Wrangler Doodles, green.

Building a Better World through Technology

co-founder Mozilla

( from the LizardWrangling Archive )

Category: Mozilla

  • The Future of Email

    Do you think email is important part of Internet life? Are you interested in seeing something interesting and exciting happen in the mail space? Believe that Thunderbird provides a much-needed option for open source email alternatives and want to see it get more attention on its own? Long to see something more innovative than Thunderbird in the mail space happen?

    So does Mozilla.

    Are you someone who could contribute to such an effort? Do you have expertise and a desire to be involved in an innovative mail effort and/or a focused Thunderbird effort? If so, Mozilla would like to hear from you.

    Thunderbird

    Mozilla has been supporting Thunderbird as a product since the beginning of the Foundation. The result is a good, solid product that provides an open alternative for desktop mail. However, the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn’t support Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus -– delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services -– is the correct priority. At the same time, the Thunderbird team is extremely dedicated and competent, and we all want to see them do as much as possible with Thunderbird.

    We have concluded that we should find a new organizational approach for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.

    Mozilla is exploring the options for an organization specifically focused on serving Thunderbird users. A separate organization focused on Thunderbird will both be able to move independently and will need to do so to deepen community and user involvement. We’re not yet sure what this organization will look like. We’ve thought about a new Mozilla Foundation subsidiary. We’ve thought about a setting where Thunderbird is released as a community project much like SeaMonkey, and a small services and consulting company is formed by the Thunderbird developers to continue development and care for Thunderbird users. Many open source projects use this model, it could be simpler and more effective than a Mozilla Foundation subsidiary.

    We don’t know the best answer yet. And we don’t expect to without a broad public discussion, which we hope this message will trigger. Some suggestions for making sure Mozilla is aware of your comments are at the end of this post.

    Broader Mail Initiative

    We would also like to find contributors committed to creating and implementing a new vision of mail. We would like to have a roadmap that brings wild innovation, increasing richness and fundamental improvements to the mail. And equally importantly, we would like to find people with relevant expertise who would join with Mozilla to make something happen.

    If we can see a path to an innovative mail initiative in addition to supporting existing Thunderbird users, then we are interested in doing so. If we find the best way to improve mail is incremental development of Thunderbird as already planned, then we’ve learned something extremely valuable as well.

    Mozilla has a range of resources -– funds, code, etc. — that can be applied to this problem. We’re looking for people with expertise, vision and leadership capabilities. If you are such a person, or know of such people, please let us know.

    Discussion

    If you’re interested in these topics, let us know. The web is great at distributed discussions, let’s see what we think about mail. Post trackbacks to your blog posts here; I’ll moderate them in quickly. If you want to make absolutely sure that Mozilla can find your stuff easily, feel free to head to the wiki and list yourself and the location of your comments. Or leave your comments on the wiki.

  • The Voice of Mozilla

    Who is the voice of Mozilla? Each and every contributor, that’s who. Every contributor has a reason for contributing, a story about how and why we contribute and why we care about Mozilla.

    It’s important that many of these voices be heard. It’s important that Mozilla contributors feel comfortable publicly describing our involvement with Mozilla.

    We have some formal mechanisms for public speaking. Mozilla sends speakers to a number of conferences; we have the Mozilla websites to describe Mozilla, we occasionally have a press release.

    The formal mechanisms are important. But they are not enough. They are not enough to convey the richness of the Mozilla project. They are not enough to respond to all the requests for speakers we receive. And they are not enough to convey the Mozilla message of participation, openness and public benefit.

    To convey the Mozilla message properly, we need many people to speak about Mozilla, to speak frequently, to speak to local users groups, local community groups, schools and local technology conferences about Mozilla. We should be clear about the scope and power of the community that make up Mozilla.

    We should also help contributors feel comfortable speaking. A good framework should do a few key things:

    • help contributors feel comfortable and empowered to speak publicly about our roles and involvement;
    • provide some basic answers for common questions; and
    • help people send questions outside their particular areas of expertise to the right people.

    Our contact person for developing a Speakers framework is Mary Colvig. The beginnings of this work can be found at the Events section of the Mozilla wiki.

    If you’re a Mozilla contributor who currently speaks about Mozilla, or who might want to speak about your involvement with Mozilla, or if you want to help develop the framework, head on over to the website and add your voice.

  • Executive Director Search Committee

    I’m pleased to introduce the members of the search committee for the Mozilla Foundation Executive Director.

    Dan Mosedale: Dan has long experience in Mozilla governance, as well as experience with multiple products, from the Mozilla Application Suite to calendar to Firefox. Dan joined Mozilla as a member of mozilla.org staff in the early, early days. Later he moved to the product group to work on LDAP and related capabilities. He spent a few years away from the project in daily life, but never in spirit. Dan returned to the Mozilla project a few years back when he joined Oracle to work on the Mozilla calendar project. Dan remained at Oracle as the lone Mozilla developer for some time after the Mozilla team there disbanded. He moved to the Mozilla Corporation a while back, worked as the lead calendar developer, and has most recently moved to working on Firefox.

    Deb Richardson: Deb is a long-time member of the Linux world, and one of the founders of the Linuxchix. She came to the Mozilla project a few years back. Deb’s initial challenge was to create a useful developer documentation site. We had always known our documentation was poor. If you look today you can see the results of Deb’s efforts, now under the leadership of Eric Shepherd. The Mozilla Developer Center contains documentation for multiple aspects of the Mozilla project, from technologies to projects to products. Deb most recently turned her attention to product management, working on Firefox product planning.

    Deb also has a significant interest in Mozilla organization and governance. It was Deb who took my initial draft of a document about the Mozilla vision, teased apart the separate threads, and created the structure for the parts that eventually became the Mozilla Manifesto. Many contributed to the Manifesto, but Deb’s early, giant contribution made a huge difference in getting this done.

    Robert Kaiser: Robert has also been part of the Mozilla project for many years. He started as a localizer of the Mozilla Application Suite. Today he is the one of the leaders of the SeaMonkey project. The SeaMonkey community group took over ongoing development of the integrated mail/news client known as the Mozilla Application Suite when it was retired as an official project. SeaMonkey is a vibrant, successful community project with ongoing development work and project releases. Robert interacts regularly with other members of the Mozilla project across a range of topics.

    Stuart Parmenter: Stuart came to the Mozilla project as a high-school volunteer. He joined Netscape in 1999 and has been working in the Mozilla world almost constantly since then. Not long after the Mozilla Foundation was formed Stuart joined Oracle to work on the Mozilla calendar team there. He moved to Mozilla a year or so later, returning to his original interest in graphics.

    Stuart also has an interest in Mozilla project dynamics. Stuart lead the recent effort to review and restructure our code modules, as well as started the process of thinking about non-code modules. He’s been active in thinking about the role of super-reviewers and other governance mechanisms.

    Bob Lisbonne: Bob is a long-time friend of the Mozilla project. Bob was involved in the launch and early days of the Mozilla project at Netscape, and has been involved in the browser space since the early Netscape versions. Bob has consistently provided reasoned and thoughtful advice to the Mozilla project, and joined the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors in late 2006. Bob is currently a general partner with the venture capital firm Matrix Partners. His involvement with Mozilla is a personal effort, not to be associated with or attributed to Matrix Partners.

    Mitchell Baker: I joined the Mozilla project part time in 1998 and full time in 1999. I’ve been the general manager of the project (known as the Chief Lizard Wrangler) since 1999 and have been involved in a broad range of Mozilla activities. Together with Brendan Eich I lead the effort to form the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and to articulate the Mozilla vision through the Mozilla Manifesto.

  • Activities: Week of July 9 2007

    Last week I participated in an online question and answer / discussion session called Air Mozilla. I thought someone might ask me a question like “Yes, but what do you actually do all day?” So I made some notes. If it’s useful I’ll try to do this periodically. Here are some of the things I spent time working on last week. There was also a bunch of product, organizational and other issues that are constant. I haven’t listed them, only listed the things that jumped out at me as particular areas of focus last week.

    • Mozilla Foundation Executive Director search. Spent time with the recruiter, potential search committee members and some resumes we’ve seen.
    • Mozilla Corporation General Counsel search. Interviewing, evaluating.
    • Speak at first Air Mozilla video broadcast.
    • Speak at Fortune magazine’s imeme conference.
    • Mozilla Foundation board topics in general.
    • Thunderbird. We know Thunderbird is overwhelmed by Firefox and web related work now. I’m convinced that’s the right priority. So, how to help Thunderbird? How to improve mail in general?
    • Caught up with Brendan on state of work in the standards bodies.
    • Community Empowerment / Giving review of recent proposals.
    • Finalized upcoming talk at OSCON (with much help).
    • Assist another open project on achieving sustainability as an independent project.
    • General management, product, organizational and recruiting topics (this covers a lot but is also true every week).
    • Stopped pretending my shoulder will get better without attention and started some minor physical therapy.

  • Foo Camp 2007

    This weekend was the O’Reilly Foo Camp for 2007. Foo was big this year — about 300 people. And wildly varying types of people — pretty much anyone the O’Reilly folks think is interesting.

    When I got home yesterday, I realized that this weekend was extremely disconnected for me. That’s highly unusual at an O’Reilly event. In part it’s because I always choose to camp in the orchard, rather than camp out in the building space available or get a hotel room. There’s no power in the camping area, and my stuff is a ways away from the activities. In past years I’ve carried my computer around with me. This year I just left it in my pack in my tent, along with my phone. And I wasn’t alone. Of course there were plenty of people with computers, but there were also a bunch of us traveling light.

    This year the facilities also encouraged disconnectedness. There were a lot fewer conference rooms available; more of the building space is in use and off-limits to Foo Campers. So the O’Reilly folks set up a bunch of rent-a-tents in the parking lot as discussion areas. The tents each had a table, chairs and a white board, but no power. That meant no projectors and no computer-based presentations. It also meant almost no one took their computers to the tents. There was very little multi-tasking — very little searching the web for info, reading mail, IMing, twittering, whatever.

    All there was to focus on was the discussion, which as a result sometimes felt quite slow. The topics were broad enough that several different conversations would bounce back and forth. And there was nothing to do but listen when the conversation veered off in a direction tangential to my thoughts. For example, one tent session was “How to Measure the Health of Communities.” It was fascinating, but had many different ideas in it. A few of us are involved in technology communities and so had some clear goals and thus some obvious clear measurements. Others are involved in organizing tech and civic groups. A couple of people were interested in “social groups” and when these become communities. Many were interested in figuring out what the goals of a particular community might be. The conversation wandered around among these. One person kept trying to get the group back to the identified topic, how do we measure? I don’t think it was a very successful effort though.

    The measurement piece is of great interest to me — other organizations have a lot to teach Mozilla. The session introduced me to people with similar interests, and then tickled my brain with all sorts of different ideas related to communities.

    Usually the O’Reilly events are a combination of high connectedness and then running into people and talking. This one had the usual can’t-get-to-my-first-cup-of-coffee-because-there-are-too-many-interesting-
    people-between-me-and-the-coffee, but-I’m-too-foggy-brained-to-be-coherent-yet feeling. (Tara Hunt rescued me with her personal coffee stash, starting Sunday off right for a bunch of us.)

    I realized that the disconnectedness of many of the sessions I attended meant that each of us participated with exactly the resources we brought with us — our own experience, expertise, and abilities. The sessions would have been different with real-time Internet access. The session on “Social Implications of Craft” would have been different with access to the various definitions of “craft“. Without this we spent some time recreating these definitions, so there was less efficiency. But the trade-off was a much more personal discussion; and a much more exploratory discussion.

    Now it’s time to dive back in to normal life.

  • Welcome David Boswell

    David Boswell is joining the Mozilla Foundation this week. The details are in Frank’s post. I want to echo (amplify, really) the welcome. David Boswell has been involved with the Mozilla project for many years. When his experience with mozdev.org convinced him that more understanding of non-profit and organizations in general was necessary, he went back to school to learn. I remember writing a recommendation for David when he applied to the Colombia School of International and Public Affairs. At the time I thought, how cool is this?? Graduate study in a field other than computer science and still intimately related to Mozilla, open source and the type things Mozilla is trying to do.

    Enough time has passed that David has finished his program. Even better, he’s back with Mozilla full-time. This strikes me as an important milestone for several reasons. To start with the obvious, it will be great to have David focused on Mozilla. We are working on building the Mozilla Foundation’s capabilities, and David is a part of this effort. (The Executive Director search is another part.) David has always been remarkably low key and effective. For a while I couldn’t understand how he could get things done in such a quiet, unassuming way. But he does, and it’s great. I’ll be talking with both David and Frank quite a bit this week to figure out some starting points for David. I’ve got a lot of ideas, the key is to be realistic!

    Less obvious, but I think equally important, is the cross-fertilization of open source ideas and organizational activities beyond coding. David now has a rich background in open source activities, a world-class education to bring to bear, and an opportunity to combine those two to help move the Mozilla mission forward. And David is not alone. In just the last week or two, another long term Mozilla contributor has been accepted into the Business School at the University of California at Berkeley. He’ll attend the business school while continuing to work full time on open source activities. He too will have the chance to combine open source DNA with a world-class education and bring the resulting connections back to the open source world.

    It’s exciting to see long term contributors bring open source expertise into the graduate educational system, and then to see them bring their education back to the open source world.

    Please join me in welcoming David.

  • Search Committee Nominations Open

    It’s time to create the full search committee for the Foundation Executive Director position. I previously posted key requirements. I’ve included them again below, along with some criteria our executive recruiter has found to be important in the past.

    If you are interested in being part of the search committee and believe you meet (at least most of) the criteria, please contact me. If you know of someone you would like to see be part of the search committee other than yourself, please let me know. In other words, nominations and self-nominations are welcome.

    I thought about creating a clear process for nomination and selection, but decided we can (hopefully) start informally and create process as we go. The one process point that I will start with is that if you contact me privately, or nominate someone else privately, I won’t make those names public until the named person is OK with this. If you have strong thoughts regarding the process, you can post them here as comments or in the governance newsgroup (available via newsreader or mailing list, or via the browser).

    So please don’t self censor based on shyness, or on your employer.

    Everyone should have:

    • Deep understanding of the project and our culture.
    • Ability to communicate the needs of the organization.
    • History of “doing” things within Mozilla.
    • Broad respect from chunks of the Mozilla community.
    • Ability to internalize different perspectives.
    • Ability to work collaboratively, incorporating other perspectives.
    • High discretion, including perhaps willingness to agree to confidentiality obligations (we need to figure out how to treat candidates properly). However this is handled, we need a complete commitment to confidentiality.
    • Commitment to speaking with one voice as a committee.
    • Ability to be a liaison between the search committee and the Mozilla community.
    • High degree of flexibility.
    • Commitment of 15-20 hours for meetings and interviews.
    • Good people assessment skills.
    • Comfortable / excited about the focus of the job.

    The group as a whole should have:

    • At least one very good scribe.
    • People with different background and focus areas for the project, (not everyone can be a Firefox only person; there should be one or more people who can articulate what it’s like to be on a non-Fx project) and views about staying broad.

  • Modules for “mozilla.org staff” activities

    In the days before the Mozilla Foundation existed, the Mozilla project was originally managed by a group known as “mozilla.org staff.” Mozilla.org staff was a virtual organization which governed the Mozilla project in general, and did so increasingly unrelated to any employment relationship. Mozilla.org staff managed the project’s day to day activities, and held responsibility for basic technology and policy decisions. Today, some of these functions live in the Foundation — stewardship of the assets, and release of products using the Mozilla name, as examples. So the old model of mozilla.org staff cannot continue unchanged in the world of the Foundation.

    Nevertheless, we need a mechanism to address governance issues that are broader than any particular product or project issue. More specifically, we should identify the key activities of the Mozilla project, identify the decision-makers, define the scope of their authority and the criteria by which they are designated.

    In the past I’ve thought of trying to modernize or reconstruct a group like mozilla.org staff — a group that would have a set of project-wide responsibilities and obligations. I’ve made several attempts at this. It sounds good in theory, but in reality turned out to be very messy. In the days of mozilla.org staff, there was no Foundation. Trying to create another group in the Mozilla world with another set of responsibilities that would overlap with, or maybe be governed by the Foundation’s Board where required by law, or maybe govern or direct the Board is very complex. And the idea of doing this in a way that people can understand and remember is even more difficult. I’ve stumbled at the effort a couple of times now and find the task pretty daunting.

    So I have a new idea that is much more simple. I’m indebted to Mike Connor, who suggested something like it in a newsgroup posting a while back. (Needless to say, if you hate the idea, please leave mconnor out of it 🙂 )

    My new idea is to identify the roles that mozilla.org staff used to play and make modules for these roles. We might have a “governance” set of modules, or a governance module with sub-modules. We’re in the process of creating modules for non-code topics anyway and so we could use a single type of mechanism for code, non-code and governance activities. We would determine governance related activities as well as activities the Mozilla Foundation now handles directly, like management of trademarks. We’d identify a module owner. We would also identify someone (a Peer, or a member) with an acknowledged voice in the Mozilla Foundation. We could do something like arranging for owners, peers or members for these modules to meet periodically with a Foundation representative. In any case, we would develop a mechanism for notifying the Foundation when an important issue has become contentious enough that escalation beyond the module owner is warranted. I’m not sure about the right mechanism here, but am pretty confident we can figure out something workable.

    This path means the activities for which mozilla.org staff used to have authority are identified, we are clear about which have become Foundation / Corporation activities and which, if any, are related to employment. We have owners and a way for differing opinions to be expressed.

    I like this approach because it allows us to address these issues within a structure and process that is already understood. It requires giving up some of the emotional attachment of a separate mozilla.org staff. I think this is manageable; keeping everything from our past intact will drag us into paralysis. And this offers a good chance of having a working process.

    Thoughts more than welcome. Once again, I’m posting this in the governance newsgroup (available via newsreader or mailing list, or via the browser).

  • Foundation Executive Director Focus

    I’ve been reviewing the job description for the Mozilla Foundation Executive Director as part of ramping up the search process. It’s a great description; I like it quite a bit. It’s also long and complex. I thought it would be helpful to provide a summary of the main strategic goals we would like the ED to help us achieve. Here it is.

    A primary role of the incoming ED is to expand the reach of the Foundation and its activities. In other words, to be a thought leader and help identify and develop strategic initiatives, and to oversee execution of these strategic initiatives.

    We currently have a set of initiatives underway with our product and technology development and adoption — from products like Firefox and Thunderbird, to the technology of the Mozilla platform, to projects such as Seamonkey, Camino, and Bugzilla.

    What else can we do? What else should we do? What other activities would make the Open Web a more lively, viable, interesting alternative? What other activities would encourage more people to participate in the Internet in alignment with the Mozilla Manifesto? How do we identify important activities? How do we try to achieve them? How do we do new things in a Mozilla-like way?

    The Mozilla project as it exists today has a set of ongoing discussions. Is our product focus right? Should we make other, new products? How much attention should we give to the Mozilla platform, separate from any other focus? How do we promote the Open Web as a competitive platform to proprietary offerings? Is the distinction between products and projects quite right?

    We expect the ED to participate as s/he gains experience and currency in the Mozilla world. But we don’t expect the ED to be, or be seen, as the judge of such questions. Actually, we hope that we move towards all sorts of new questions of focus and priority, based on new participants and new possibilities. This will be a mark of success.

  • The Open Web and JavaScript 2

    Recently we’ve been talking about the Open Web as platform, and making the Open Web itself a rich platform. While this is a rather abstract discussion, one very concrete aspect of it is JavaScript, a key ingredient in interactive applications like Google Maps. (JavaScript is also referred to as ECMAScritpt, named after ECMA, the standards body through which the language has been standardized.) And one very concrete step occurred on Friday with the public release of a Reference Implementation for ECMAScript Edition 4. This is more generally known as “JavaScript 2.” The Reference Implementation is an early release, allowing the power of many eyes and many brains to understand and participate in the development of JavaScript 2.

    Why does this matter? And why does it matter to the concept of the “web as platform?”

    JavaScript is the language of the web. (I don’t mean to say it is the only fine scripting language or is better than other languages for various tasks. There are a number of excellent scripting languages.) Much of the web is written using JavaScript and it’s likely to stay that way for some time. In fact, JavaScript is so widely deployed on the web that the use cases and workloads outstrip the original design of the language. JavaScript is malleable enough that people have devised all sorts of ways to make things work that were not widely foreseen when the language was designed and standardized. But some of these uses and workloads could be much more effective with an updated version of JavaScript. And so, work on defining the next version of JavaScript has been underway for several years. This work is known as the work on “ECMAScript Edition 4.”

    JavaScript is intimately tied with Mozilla. JavaScript was created in 1995 by Brendan Eich, who went on to become a co-founder of the Mozilla Organization at the launch of the Mozilla project in 1998. Both Brendan personally and the Mozilla project in general devote an enormous amount of time and focus to JavaScript. Mozilla maintains one of the major JavaScript implementations (known as “SpiderMonkey“) in our source base. We also maintain a version of JavaScript written entirely in Java known as “Rhino.” In addition, in November we launched the Tamarin Project based on Adobe’s contribution to create a virtual machine shared by Mozilla projects, Adobe products and anyone else who is interested.

    Mozilla’s implementations of JavaScript are used by a range of organizations and products as well as Mozilla projects.

    Mozilla has been deeply involved in improving both the JavaScript language itself as well as the Mozilla implementations. Brendan is the “convener” of the ECMA working group for ECMAScript Edition 4 (the precise name of this group is TC39-TG1 — Dynamic Scripting Language). There are other active participants of course, who have been collaborating under ECMA auspices for years.

    The Reference Implementation is under active development, with plans to finish it this summer and then finalize the specification itself. The benefit of a Reference Implementation is having a testable example of what the JavaScript 2 does and doesn’t do. This allows for better evaluation of the updated language. It also allows for better drafting of the specification and ultimately a more precise specification that will foster inter-operation on the Web among browsers.

    Making the Reference Implementation public now encourages review, evaluation and comment. This brings the benefits of greater understanding, problem finding and problem solving that we’ve become familiar with in the open source world.

    JavaScript is not something the general consumer works with or even understands. Many may not know of it or understand why it matters. But JavaScript is a fundamental element of the web. It’s fundamental in human interaction with the web. Updating JavaScript’s capabilities updates the power of the web itself. Updating the web through open standards and through open source like Mozilla moves the web forward in a way that is accessible to all.

    That’s the Open Web. That’s the Mozilla mission. And that’s why Mozilla invests so much in fundamental technologies such as JavaScript.