Archive for December, 2011

November was MozCamp month for Mozilla. We held MozCamp Europe, including the Mid-East and Africa, and MozCamp Asia. For each MozCamp I gave an opening talk that touches on:

• what mozilla is, our key goals
• a bit of history about what we’ve done so far to meet our goals
• what we’re working on today
• what we should be doing in the future to meet our goals.

I’ve embedded the opening talk from MozCamp below. It’s a video, but the audio is the important part. It’s about 40 minutes long, so it’s not a set of sound-bites and it may seem slow-paced.   It is however, a pretty good summary of my view of the world and Mozilla’s place in it.

I also have a set of slides that reflect this talk. I’ll get them posted shortly as well.

Here’s the MozCamp Asia opening talk:

Over the summer and fall I wrote a set of posts about how Mozilla’s mission is leading us to develop new offerings and new ways of bring user sovereignty and freedom to online life.

My colleague David Ascher has written a piece which I find to be a nice summary of these goals. I’m planning to write a summary next year, after some discussion of user data, so I was very pleased to see that David has done so now. It’s a week or 10 days old, but if you haven’t seen it already it’s a nice, personal voice thinking about Mozilla in the new era.

We’re all creating large amounts of online data about ourselves. How should that data be treated? One key element is encryption, and the ability to store data in a format which is not easily read by people who aren’t authorized to do so. “Encryption” gets complicated pretty quickly, and the cryptography which underlie can also be complex. As a result, it’s easy to think of “encryption” as the answer, thinking that my data is safe if it’s encrypted.

My colleague Ben Adida has written a very helpful post about the value of encryption. He describes why is part of the solution for protecting data, but isn’t a complete solution. It’s a great post because it respects those of us who aren’t cryptographers and provides a thoughtful, understandable outline of the problem space.

Figuring out better ways to handle user data will be on our minds a great deal in the future. I was happy to see this post because it helps me think about the issues in a smarter way.