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.

On Wednesday, September 17 a group of 10 or 15 people had a discussion about the proposed 2010 “mobile” goal. The notes of that meeting are below. I’ve also incorporated additional comments from the newsgroup. Asa, Atul, and Nanda are interested in facilitating future discussions of these topics. (I’m interested too, but not always around. And in any case the whole goal is to build many connections, with many set of discussions.) Each of them may initiate discussions, 1 or 2 people, maybe groups. If you’re interested in discussing this feel free to contact any of us in addition to commenting here (contact info is at the end.)

I’ve put an outline first, for brevity.

Effective Product in the mobile market means:

• mindshare
• marketshare
• momentum
• Reference Implementation for the Generative Web
• Platform issues ongoing (is this an execution issue, or is there a value piece here as well?

One, unified web, including mobile means:

• Mobile specific presentation, not mobile specific content
• The Web as SDK
• General Web standards and APIs, not mobile specific

Effective Product Discussion
Part one of the mobile goal says “have an effective product in the mobile market.”  What do we mean by an “Effective Product”?

• First, the three “M”s:  mindshare, marketshare, momentum
• Asa asked if there is there an cross-platform value here as there is on the desktop. We didn’t reach a conclusion on this. (In any case portability as a technical requirement is high.)
• Reference Implementation for the Generative Web. We also ended up thinking an important goal might well be to make our mobile product a reference implementation for the generative web. In other words, an effective product is one that demonstrates how much innovation and improvement in user experience is possible through openness. We’re looking at a range of products that are (a) tightly controlled up and down the entire stack; and which (2) promote development of applications that aren’t web applications, but are built on closed technologies. We could define an effective product is one that demonstrates this closed, non-web approach is not necessary and is limiting. The exact phrase is mine. I like it because we have long thought of Firefox on the desktop as a “reference implementation for web standards” as well as a great end user product. I like the symmetry here, but even so the phrase itself is not important.
• Zak asks if an effective product is one which people can use to *author* content, we haven’t talked about this yet.

One Web Discussion
The second part of the proposed mobile goal says “demonstrate that ‘mobile’ is part of one, unified, open web.”

• We spend a bunch of time talking about mobile specific sites, content and presentation. It’s pretty clear that the size and input mechanisms of mobile devices mean that simply presenting the full website exactly as we see it on the desktop doesn’t always result in the best experience. Our hope is that the tuning for mobile is in *presentation* via CSS and other web-centric techniques. Tuning for presentation can be something good for users. We hope not too see to many mobile-specific sites or very much mobile specific content. That content lives in silos, is not sharable with the web, and ends up promoting the different closed gardens of information and communities that the web has done so much to alleviate. We need to make sure that the web mechanisms available (CSS, etc.) are adequate to the task.

Our current label for this idea is: “the Web as SDK.” Build mobile content using web technologies and standards, accessible across devices, and vary the presentation to fit the device.

• Standards and APIs. We want to avoid mobile-specific standards and APIs. That also encourages fragmentation of content and access. Our goal is to expand the web to be a good mobile platform. This means developing APIs (like geolocation) as part of the web standards so they can be used across the range of devices from mobile to desktop. (We noted that this is not a simple or easy goal. Security is always a concern, as is the multitude of devices.

Broader picture.
Two areas were raised where we weren’t sure how a Mozilla product could help, they seem to have an advocacy or policy basis. We wanted to capture them as areas to look at again, see if the Mozilla Foundation’s programs might address these or there are others working on this who have ideas for which Mozilla is particularly qualified to participate.

• What about bringing the mobile web to the billions of people in the developing countries / emerging markets?
• access to the web via mobile devices is very expensive, in both developed and emerging markets.

Future Discussions.
Three of the people in this gathering — Asa (asa at mozilla dot org), Atul (avarma at mozilla dot com) and Nanda (kishore dot nanda at gmail.com) are interesting in facilitating future discussions of these topics. (I’m interested too, but not always around. And in any case the whole goal is to build many connections, with many set of discussions.) Each of them may initiatite discussions, 1 or 2 people, maybe groups. If you’re interested in discussing this feel free to contact any of us, or of course to comment here.

Note:  I saw one press article wondering if including “have an effective product in the mobile space” in our 2010 goals means that we won’t ship something interesting until 2010.  That is not the case at all.  We will ship well before then.  The intent of this goal was to say: in 2010 when we look at where we are, it should be screamingly obvious that we’ve done this. That means releasing a good product much sooner, seeing good results and acceptance, and seeing those results grow over time.

We also need to get a bit further on what “effective product” means. The details may or may not end up in the goals statement, brevity may be a big virtue.  But if there aren’t included, we’ll want a place where we capture the next couple of levels of detail.

On that note, I posted some questions about the mobile goal in the mozilla.governance newsgroup last week.  I meant to cross-post here simultaneously, but last week was quite hectic and I missed that.

I’ve proposed a set of product and technology goals for Mozilla for 2010. (http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2008/09/11/proposed-2010-goals/) One of these goals is about the mobile space. It’s below. I believe that the two very high level goals I proposed for mobile are uncontroversial in themselves. If that’s not the case then please speak up asap.

3. Mobile

* have an effective product in the mobile market
* demonstrate that “mobile” is part of one, unified, open web”

Gerv has suggested we talk about what an “effective product” means. Is that a market share number? Some degree of mindshare? Proof that Firefox on mobile devices is as exciting as Firefox on the desktop? Are users the key, or innovation, or speed, or mindshare?

As to the second part of the goal Stuart notes that we’ll need to think about how content is created for devices with different characteristics than a desktop machine, and how this affects our idea of one web. How should we approach this?

What do you think is necessary for an “effective product” on mobile devices?  And how should we think about maintaining one web? Free-flow thoughts are welcome — what’s the picture you’d like to see?

(Some thoughts from summit attendees can be found here. I asked people to put their thoughts on sticky notes and attach them to the various goals. So these are stitched together in any way.)

Last week we also had an initial in person / phone dial-in group discussion regarding the mobile goals. I’ll post about that next.

About ten days ago I published a proposed set of product and technology goals for the next two years. It’s a bit hard to talk about the topic in one big chunk. There are some very thoughtful comments to my last post that I want to discuss, but if feels a bit fragmented to do that through blog comments. (Many thanks to those who’ve responded).

To address this I’m going to break the discussion into smaller pieces. I’ll put them here, and also in the mozilla.org Governance newsgroup where it’s sometimes easier to have a discussion. You can also participate through the mozilla.governance Google Group. I’ll seed the discussions with some questions, context and with the comments that have been made so far.

We’ve set up an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel called #2010goals; I’ll hang out there as much as possible for the next few weeks. Anyone interested in the topic is more than welcome to do the same, to look for me or just for discussions. I’m traveling this coming week and expect to be frantically busy, so this week may not fiind me in #2010goals much, but there are other interested folks to look for. I expect the channel will be used most as the discussions peak.

We’ll also try having a series of phone/ video group discussions. We’ll definitely do some from Mountain View in the California timezone. We may do some in other timezones as well, I haven’t looked into arranging this yet.

First set of mock-ups

Second post re mock-ups

We’re still working on this. There’s been a bunch of helpful feedback. We appreciate this. We think we’ve integrated the feedback into something that’s a good solution; different from out last version in both its essence and its presentation and content.

We’ve come to understand that anything EULA-like is disturbing, even if the content is FLOSS based. So we’re eliminating that. We still feel that something about the web services integrated into the browser is needed; these services can be turned off and not interrupt the flow of using the browser. We also want to tell
people about the FLOSS license — as a notice, not as as EULA or use restriction. Again, this won’t block the flow or provide the unwelcoming feeling that one comment to my previous post described so eloquently.

We expect to have the materials that show this plan posted tomorrow morning.

Along with the feedback, there have also been some responses that go beyond anger to nasty, personal attacks.  This is unfortunate. I think we’ve gotten past the vitriol to absorb the underlying issues. It’s possible that we’ve missed something. Sometimes the vitriol masks what would otherwise be a point we might understand and agree with. If that’s the case, we’ll keep working on things. The end result will be better for all of us.