With this in mind my family and I have decided to get ourselves out of California for a bit.    We’re planning to move to Barcelona next September for a year.  Barcelona is not only in the heart of Europe, it’s much closer to the middle east and Africa, and it’s no further from the east coast of Latin America than California.  (Although getting to Asia may be a longer trip.)  I expect to be able to spend much more time with many more local Mozilla communities.

This is a change of geography, not of commitment to Mozilla.  I expect to spend more time meeting Mozillians and more time focusing on project  dynamics.  I want to strengthen the ability for local leaders to become regional and global leaders in Mozilla.

I also expect to spend more time representing Mozilla to governments, policy-makers and other organizations interested in Mozilla and the Internet. By being located in Europe, we will be able to give more support to the critical issues being discussed in that region.  I will also stay involved in our product efforts, as these are so key to have we achieve our mission.    Perhaps I’ll find the time to do some of the writing that would be so helpful.

I’m not (yet???) a Spanish-speaker, so I will undoubtedly spend a bunch of time off-balance and trying to figure out how basic things work.

September will be here soon.   We’re excited!

As a result, my graduate school notes were all taken on an old, otherwise-decommissioned CP/M machine with 8″ floppy drives.  As it turned out, my preferred study partner in grad school was also using such an ancient machine, and it mean we could share notes.  My study partner was used to preparing “briefing books” for governor – level public officials, our our law school notes increasingly took on the look of briefing books as years went by.  He was also the only other person I knew in my class to took 4 years to complete law school, so we both started together and finished together.   (I spent the extra year living and traveling in China, he spent it getting an additional Master’s degree.)    That extra year was pivotal for me, changing by worldview in so many ways.

Today the near-ubiquity of the network means it’s hard to imagine being far, far way from global communications systems.  My time traveling in China (including Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong), Burma, Thailand, and Nepal, before cell phones and before the Internet is something I treasure.    I came back from my longest trip to find both of us in our 4th year of law school (imagine being proud of that ).  And to find the greatest measure of success:  we had each learned each other’s most effective techniques.  When a question came up, we would find him reasoning from the principles he remembered, and me leafing through the briefing book to find the materials we had already prepared.  This was one of our finest moments: we had taught each other a whole new set of tools.

And then I’d bicycle through Berkeley back to “my” office.  Sometimes I’d be alone there.  Sometimes my friend would have given a set of keys to others and I’d find new people there.  (If you happen to know “gumby” you’ll know what I mean.)    We were above the pizza parlor and the California Girls massage studio, where bats appeared each  evening off the fire-escape.    I saw my first Mac in this office.   I first came across email here (gumby, again!).  I first encountered the IETF (long before the Web) here.  I learned what an extraordinary place MIT is, especially at night during finals.  At some point the office moved to slightly more upscale setting (no pizza, no massage).    People came and went though, each bringing something.

I’m still not as generous as this friend with my personal space.  I need more privacy that he did.    But office space, and sharing resources, and connecting people, and wanting people to build on whatever resources I can bring to the party — I learned a lot about this from the friend in question.    It’s not what people think of as a “law school education.”

I went to grad school at Berkeley Law (known as Boalt Hall School of Law in my day); one of the great legal institutions in the US.  I was fortunate; the University and the State of California invested in me.   I’m proud of being a UC Berkeley grad.  I’m a little stunned by what I’ve been able to achieve with it.    And there, generally unseen but critical nonetheless, I learned to share.  In some ways this is the most rewarding.

I’ve found that sharing — sharing wildly, sharing boldly, and reveling in what others do with the sparks I send their way — is liberating.  It’s powerful.  And it makes me part of a community of people that gives me hope for the future.

The best part of the event for me occurred at the Gala dinner.  That’s when they got the groups of Hall of Fame members on stage.  Most importantly, they started with the Pioneers group. A few of the pioneers are no longer with us, Bob Kahn couldn’t make it, and there were undoubtedly a few people who could have been included but weren’t. Even so, it was a visceral moment for me.  There, on stage together, was the greatest concentration of the designers and creators of the Internet that we’re likely to see together.

The Internet has proved to be a revolutionary technology.  And everything we’ve built with the web sits on top of the Internet.   The principles of decentralization, freedom at the edges, the ability to innovate, leadership by action rather than status are all reflected in the early work of this pioneer group.  Not to mention the development of the key technologies.    I feel very fortunate to have been in the audience at that moment.  I’m very grateful to Walda Roseman of the Internet Society for not letting me miss the event.

The Hall of Fall Induction Ceremony was also fun.  I am of course very honored to be included in the initial class of people included in the Hall of Fame.  It’s a great honor and reflects all that we’ve achieved with Mozilla as well as whatever particular talents I bring.    The Hall of Fame induction ceremony was invitation-only I believe, and much smaller than the dinner.   Not every member of this class of Hall of Fame members was there, but a bunch of us were.  (Here’s a photo of most of us who were at the event.) Each of us was asked to give 1 to 2 minutes of comments.  Most spoke for longer.  I think Brewster gets the award for the closest to 1  minute   I don’t know if these comments were recorded. I’ve looked a bit online but haven’t found these.  I did find a set of pictures of most of us as we made our remarks (scroll down a few rows to find these).   Many of the speakers described what it was like in the early days and how they came up with their inventions.  Steve Crocker talked about the RFP process and its relationship to the development of standards.  Randy Bush talked about the people — in particular the women of Africa and Asia — who weren’t represented in this class.    Tim Berners Lee and Vint Cerf talked about the organic nature of the web and the internet, respectively.  Vint told some jokes as well.

Nancy Hafkin and Elizabeth Feinler both accepted the award only on behalf of groups they had worked with, identifying the women they though should be there with them.    This interested me a great deal.  There were 3 women in the Hall of Fame group; I’m the third.  I had thought about accepting the award not solely for myself but ended up talking about the Web and our goals for building openness and opportunity instead.  (For some reason I was the first of the Hall of Famers to speak at the ceremony.)  I spoke  about how the Internet was always there — available, decentralized, open to exploration and innovation — as we began to build the World Wide Web.  Both the other women were quite explicit that they were accepting on behalf of a group.

I almost didn’t get to these events.  I first heard about the event in February, when Walda asked to speak at the event opening on Monday morning.  I declined because I was at MozCamp LatAm for the weekend before and that was too important to miss, even for something else very special.    In February I also heard about the Internet Society’s planned Hall of Fame.  I had missed the public call for nominations, so I immediately started lobbying for someone (not me) to be included.    Eventually I was told it was too late for this year, I should submit my nomination during next year’s process.   The Internet Society folks suggested I speak at the closing event on Tuesday, and we managed to make that schedule work.  It was only later that I learned that I had been included in the Hall of Fame and that the ceremony as well as the talk would be so special.

I gave a 15 minute closing keynote. I followed Francis Gurry, the director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization.  In turn, I was followed by Vint Cerf, who closed the entire event.

One key value at Mozilla is giving our users a great experience.  We want to build products that people love and that build openness and user sovereignty into the Web.  “Products that people love”  is a key part of this sentence.  It’s not a throw away phrase.  It has meaning.  It is a demanding goal and it must drive us — just as the latter part about openness and user sovereignty drive us.

For the past few years we have focused our codec efforts on the latter part of this sentence.  We’ve declined to adopt a technology that improves user experience in the hopes this will bring greater user sovereignty.  Not many would try this strategy, but we did.  Brendan’s piece details why our current approach of not supporting encumbered codec formats hasn’t worked, and why today’s approach regarding existing encumbered formats is even less likely to work in the future.

Given this, it’s time to shift our weighting.  It’s time to focus on shipping products people can love now, and to work on developing a new tactic for bringing unencumbered technology to the world of audio and video codecs.  It always feels better when we can build exactly the product we want and people love it.  It’s possible to fall into the view that the only way to live up to Mozilla values is to ship the product we think people should want.  This aspect is one element, but it’s not the only one.  Another critical element is shipping products that work for people now so they can love them.  This makes our values something people can want, not medicine that one takes because one should.  This element is a key part of Mozilla’s mission.

Our first approach at bringing open codecs to the Web has ended up at an impasse on mobile, but we’re not done yet.  We shouldn’t beat ourselves up for somehow failing to live up to Mozilla’s values.  We’ll find a way around this impasse.  We have some of the world’s most creative and dedicated people working on open video and video technologies.  We’ll rebuild the maze if we have to.  We’ll  keep working hard to bring unencumbered codecs to the Web.  We’ll be more effective at building products people can love as we do this.  We should do so proudly.

Here are some statistics I found stunning:

 . . . 80% of women business owners were Girl Scouts, 69% of female U.S. Senators were Girl Scouts, 67% of female members of the House of Representatives were Girl Scouts, and virtually every female astronaut who has flown in space was a Girl Scout.  (Marina Park, CEO of Girl Scouts of Northern Californa)

The Girl Scout organization attributes this to girls growing up with women leaders, in an organization that believe in girls and women and works to build “courage, confidence and character to make the world a better place.”

The second unexpected thing was how emotional the evening was for me. I attended because I was honored as one of the 100 women of Northern California selected to receive the “Greening the Future” award and to represent what’s possible. I went knowing that I had been a Girl Scout, but not thinking much about it. The statistics above struck me personally. Anytime I find a demographic that I fit into I’m interested, since I’m so often the only one of my kind in a room (e.g., the only woman, or the only person who studied China rather than technology, or the only person who can be equally happy watching either football or classical ballet, or the only person who . . . . . .)

I was also struck — viscerally — by the memories. The evening’s talks started off with a discussion of Girl Scout camping. I realized I had related my strongest memory of Girl Scout camping to my son literally 2 days before. That was a shock that suggested Girl Scouts may have had more impact on my life than I have thought.

A few women wore their sashes with achievement badges. Af first I thought this was fun and interesting — mine was lost unknown years and moves ago. Then during the award ceremony I stood next to a woman wearing hers. It made me gasp. I recognized the general pattern, the wings, the troop badge and some of the actual badges. “I had that badge, and that one , and that one too!” I haven’t thought of these in some times. Yet they instantly reminded me of hours spend figuring out what I wanted to learn about, and what I was going to do to learn and demonstrate my accomplishment.

I guess maybe being a Girl Scout taught me more than I knew at the time.