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Archive for the ‘Mitchell’s Blog’ Category

I’ve known Dan Mosedale a long time. He was already at Netscape working in the browser realm when I arrived in the fall of 1994. In fact, of all the people working on Mozilla and browsers in the world today, I think Dan was probably the first. Not the person with the longest continual history (Dan has taken some breaks), but the first chronologically.

I got to know Dan well when we both joined Mozilla full time in 1999. We had both been working on Mozilla part-time since before its founding, Dan on the IT/infrastructure side and me on the MPL and organizational aspects. We both joined Brendan at Mozilla full time at the same time in early 1999, as did Mike Shaver. In that era the very small group of us managing the project were known as “mozilla.org staff.”

In the next few years mozilla.org staff (which also came to include Myk, Asa and Marcia) made a number of decisions about the Mozilla project that we know put our jobs at Netscape/ AOL at risk. Each time we would all look at each other and make sure we understood what we were doing. We would plan how to keep mozilla.org up and running. In this we had support from many other long time Mozilla contributors who are with Mozilla today, including Chris Hofmann who ultimately became the liaison between mozilla.org staff and Netscape/ AOL after our decisions did cause me to be fired (technically “laid off”).

A couple years ago I mentioned to Dan that I had decided to learn to ice skate, since there’s a skating rink near my house. Dan suggested I try hockey, that despite its appearance it can be much less risky and worrisome than figure skating. I recall vividly his comment that once he has all his gear on, falling became mostly irrelevant. I’ve remembered this each time I’ve fallen without pads — the ice can be hard. Not every fall hurts, but the idea of falling is inhibiting.

Saturday night was Give Hockey a Try Day, with a session at the local rink. The Northern California Women’s Hockey League, a volunteer organization focused on getting women to play and enjoy hockey, takes this seriously. Members donate their gear for the session. They invite women of all skill levels and all ages. (One current coach had no idea how to skate when she started.) Members come with their gear, members come to help neophytes get dressed, member coaches come and get everyone out on the ice. In two hours you go from never having worn hockey skates or held a hockey stick to passing and scrimmaging. Poor quality scrimmaging for sure, but also sometimes hysterically funny as a result. The great thing is that once you’re thinking about the puck, you stop worry about the skating.

In Dan’s honor I rammed myself into the wall to make myself fall. He was right — it was barely noticeable, and not remotely inhibiting.

The NCWHL folks were universally positive and supportive. They end the event with a gear sale so that newcomers can get somewhat worn-out gear for very little money and get started in league play without a lot of expense. I travel too much and have far too little time to add anything structured to my life but still love the sense of racing around the ice not worried about knees and elbows and jaws.

The evening also reminded me of how astonishing people can be when they love what they are doing. As Esther Dyson keeps reminding me, a vibrant civil society is an awesome thing.

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Almost every time I talk to Esther Dyson about Russia, she speaks of the importance of building civil society, of developing a world where people don’t look to government and formal “non-governmental organizations” for all the answers. Here’s a paragraph she wrote about civil society in an article about the Feb 2010 US State Department Tech Delegation to Russia:

Civil society is not just politics: it is a restaurant giving unused food to the poor. It is a for-profit company such as Twitter providing its service free to rich and poor alike (even though advertisers will focus on the rich). It is successful entrepreneurs mentoring start-up entrepreneurs, and NGOs engaging not just with the government, but also with commercial outfits to get support for activities that will address vexing social problems such as maternal and infant mortality.

I was reminded of Esther’s focus on civil society at the CrisisCamp event Friday night.

There are a lot of barriers to helping from a distance when a disaster strikes. Today information technology, the marvels of the Internet, and new tools focused on crowdsourcing and crowd-sourced data provide some new mechanisms. And so there are groups of people trying to develop actionable data out of the heartbreaking SMS messages (a partial example: “village of 200 houses, 100% destroyed. 100% crops destroyed. Village still flooded.”)

There’s no official government involvement. There’s not necessarily any direct connection between the people working at this and the villages or individuals affected by the floor. There is however civil society in action: see a problem, do something. Form an association (Ben Franklin formed a surprising number of associations), virtual or formal. Build a tool — or a product. Reach out. Don’t wait for government to set up a special official organization — plunge in and do things.

The degree to which citizens believe they can, can, and do affect their own lives and the lives of others is a pretty potent marker of the nature of a society.

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I’ve been asked a few times what I think Mozilla can do to respond to the suffering caused by the floods in Pakistan. The answer is that I don’t know. I don’t know what particular expertise Mozilla has that can be put to use in a way that actually helps people. CrisisCommons works to develop technical solutions so that people can help, particularly to enable information sharing:

CrisisCommons is a global network of volunteers who help people in times and places of crisis. If you can use the Internet, a word processor, a cell phone or any other kind of technology, you can help. Right now virtually online or during one of our many CrisisCamps around the world!

CrisisCamps are held to bring focused attention on particular disasters. There’s one tonight in Silicon Valley focused on the Pakistan floods. Here’s the description:

Non-techies with laptops are needed do Pashtun translation, data entry, blogging, text editing, classifying messages, user-interface testing, collating web-based news updates, etc. We will also create technical tiger teams to provide Silicon Valley-located expertise to CrisisCommons projects managed by camps around the world. These projects involve mapping, databases, crowd-sourcing, coding, user-centered design, etc. This requires techies with laptops. Range of coding skills (python), geo-, and user interface skills are required.

I plan to go — anyone else?

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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