Archive for March, 2008

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.

That’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.