Work Week in California, when a bunch of Mozilla folks had come to town for a chance to work face to face. Behind though I was, I took the opportunity to talk with a bunch of people I normally don’t see face to face. I spent a couple hours in the morning opening the door for out-of-town folks who don’t have a card key to get in. It seemed the best way to meet people — it’s pretty hard to let someone in the door and pretend we know each other. I met some of the people who’ve joined Mozilla recently, plus some people who have been active for quite a while but whom I had never met.

    Work week was also the freeze for Firefox 3 Beta 3, which was very exciting. Both because a bunch of work is coming to fruition and showing up in the code. And also because this freeze was a demonstration of how far we can come on our automated testing tools and infrastructure. This is an area — like automated builds — where we’re seeing significant progress after years on waiting and wanting. The Mozilla project is so big it’s hard to keep an eye on everything that’s happening. But wherever one looks, it’s exciting.

    It was great to attend the WEF and Social Entrepreneurs events. It’s also great to be back in the heart of Mozilla work. Talking and meeting people is fascinating. But doing things — building the Internet we want to see — is even better.