Archive for August, 2010

I’ve known Dan Mosedale a long time. He was already at Netscape working in the browser realm when I arrived in the fall of 1994. In fact, of all the people working on Mozilla and browsers in the world today, I think Dan was probably the first. Not the person with the longest continual history (Dan has taken some breaks), but the first chronologically.

I got to know Dan well when we both joined Mozilla full time in 1999. We had both been working on Mozilla part-time since before its founding, Dan on the IT/infrastructure side and me on the MPL and organizational aspects. We both joined Brendan at Mozilla full time at the same time in early 1999, as did Mike Shaver. In that era the very small group of us managing the project were known as “mozilla.org staff.”

In the next few years mozilla.org staff (which also came to include Myk, Asa and Marcia) made a number of decisions about the Mozilla project that we know put our jobs at Netscape/ AOL at risk. Each time we would all look at each other and make sure we understood what we were doing. We would plan how to keep mozilla.org up and running. In this we had support from many other long time Mozilla contributors who are with Mozilla today, including Chris Hofmann who ultimately became the liaison between mozilla.org staff and Netscape/ AOL after our decisions did cause me to be fired (technically “laid off”).

A couple years ago I mentioned to Dan that I had decided to learn to ice skate, since there’s a skating rink near my house. Dan suggested I try hockey, that despite its appearance it can be much less risky and worrisome than figure skating. I recall vividly his comment that once he has all his gear on, falling became mostly irrelevant. I’ve remembered this each time I’ve fallen without pads — the ice can be hard. Not every fall hurts, but the idea of falling is inhibiting.

Saturday night was Give Hockey a Try Day, with a session at the local rink. The Northern California Women’s Hockey League, a volunteer organization focused on getting women to play and enjoy hockey, takes this seriously. Members donate their gear for the session. They invite women of all skill levels and all ages. (One current coach had no idea how to skate when she started.) Members come with their gear, members come to help neophytes get dressed, member coaches come and get everyone out on the ice. In two hours you go from never having worn hockey skates or held a hockey stick to passing and scrimmaging. Poor quality scrimmaging for sure, but also sometimes hysterically funny as a result. The great thing is that once you’re thinking about the puck, you stop worry about the skating.

In Dan’s honor I rammed myself into the wall to make myself fall. He was right — it was barely noticeable, and not remotely inhibiting.

The NCWHL folks were universally positive and supportive. They end the event with a gear sale so that newcomers can get somewhat worn-out gear for very little money and get started in league play without a lot of expense. I travel too much and have far too little time to add anything structured to my life but still love the sense of racing around the ice not worried about knees and elbows and jaws.

The evening also reminded me of how astonishing people can be when they love what they are doing. As Esther Dyson keeps reminding me, a vibrant civil society is an awesome thing.

Almost every time I talk to Esther Dyson about Russia, she speaks of the importance of building civil society, of developing a world where people don’t look to government and formal “non-governmental organizations” for all the answers. Here’s a paragraph she wrote about civil society in an article about the Feb 2010 US State Department Tech Delegation to Russia:

Civil society is not just politics: it is a restaurant giving unused food to the poor. It is a for-profit company such as Twitter providing its service free to rich and poor alike (even though advertisers will focus on the rich). It is successful entrepreneurs mentoring start-up entrepreneurs, and NGOs engaging not just with the government, but also with commercial outfits to get support for activities that will address vexing social problems such as maternal and infant mortality.

I was reminded of Esther’s focus on civil society at the CrisisCamp event Friday night.

There are a lot of barriers to helping from a distance when a disaster strikes. Today information technology, the marvels of the Internet, and new tools focused on crowdsourcing and crowd-sourced data provide some new mechanisms. And so there are groups of people trying to develop actionable data out of the heartbreaking SMS messages (a partial example: “village of 200 houses, 100% destroyed. 100% crops destroyed. Village still flooded.”)

There’s no official government involvement. There’s not necessarily any direct connection between the people working at this and the villages or individuals affected by the floor. There is however civil society in action: see a problem, do something. Form an association (Ben Franklin formed a surprising number of associations), virtual or formal. Build a tool — or a product. Reach out. Don’t wait for government to set up a special official organization — plunge in and do things.

The degree to which citizens believe they can, can, and do affect their own lives and the lives of others is a pretty potent marker of the nature of a society.

I’ve been asked a few times what I think Mozilla can do to respond to the suffering caused by the floods in Pakistan. The answer is that I don’t know. I don’t know what particular expertise Mozilla has that can be put to use in a way that actually helps people. CrisisCommons works to develop technical solutions so that people can help, particularly to enable information sharing:

CrisisCommons is a global network of volunteers who help people in times and places of crisis. If you can use the Internet, a word processor, a cell phone or any other kind of technology, you can help. Right now virtually online or during one of our many CrisisCamps around the world!

CrisisCamps are held to bring focused attention on particular disasters. There’s one tonight in Silicon Valley focused on the Pakistan floods. Here’s the description:

Non-techies with laptops are needed do Pashtun translation, data entry, blogging, text editing, classifying messages, user-interface testing, collating web-based news updates, etc. We will also create technical tiger teams to provide Silicon Valley-located expertise to CrisisCommons projects managed by camps around the world. These projects involve mapping, databases, crowd-sourcing, coding, user-centered design, etc. This requires techies with laptops. Range of coding skills (python), geo-, and user interface skills are required.

I plan to go — anyone else?

In a funny coincidence, two separate articles evaluating the effect of copyright law came through my reading stream this week:

The first is the Ars Technica discussion of the theory that weak copyright laws in the 1700s and 1800s helped Germany catch up technologically.

The second is a book review in this week’s New York Times. The book review is written by Lewis Hyde and called “A Republic of Letters” and the book is “Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership.” Apparently Thomas Jefferson wondered whether copyright should exist at all when writing the US Constitution, but was persuaded by Madison that a very limited law would be the best balance.

Of course, there’s nothing new about the topic of how much intellectual property protection encourages creativity and innovation, and when IP protection backfires and stifles intellectual development. Even so, it’s a relief to see new works articulate the importance of evaluating our intellectual property laws in light of the things they are preventing, not just how much protection they can give. Now it’s time to read the actual book instead of the review 🙂