Christopher Blizzard

First, Aza Raskin does a quick interview with Dan Mills to talk about what’s going on with Weave. There’s been a huge amount of development going on in the weave project including a completely new server and client. I’ve heard that some of the labs guys have Weave syncing between desktop and mobile devices, too. So lots of progress going on there. I’m sure these guys will have another release up pretty soon.

Dan Mills on Mozilla Weave from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

In this video Madhava Enros gives a demo of our Mozilla mobile browser called Fennec. Since the first Alpha release there’s been a lot of work on responsiveness and performance. Madhava gives a quick walk through of the browser as it stands today.

Fennec Alpha 2 Overview from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

And in this last video mctones gives a demo of a concept that he’s working on that might be used when you open a new tab, using z-order to indicate age with a jQuery-driven visual layout. This video is pretty neat if for no other reason to see the sea of floating web pages. Not sure if it’s useful, but it’s a fun video.

Auto Dial 3D from mctones on Vimeo.

This is a “help me” post.  I’m looking for a contact at NASA.  In particular, someone in the shuttle program who might have access to previous launch high-level telemetry data.  If someone knows someone who knows someone, drop me a line or contact me on twitter.  It’s Mozilla-related.  Thanks!

I just deleted my entire email Inbox.  800 unread wasn’t something I was going to fight my way back from.  So if you sent me something that you think I should really look at and respond to, send it again.  Otherwise it’s gone forever.

The matter of copyright and access to content seems like a small thing in the mix of problems that the new President will face when he gets into office.  Indeed, when compared to problems like climate change, a faltering world economy, a couple of wars and everything else that’s on all of our collective plates, this might seem like a trivial thing.  But it’s not.  As a signal of how this administration will act vs. what it will be doing, these things are important.

A number of individuals and organizations have put together a set of principles on open-government.us that reflect what they believe should be the way to approach the question of access to documents, video and other artifacts that are created as the government transition takes place, and hopefully after.  Some of this has already happened.  So progress is being made.

On the site there’s a short video from Lawrence Lessig that introduces the ideas as well as a place to add your name to the list of signatories.  It’s worth the five minutes.  Go have a look.

I got this dialog on Facebook today and I was completely stumped.  Totally.  I read the paragraph over and over, trying to figure out what I meant.  I read it to friends, didn’t help.  Thought about it some more.  It turns out that what I really wanted to do was both of these things.  I want it out of my profile and I want it not to be able to read my data, either.  But you can’t.  It’s a false dichotomy.  You can pick one or the other, but not both.  In the end I picked “Remove” - removing access to the data.  (Maybe.)  In hopes that it would at least posting new stuff to my timeline on facebook.

This stuff is hard.  No one has really figured out how to describe these interactions.  More evidence that privacy decisions in our world are a completely unnatural act.  We’re just missing the language and cultural context, not to mention the tools.

I’m just going to post some stuff I found on the web and I really like.  Here goes.

1. Aza Raskin has a good overview of how people use the web in China.  There’s a service over there called QQ that started with chat and has morphed into everything.  About that:

Whereas chat is fundamentally about people with information tacked on, the Web is fundamentally about information with people tacked on.

True enough.  Also about status in the community:

What QQ does to incentive its community is rather weird. The normal things they do is give contributors special VIP standing — special logins and special abilities. The abnormal thing they do is give those VIP folks the ability to access other people’s private data. Scary.

Uhh, yeah.  Scary.

2. David Eaves has a post up about cultural theories of risk and the rise of emergence systems.  That title doesn’t really communicate the content (at least not to me) but there’s some good stuff in the post about how the emergent communities on the web differ from the classic left/right arguments and how it might be worth it to consider other modalities for thinking about how people think about problems and self-identify.

There are few examples of egalitarians (or emergents) that spring to mind as successful - certainly the organizational and political discourse has been dominated by hierarchists and individualists. Maybe this explains why people have such a hard time defining new forms of organisation - like open-source projects. They are trying to peg their participants as either right-wing market loving individualists or left-wing regulation loving hierarchists. The fact is they are neither. While hardly uniform, my experience is that they are often libertarians (low-grid) who believe in free-association, collaboration and emergent systems (high-group).

3. Bruce Sterling has written what I might call a post - The Last Viridian Note.  It’s worth a read, and frankly all of Bruce’s stuff is worth following.  Bruce manages to touch on a lot of things that I care about - how we relate to the things we own, what our priorities should be in how we spend our resources in the future and what the role of design should be.  He also includes what I think is the best definition for what Sustainability really means in the world:

My personal relations to goods and services – especially goods – have been revolutionized since 1999. Let me try your patience by describing this change in some detail, because it really is a different mode of being in the world.

My design book SHAPING THINGS, which is very Viridian without coughing up that fact in a hairball, talks a lot about material objects as frozen social relationships within space and time. This conceptual approach may sound peculiar and alien, but it can be re-phrased in a simpler way.

What is “sustainability?” Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It’s not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

No, seriously, go read it.  It’s long but it’s worth your time and attention.

4. Lawrence Lessig has a video up of his speech on “Speech, Privacy and the Internet: The University and Beyond”. It’s interesting because it’s not one of his usual topics.  But he brings some great thinking to the table, as usual.  Sorry, no quotes.  It’s audio/visual.

5. A great ad for Harley-Davidson:

The other end of Wall Street connects with millions of better roads. All leading from the stink of greed and billion-dollar bankruptcies. If it was all just a casino, where were the complimentary cocktails?

6. And finally, because it’s great music I leave you with a song that Fred Wilson posted.  Just go listen.

If you haven’t been following the really neat videos by Keith Loutit then you haven’t been paying enough attention.

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Mitchell Baker has posted some results from Mozilla’s 2007 financial filings and how they relate to our ability to execute against our non-profit mission over the coming years.  The numbers are what the press will likely report, just given history as a guide.  But there’s a deeper message that I suspect needs repeating here.

When you’re in the thick of operations - shipping, feedback, building programs, executing and talking to people on a day to day basis - sometimes it’s hard to take a step back and really think about what has happened over the last couple of years and how far Mozilla as a project has grown.  Mitchell’s post is a reminder that the project is very healthy and I think over time it’s become even more mission-focused as the basic mechanism to drive the change that we want to see has fallen into place: Firefox market share.

In order to illustrate I’m going to offer up some quotes from Mitchell’s post that help quantify our community health.

This global reach is driven by our focus on local contributors, local product and local empowerment. Firefox 2 shipped in thirty-six languages. Firefox 3 shipped in forty-six languages in June 2008 and 4 months later, our Firefox 3.1 beta is now localized in over 50 languages. We continue to invest very heavily in what we call “localization” for short but which in its broadest sense means everything that allows global participation in building and accessing the Internet.

…

Our community remains healthy and vibrant. The percentage of code contributed to Firefox by people not employed by Mozilla remained steady at about 40% of the product we ship. This is true despite a significant amount of new employees in 2007. Our geographic expansion is powered by active and committed volunteers, from the localizers to Spread Firefox participants to others who introduce Firefox to new people.

…

The number of people using Firefox on a daily basis nearly doubled from 27.9 million in 2006 to 48.9 million in 2007. As of October 2008 that number has grown to 67.7 million. In 2007 and 2008 three titans of the Internet and software industry — Microsoft, Apple and Google — all released competitive Web browsers. [...] The impact of our userbase allows us to help move the Internet industry to a more open and participatory environment — accessible content, standards-based implementations, and bringing participation and distributed decision-making to new aspects of Internet life.

I think this is the key message that I would like to highlight.  Mozilla is still a very healthy project.  We use the funds that we gather to grow both the user base (which helps us drive our mission) but also to enable and grow a community that also shares the same values that we do.

Much of that effect can be felt in direct market share numbers - people directly using Firefox.  But Mitchell’s post also mentions something else as well.  That releases by other market players who have to compete with us also help us meet our mission in keeping the Internet alive and vibrant.

It’s a good time to be a Mozillian.

These tabs have been hanging around in my browser for a week or so and it’s time to put them into a post.  Lots of good material here, even if absorbing it might take a few hours.

1.  First, Seth Godin on Be careful of who you work for.  This is a way to think of self-branding in the choices that you make in your work life and how it affects you.  Good thinking about how to approach the problem of job choice.

2.  Jason Fried’s talk at the 2008 Business of Software conference is worth watching.  He just talks about ideas that he has about software development and how they have learned to work at 37signals.  I don’t think that everything that he talks about is applicable at a place like Mozilla, where we have to work at a larger scale than they do at 37 signals, but there’s a core here that we share about action, simplicity and how we treat each other.  It’s worth the hour to watch this talk.

(As a side note, I have never ever worked at a place that is as special as Mozilla.  We have problems but it seems like humanity permiates the organization.  Part of working in a fish bowl, I suspect.)

Two from Bob Sutton:

3.  A quick quote from Harry Truman that rings true for me as well:

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

I try and do this every day although I had not seen this quote before.  If I had to turn it into a quote I would say “delegate, celebrate, iterate.”  Push decisions as low in the organization as possible, throw things away that don’t work (and don’t blame in the process!) and celebrate the work of others as much as possible.

4.  The Importance of Killing Good Ideas.  This has to do with focus and the ability of an organization to be able to do a few amazing things instead of trying to do too many things poorly.  I’ve heard the story repeated that one of the first things Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple was to kill off a vast number of projects that were going on at Apple at the time.  (There were probably a lot of really good ideas mixed in there along with some bad ones.)  I suspect, without a huge amount of evidence, that was one of the things that allowed Apple to get back on the road to growth + success.

I would also stretch this to hiring practices as well.  Sometimes it’s important to say no to good people than it is to say yes to someone that you’re sure isnt good.  It’s painful, but you end up with a better team when you do.

And two from Diego Rodriguez:

5.  What is design thinking? In the context of business schools, mostly.  A video interview with Roger Martin who gives a wonderful and succinct answer to the question.  I would borrow from some old Red Hat friends on this one myself (Chris and David - hope things are going well!) who describe it as learning to think creatively instead of critically.  A very important distinction.

6.  Yet another in a series of How to drive a 911.  I love the stuff that Diego posts in this weblog about racing and cars, but the thing that struck me about these videos was the choice that Porsche has made as a company.  They don’t have their own racing team anymore.  Instead they enable others to race using their equipment.  That’s a wonderful decision and a wonderful business model for the company.  Turning what is often a loss/R&D activity into something that enables others to celebrate the brand and give the company a chance to learn about their own products.  Good stuff.

And that’s it.  Happy that I can finally kill this window with these tabs in it.

Enjoy!

As John mentioned I’ve taken over helping to run the Evangelism group inside of Mozilla.  One of the best moments I’ve had in this new role has been to offer a full-time role to Paul Rouget.

Paul has been extremely active in the Mozilla community in Europe, particularly in France.  Those of you who who have been to events in Europe probably know him.  He has an incredible depth of knowledge about XUL and a lot of the rest of the Mozilla platform and has spent quite a bit of time hacking on Thunderbird.

But what really sets Paul apart from others is his passion for Mozilla and his willingness to organize people around it.  We’ve had some excellent people in Europe who have Evangelism in their blood, most notably Tristan, but Paul enjoys that special mix of technical skill, community organization and passion for the project that we love to have on our team.  It’s going to be great to have him as part of the Mozilla community full time.

As a first task I’ve asked him to help us put together technical information for people transitioning add-ons to Firefox 3.1.

You can follow Paul’s weblog or you can email him at prouget remove me at mozilla.com.

Welcome, Paul!