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Archive for January, 2009

7 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Me

January 21st, 2009

The rules:

  1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
  2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
  3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  4. Let them know theyโ€™ve been tagged.

I was tagged by Tristan Nitot and Robert Kaiser.

1. My last year of High School was at the Oakland Public Zoo, along with 30 other students and 1 teacher, housed in a single room near the admission gate. The school had nothing particular to do with animals or zoos. It was a short-lived (one year, actually) experiment in educational alternatives amidst the general decline of Oakland public schools. Some 20 or so of my closer friends found a way to avoid the last year of regular high school (student body of 2500) and still graduate; the Oakland Zoo School was my escape route.

2. I headed off to study at Peking University based on a single telegram I never saw (this was before the World Wide Web) from the chancellor of Peking University to the Chancellor of U.C. Berkeley which — I was told — said “W.M. Baker welcome to study at Peking University for one year starting February.” I was in Taiwan at the time, a copy of the telegram was mailed by U.C. Berkeley to my parents’ address and my mom read it to me over the phone during a hurried collect call.

3. My first computer was actually a set of keys to a friend’s office where his 8 inch disk CP/M machine lay unused.

4. I graduated from U.C. Berkeley (undergraduate population 20,000) in an undergraduate degree program that was so small it had no graduation ceremony. That degree is in Asian Studies, which encompassed China, Japan and “South Asia.” The Oriental Languages Department took pity on us and asked the handful of us graduating to join their ceremony. That was an experience for my parents since all of the speeches were in either Chinese or Japanese.

5. I started my first law firm job a week late so I could finish anti-rabies treatment in Katmandu, after being bitten by a dog in Samye, Tibet. I started by last law firm job 5 weeks late so I could recover from what had been hard-to-diagnose malaria picked up on some small islands off of Lambok, Indonesia.

6. My first few weeks as a Netscape employee (fall of 1994) were so tumultuous that I thought I was likely to be thrown out. Fortunately Jim Barksdale’s arrival as CEO calmed the setting.

7. I joined Mozilla knowing full well that it was a very bad career choice, giving up a likely VP level role in a then-very-successful organization for a funky role in a unknown and precarious project.

I tag:

  • My husband Casey Dunn, one of Mozilla’s great anonymous contributors, who I know still has some secrets hidden away ๐Ÿ™‚
  • Bob Sutton, whose thinking is both broad and extremely relevant to Mozilla
  • Karim Lakani, because his tweets don’t yet capture quite the same power as his blog
  • Joi Ito, whose life is so online he’ll have to dig deep for new factoids
  • Danese Cooper, who knows more about various open source projects than almost anyone
  • Jonathan Zittrain (who may tag less than 7 people), who is a font of creative thinking about our online lives
  • a whole set of mozilla people who have already been tagged

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the Parks

January 20th, 2009

Monday was a busy day in the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. It’s a good thing we chose a service event that didn’t require registration, since many of the projects that did were full by early morning and registration closed. Our site also had far more volunteers than had been expected, but more was better. The organizers made extra trips for tools and water (non-potable water for the plants we were planting, not for us to drink).

It turns out Mori Point is a spectacular site that needs a lot of restoration. Replanting a hillside doesn’t sound like a big job, but planting 20,000 plants with only handtools turns out to be significant. We planted 1200 or 1300 yesterday, adding another batch of flags (each flag noting where a plant has been planted) to the hillside:

We even received a certificate of service, aimed mostly for kids I think.

Certificate of Public Service

Martin Luther King US National Holiday

January 15th, 2009

Monday is Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday in the United States. Mozilla offices in the U.S. will be closed. This year President-Elect Obama has advocated that more of us celebrate the holiday through volunteer public service activities. I’m planning to participate through habitat restoration in one of the national parks along the California coastline. These parks are a spectacular public resource that need a surprising amount of maintenance (habitat restoration, trash collection, trail maintenance) to retain the fullness of their beauty. I often think I’d like to do this and the coming holiday seems the perfect time.

7 things you *still* don’t know about me

January 15th, 2009

I’ve been tagged, will post something shortly ๐Ÿ™‚

Studying Leadership

January 14th, 2009

I don’t remember courses or programs on “leadership” when I was in college or in law school. Now I’m becoming aware of more and more classes, workshops and programs focusing on leadership. Last week I met with Barry Posner, who is the “Professor of Leadership” at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley.

Barry has been organizing a lecture series know as the “Santa Clara Leadership Lectures” for the Santa Clara University community for the last 9 or 10 years. One piece of his methodology particularly interests me. A week or so after each lecture he asks the students to write down what idea(s) stick with them the most — what they actually remember from the lecture. Then he sends a selection of these back to the speaker. I’m intrigued by the idea of learning what people remember after some time has passed, and what they are thus likely to pass on. I’m also intrigued by seeing written responses, where the person reformulates what they think they remember in their own words.

I’ll be giving a talk to the SCU community as part of this series in February and am very interested in learning what sticks with people. If I learn something interesting I’ll summarize it here.

Modules for Policy Ownership

January 7th, 2009

For those who are interested in Mozilla govenance, I’ve proposed an Activities Module for ownership of key Mozilla policies. The proposal is in the mozilla.governance newsgroup, which can also be accessed via Google Groups.

Integrated Revised 2010 Goals

January 5th, 2009

Here’s what I believe to be the final, consolidated set of 2010 goals. Let me know if you think there is some big issue I missed.

1. Make openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life

  • More and stronger Mozilla communities practicing these values
  • Mozilla experiences increasingly applicable to topics such as the open web, hybrid social enterprises, organizational sustainability, shared decision-making, individual control, and portability in Internet life
  • Innovations emerge from varied sources
  • Projects and products based on these values โ€” at Mozilla and elsewhere โ€” become increasingly vibrant
  • Leadership through excellence, technical and otherwise
  • Creation of open content becomes easier
  • The web becomes the primary development environment for applications

2. Make the explosion in data safer, more useful and more managable for individuals

  • Products offer people realistic options for understanding, managing, combining, sharing and moving data created by or about them
  • People expect the ability to understand,access, manage, combine, share, and move their data

3. Integrate mobile into one unified, open, innovative web

  • Make the web experience on mobile devices exciting and enjoyable
  • Products:
    - demonstrate the power of the web as the development platform
    - accelerate innovation from multiple sources
    - delight users, attract developers
  • New web standards are for all devices, not segregated into mobile-specific or โ€œwebโ€ standards.

4. Reinforce Firefox’s role as a driver of innovation, choice and great user experience

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