Archive for 2008

Mark Surman recently joined the Mozilla Foundation as our new Executive Director.  Mark and I are spending a lot of time together, and one topic is the 2010 goals.  I crafted these goals to be focused on our products and technology.  Now that Mark has been immersed in Mozilla for a few weeks (coming up on a month), we believe it would be great to include some references to even broader Mozilla Foundation goals.  Mark will propose something in the next week or so.  We hope that the various discussions about the 2010 goals will include some thinking on these topics.

We started a conversation a while back about two year product and technology goals. I’d like to return to that discussion. It’s clear that a blog post and comments is a hard way to discuss a complex and nuance topics like this. Here are some techniques we’ll try to get broad input.

Multiple discussions, multiple constituencies.

Mozilla has many groups of people who work together on particular aspects of Mozilla products, technology, adoption and mission. These groups are a natural setting for discussing the overall goals of the Mozilla project, and what motivates people to contribute. With that in mind, we’re planning a set of discussions to give more people a chance to participate comfortably. Some of these will be face-to-face meetings; others will be online discussions.

Listed below are the people I know of so far who will be organizing discussions on 2010 goals among particular parts of the Mozilla community.

• Tristan Nitot — European community at MozCamp in Barcalona in late October
• Guillermo Movia — spanish-speaking Latin American communities
• Marcio Galli — Brazilian community
• Takita-san (Chibi) — Japanese community at Mozilla Developer Day in Tokyo on November 16
• Seth Bindernagel — localization communities
• Jay Patel — campus reps
• David Tenser — SUMO community (probably as part of Support Firefox Day activities).

If you know of additional constituencies where such discussions would be valuable please let me know, and consider volunteering to work with me to make such discussions happen And if you want to participate in one of the groups above but don’t know how to reach the identified person, let me know.

General discussions

I previously noted that I would organize specific times for general face-to-face / Air Mozilla / irc discussions for the various topics in the goals. I’m working on a schedule for that now. I expect that people who know me or are accustomed to dialing into Mozilla meetings — Monday meetings, Gecko meetings, Firefox and Thunderbird meetings — are the most likely to participate in these meetings. All are welcome. I recognize that it can be intimidating to participate in these as a contributor who doesn’t know many people personally. If that’s the case, please feel free to listen, and of course to join any of the group discussions above (or propose your own).

I’ve been suffering from writer’s block. I hope to correct that very shortly.

I’ve read the comments to my last post a number of times and I think I now understand what’s happening.

There are a bunch of comments along the lines of “if Firefox starts to include something that tracks my behavior and automatically sends that information off to someone else, then I don’t want to use it anymore.” Absolutely. I don’t want to use that kind of product either. That’s why I’m part of Mozilla — to build products that don’t do this sort of thing. To be explicit: Firefox and Mozilla will remain intensely focused on privacy, protection of personal data and user control over that data. The Mozilla community won’t build or support products that do otherwise.

There are also some comments that discount the examples I used because they are “server-side.” Yes. Absolutely. The examples are server-side because that’s what I mean.

The kind of data I’m trying to talk about is more like census-data: how many people are using the Internet; what are the broad patterns of Internet development and usage. In our physical lives, the basic demographics of our population collected in a census are a valuable shared resource. In understanding the Internet aggregate, anonymized, server-side census-like data can also be a valuable public resource.

This kind of data can of course remain a private resource, held by those websites big enough to generate their own understanding. My point is that moving some of this census-like data from the private to the public realm could have great benefits.

I’m wondering if this distinction, which is so clear in my mind, has not been clear in my writing. The term “usage data” may have made this worse. I explicitly do not mean using the browser to collect individual usage data. I mean looking at broad usage patterns that can be discerned from aggregated, server-side data, such as the examples I gave before.

In past posts I’ve said that I believe there is a need to make basic, aggregate, anonymized information about Internet usage more widely available. If everything that is known about the basic usage of the Internet is closed and proprietary then the Internet as an open platform will suffer. Here I’ll try to describe the kinds of data I’m talking about. For now I’ll call it “usage data” though that’s just a term of convenience.

There is a set of usage data that we’re quite accustomed to seeing in aggregated, anonymized form. Unconsciously I think many of us have come to realize that without public availability of this data we cannot understand even the basics of how the Internet is working.

One familiar example is the amount of bandwidth a site serves. Bandwidth data is critical to planning capacity and making sure the website doesn’t “go down” when spikes of traffic occur. Bandwidth usage is also tracked quite carefully by the ISPs (Internet service providers) for their planning and billing purposes. As an example, here’s a blog post showing bandwidth usage when we brought our facility in Amsterdam online. In addition to the data, there are also a series of posts about what was involved in making this happen, which we hope helps others who want to do similar things.

Another familiar example is the amount of “traffic” to a website in a day or a month. This is one important method of determining how popular a website is. Changes in these numbers can reflect trends and changing behavior. A specific page view might be associated with a particular person, and thus be sensitive personal data. But the total number of page views is not related to a specific person. It tells us overall how popular a site is.

A third familiar example are download numbers, which can be very informative in specific settings. For example, we had a real-time download counter during the Firefox 3 Download Day event. We were able to provide automated counts of downloads and current number of downloads per minute, each broken out by language, during this event.  Here’s some basic analysis of download locales, showing how global a project Mozilla is. And here’s a post showing the effect on download rates caused by a popular talk-show host. This information can be useful without any personal or individual data being disclosed.

These examples are clearly very general. I use them precisely for this reason — to demonstrate that we already understand the usefulness of this type of data and that it can be presented in an aggregate, anonymous form. There are other forms of aggregate, anonymous data that can be equally useful in understanding how the Internet is being used and ultimately, understanding what the Internet really is. I’ll describe some of those in a subsequent post; this one is long enough for now.

The types of data I’ve described above are carefully tracked, analyzed and used in planning and decision-making across the industry. It’s often not publicly available. We’d like to see more of this sort of information publicly available. We hope to start publishing more of this type of information about Mozilla. To do this, we need to be confident that people understand this is not publishing personal or individual data, and this is not Mozilla changing.

This is part of our effort to make the Internet accessible. At the same time, Mozilla will continue to be at the forefront in protecting individuals’ security and privacy.