Archive for October, 2008

On Tuesday, October 28 at 1 p.m. Pacific Time I’ll be holding a session to talk about the privacy and data section of the Mozilla 2010 goals. This will broadcast on Air Mozilla. We’ll also use the IRC channel (#2010goals) for people who want to ask questions via IRC. As usual, Asa will be the contact for Air Mozilla aspects of this.

I’m doing this Tuesday because a big set of the platform team will be in town and available at that time. That creates an opportunity to have a session that includes face-to-face discussions with a set of people who are rarely together. This follows the goals discussions in Barcelona this weekend, and will proceed other goals discussions among smaller groups where hopefully people will feel more engaged and comfortable speaking up.

I’ll get a more complete schedule for other goals discussions together shortly. If you want to participate in a session on data but can’t make the Tuesday session, let me know. If there are a lot of such people then I’ll schedule another session. Or you might contact anyone who is part of the other Mozilla contributor groups I listed — they will be participating in goals discussions.

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.