Posts Tagged with “2010 goals”

What can Mozilla do with our products and our product development processes to move the Internet toward our vision of an open, decentralized, participatory place in the next two years? In my last post I suggested we develop a set of goals to answer this question. Here’s my proposal. Comments, suggestions, additions, deletions, concerns, even wholesale restructuring welcome!

1. Deepen Mozilla’s role as a centerpiece of the Internet

• communities continue to expand and provide means for individual development
• thought leadership expands to include things such as the open web, hybrid social enterprises, organizational sustainability, shared decision-making, individual control, and portability in Internet life
• innovations emerge from the Mozilla world
• technology excellence and industry wide leadership continues
• projects and products remain vital

2. Data: provide leadership in

• helping people exercise better ownership and control over their data
• making anonymous, aggregate “usage data” more of a public resource

3. Mobile

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

4. Continue Firefox mindshare and marketshare momentum

I propose we have a set of goals for the next two years that describe the ways we want our products and technologies to move the Mozilla misison forward.

These goals should be concrete enough that people can respond to them and provide a means for evaluating the scope of progress. Perhaps even more importantly, these goals should express important ideas rather than specifying implementation plans. They should set the directional, aspirational goals. They are intended to describe the type and scope of accomplishment we want to see.

Broad aspirational goals are critical, for the reasons I described last May. Mozilla’s great success is built on:

. . . many thousands of people (tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, actually) moving in the same general direction, most of whom aren’t full time, aren’t employees and may not even be known personally to the project’s leadership. We won’t know and don’t seek to control all the things people will do that make us more successful. Articulating a broad, commonly shared set of aspirations helps many disparate groups of people organize themselves and work towards very practical, concrete tasks that make our aspirations real.

There are also other broader goals that Mozilla might take on — proposals to date include education, open source evangelism in general, open everything, assisting online communities with participatory tools. These discussions will pick up steam as Mark Surman joins us. Having an  set of goals for our product and technology development will also provide valuable input into that discussion.

I’ll give a list of 2010 Goals in my next post. I initially presented these goals at the Firefox Summit, and invited people to post sticky notes and comments on a whiteboard. The transcribed notes have been placed on the Wiki so they can continue to generate discussion.

Please take some time to review the proposed goals, make suggestions, ask questions, and make alternatve proposals. It’s important to have only a small number of goals, so I’ll be constantly trying to find the over-arching themes.