Archive for March, 2016

This blog post originally appeared on the Mozilla blog.

The U.S. Department of Commerce has just created a Board of Advisors for topics related to the Digital Economy.  I will participate as one of the two co-chairs, along with Zoë Baird, President and CEO of the Markle Foundation.  The Digital Economy Board of Advisors is to provide regular advice to the Secretary of Commerce from leaders in industry, academia, and civil society on the Department’s new Digital Economy Agenda. The Agenda is focused on advancing the Internet and the digital economy across many frontiers, including promoting innovation, a free and open Internet, trust online, and Internet access for all Americans.

The Board of Advisors has been charged with taking a broad, strategic look at the digital economy, including how best to promote innovation and development of new technologies, and the impact of Internet policy issues such as cybersecurity and privacy on the digital economy. I expect the the Board of Advisors will consider whether, when, and how the U.S. government should take direct regulatory and policy action, and when not to do so. The Department of Commerce has a key leadership role within the U.S. government on these issues.

Read more about the Commerce Department’s Digital Agenda here and see the Advisory Board’s announced appointments here.

Decision-Making is hard at Mozilla.  We often face inertia and ambiguity regarding who owns a decision.  It can feel as if many people can say “no” and it’s hard to figure out who can and will say “yes.”  Our focus on individuals as empowered leaders can make it hard to understand how to make a decision that is accepted as legitimate.  This impacts everything from deciding what platforms or tools to use, saying yes or no to projects, to the role of  volunteers and supporters in our work.  I hear that decision-making at Mozilla is hard regularly, and I’ve experienced it myself.

A few months back I decided to get involved directly.  I decided to develop case studies of how to make decisions well, using the decision-making model I presented during Mozilla’s Portland gathering as a guide.  The slide is below.

If you’d like to spend 20 minutes or so listening to this part of the presentation go to minute 1:35 here.

I started by recruiting Jane to do the project management and make this a more consistent project than I would do on my own.  The next step was asking a few people if they have decisions they are struggling to get made and if they would be interested in piloting this plan with me.  I started with people who know me well enough to be comfortable with give-and-take.  In other words, a few people who aren’t so intimidated by my role and can tell me things I don’t really want to hear :-).  I’ll widen the circle over time.  There is also a set of people I think of as “standing members.”  This latter group currently includes:

   — Jane Finette, for project design and management;
   — George Roter, for his participation focus;
   — Larissa Shapiro, to help build inclusion of diverse voices into our decision-making; and
   — me.

We’ve learned a few things already, even though we’re not far enough to have a case study yet.  Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

1. The decision-making model is missing at least one key element.  It’s so key that we currently call it “Item 0.”  (We’ll probably rename it item 1 at some point.)  This is — identify the actual decision that needs to be made.  This sounds obvious.  But the actual decision may be very different than the question as first presented.  For example, in one case the initial question was something like “what’s the most cost effective way to do X?”  But in reality the decision turns out to be things like “How important is this product feature?”

2.  We need a shared understanding of what “community” means and how we think about our volunteers and community when we make decisions.   We need a way of doing this that respects the work being done and that simultaneously allows us to decide that not every activity should be supported forever.  George Roter is our point person for this.

3.  We decided to create something I dubbed  the “Map of the Land Mines.”  This will start as a list of questions that tend to stop forward momentum and leave us paralyzed.  Our starting list here is:

— How public should we be? When is open appropriate / when is it not?
— Are we collecting data?
— Is it important we choose open source for our tools?
— How do we think about supporters and volunteers?

Of course we’ll want more than a list.  We’ll want tools for how to approach these topics so we can all get unstuck and stay unstuck.

We’ll meet every 2 weeks or so.  Steps 3, 4 and 6 of the decision-making model are about communication, participation and documentation.  So expect to hear more, both about the process and the decisions areas we’re using to build case studies.

Comments and suggestions are welcome, either here or via other channels.

I feel a strong need for more conversations with people who care about the Open Internet, Mozilla and Mozilla’s mission.  I’ve noticed that my blog has become pretty “official.”  By this I mean most of the posts are more one way and don’t invite conversation the way I’d like.

I’m going to try returning to blog posts that are  more about topics in process, and see if this helps spark good conversations about what we want to see happen and the decisions we want to make going forward.

I’ll tag these posts as “thought process” to be very clear they aren’t intended as decisions or announcements.  We’ll moderate comments on these posts.  Hopefully after-the-fact if possible but if we see too much spam or flame-throwing or trolling we’ll change that plan.

Tuesday March 8 2016 is International Women’s Day (IWD), an event launched just over 100 years ago to promote equal rights for women.  IWD is officially celebrated in many countries and by the United Nations.

This year I’m much more focused on marking International Women’s Day than ever before.  There are two drivers for this.  On the one hand, there has been important progress to date and many women in the world have ascended to new levels of empowerment.  On the other hand, there is a great deal of critical work still needed.  As the World Economic Forum’s annual The Global Gender Gap Report 2015 notes, “Ten years of measuring the global gender gap has helped us understand how lack of progress is damaging to global economic growth, and given us insights into how practical measures can support growth and improve the quality of life for women worldwide.” Governments around the world have recognized the remaining needs by including “Gender Equality” in the United Nations shared goals for the future, known as the “Sustainable Development Goals.”  Empowering women to reach full potential has many aspects, and each one of us with good will can make valuable contributions.

I am particularly focused on the role the Internet can play in improving the lives and opportunities of women, girls and their families.  The Internet is an unusual development because its core design principles are to provide the maximum amount of opportunity for the maximum number of people.  In the tech world we use phrases such as “decentralized” or “placing decision-making at the edges of the system rather than the “center” or “open” or “interoperable” or “permission-less” to explain this extraordinary nature of the Internet.  Sometimes we shorten this to “the Open Internet.”  Whatever the phrase, the meaning is a system where more people have opportunity to innovate and to solve problems that are important to them.  An opportunity like the Open Internet comes along very rarely, maybe once in many generations, and so I want to make sure that its benefits are available to all of humanity.  Indeed, it is crystal clear to me that the Open Internet is they key to development that is inclusive, innovative and sustainable.

For this reason I am honored to participate in the United Nation’s’ first High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment, which was launched this January.  I am eager to bring the possibilities that ICT and the Internet bring for  empowering women into the work of the Panel.  This involves learning for me, as this is a global topic and my Silicon Valley experience is only a piece of the picture.  At Mozilla we’ve learned a lot and benefitted from our participation in the US State Department’s TechWomen program, which brings professional women in technology fields to spend time with Silicon Valley technology organizations.  The women Mozilla has hosted through this program have been impressive, inspiring, and the source of much learning for Mozilla and for me.  Similarly we have learned a great deal from the Outreachy program, which brings people from underrepresented groups, including women, to working internships in free and open source software organizations.  And of course I learn an enormous amount from the thousands of Mozilla volunteers as well as the organically developed Women@Mozilla program.

Recently Anar Simpson (Special Advisor to me on the topic of Women, Girls and Technology) and I followed up with delegation trips to join women  professionals in technology in Jordan, the UAE and Zimbabwe.  In Jordan the TechWomen designed the  “I Am Empowered” campaign which reflects the degree of progress we’ve made to date.

Photo Credit: Agnes Monpanari

The input from these activities will help form my technology related contributions to the Panel.  Similarly I’ll be gathering input from Mozilla community members, who build and teach and spread the benefits of the Open Internet around the globe.  And of course, from technology leaders in Silicon Valley, so that together we can make greater strides for women’s economic empowerment.