Last week I described my aspirations for Mozilla in 2008 — a set of high level, overarching concepts that describe *why* we do things and what is ultimately important to accomplish. Here’s a first step in translating those general sentiments into more concrete elements.
1. Mozilla designs and implements new ways for people to participate in building a better and more open Internet. Its programs help people participate at all levels — from building software to making good choices after the software they use, to understanding their role in protecting themselves, to expecting to be able to see the underlying data, to expecting and participating in decision-making for a range of Internet activities. The programs allow people to do these things without requiring that they get involved with a mass consumer product like Firefox. These program may relate to existing Mozilla projects, they may be in new areas. In short, we develop programs that encourage individual people to have a relationship with the Internet that is deeper than simply consuming what others choose to provide.
2. Mozilla continues to move the industry towards a more open Internet. This is brutally hard, but we consistently show that we are up to the challenge. This success is based on some fundamental accomplishments:
- Firefox is the browser of choice for at least 200 million people and for web developers. Our userbase, marketshare, mindshare and distribution of the underlying Mozilla platform technologies are all stronger.
- The Mozilla platform technologies showcase what the Internet can be. They demonstrate why developers should eschew closed commercial “platforms” and development environments.
- We demonstrate that this focus on the platform technologies and Firefox is not a misguided focus; we demonstrate that it is the path for promoting the Internet itself as the development platform. And we’ve shown that this is an astonishingly effective way to move the Internet towards the goals of the Mozilla Manifesto.
- “MailCo” has established itself as a good steward of Mozilla Thunderbird and a location for creative thinking in the Internet mail and communications space.
3. Mozilla is inserting openness and transparency to industry activities beyond the software we ship. We’re using the voice that Firefox gives us to show how information, standards, software, data, security, organizations and online life in general can be more open, more understandable and more influenced by individual action.