A city that thinks like the web, slides + audio

Thanks to everyone who pitched in with comments and ideas for my City of Toronto 2.0 Web Summit talk yesterday. The idea that we can create a ‘city that thinks like the web’ — and that Toronto can learn from projects like Mozilla — seemed to go over well. Here are the slides:

… and the audio:

As outlined in my call for ideas last week, the talk ended with three simple challenges to City Hall. They went something like this:

1. Open our data. transit. library catalogues. community centre schedules. maps. 311. expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city. do it now.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city.  somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen. encourage it.
3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the web. copy Washington, DC’s contest strategy. launch it at BarCamp.

I also made off the cuff encouragements for the city to open source the software it produces and put Firefox on every desktop. Didn’t want to push these, but had to at least mention .

A fun story: the mayor was in the front row for the whole talk. Every time I’d say something challenging or controversial, he’d start typing madly on his his Blackberry. I thought he was taking notes. Turns out he was emailing people on his staff with questions about opening TTC data for Google Transit, open sourcing city-made code, and so on.

When my talk finished, the mayor came back immediately with ” … I’ve been emailing people about your challenges. Open data for Google Transit is coming by next June, and I don’t see what we shouldn’t open source the software Toronto creates.” He also said “I promise the City will listen” if Torontonians set up a site like FixMyStreet.com. Great news, and hopefully real encouragement for TransitCampers and open web geeks into Toronto start hacking away at online tools that make our city better. I’ve uploaded audio of the mayor’s remarks here:

The one challenge the mayor didn’t address directly: doing an Apps For Democracy-style contest like the one done in Washington, DC. I still think this is a super and low cost idea. I talked to Tonya, Mark K and Will P about it after the Summit, and all said they want to make something like this happen. In fact, Tonya offered to host a Toronto Social Innovation Camp (geeks gather to sprint on solutions to a problem) where people hack on ‘make Toronto better’ web projects. This could totally blend in with the contest idea. All we need is for City Hall to is open up some data and pitch in the prize money. Fun times ahead.

One the talk itself: a little longer than I’d hoped (40 mins) and got a few Mozilla facts wrong (ooops), but overall think it was okay. Comments on how to improve for similar talks welcome.

2010 Goals: Update on Mozilla Foundation Bits

As I’ve blogged before, Mozilla is in the midst of a project-wide conversation about goals for the next two years. This post provides an update on the Mozilla Foundation bits of the 2010 goals process.

The overall aim of this process is to set goals that strike a balance between aspirational (we want to reach far) and concrete (we want goals that guide our decisions). When first discussed at Whistler back in July, these were imagined primarily as products goals. Since then, the focus has expanded to cover the Mozilla Project as a whole, including the Foundation.

For the past two months, I’ve been asking: ‘Where specifically does Mozilla Foundation fit into these 2010 goals? Where do people want to see Foundation resources focused?‘ I’ve done a good deal of talking (Barcelona, Mtn View Brown Bag, personal chats), blogging (here, here, here, here and here) and reading (Whistler Foundation 2.0 notes, Mozilla identity notes from Whistler, Mitchell’s blog posts from the summer about community) as a way to dig into these questions. There has been alot of good conversation already, and enough ideas are on the table that some directions are emerging.

At the recent Mozilla Foundation team meeting, we compared emerging ideas about what the Foundation should be doing against the Mozilla 2010 goals that have already been proposed. Based on this review, there was little question that the Foundation should be focused on these items from the initial goal list:

1. Communities continue to expand and provide means for individual development.
2. 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.
3. Innovations emerge from the Mozilla world.

There is also a Foundation role to play explaining the link between an open, participatory web and Mozilla work on Firefox, mobile and data. But the proposed goals in these areas don’t seem like a direct fit for hands-on Foundation work. The team came up with this suggested goal in response:

4. More people understand and embrace the principles that underpin Mozilla.

… which ties back to why we make products like Firefox. Based on all the conversations I’ve had, explaining and activating people around Mozilla values feels pretty central to what people want the Foundation to be doing over the next few years. Others also need to be involved, for sure. But the Foundation should play a leading role.

Over the next month, we’ll be starting a conversation about what kinds of programs Mozilla Foundation should have (I’ll post on this soon). The goals listed above will be part of that, which means we need to keep giving them a real hard look. Some things I’m asking myself right now:

• Are the four goals proposed above right for the Foundation? If not, what’s missing?
• We’ve talked alot about open source education. Do we need a specific goal for this, or is it covered by ‘communities continue to expand’ goal?
• Same question about open web technology research. Do we need a goal for this, or is it covered by ‘innovation’?
• What about broader questions of keeping the Internet accessible to anyone anywhere. Do we need a goal on ‘access’ or is that already covered by our mission?

The goals above still aren’t final. Sometime in mid-December, we’ll start feeding them into the broader Mozilla Foundation planning process. We hope they’re in closer to final shape by then, which is why the team and I are mulling questions like the ones I’ve raised here. We’d love your help with this thinking process. Post thoughts below, on your own blog or feel free to send mail.

Need help: webifying city hall

In 10 days, I’m doing a lunchtime keynote for 300 councillors, tech staff and agency heads at the City of Toronto’s internal Web 2.0 Summit. Beltzner’s great Changing the World slides (warning: big) got my mind rolling on this talk. So, I started writing it up. My main point will be something like:

Openess and participation created a better internet. They can also create a better city.

The talk will start with the Firefox story, much along Beltzner’s ‘this is how we changed the world’ line. Then I’ll tour examples of people using open, participatory webishness to make cities better. This will feed into a set of simple, concrete challenges to the people who run my city.

Challenges to city hall: open data; crowdsourcing; and listening.

For this talk to rock, I really need help with the last two sections — the examples and the challenges.

On the examples front, I am looking for three very specific things:

• Cities (or other governments) that have opened up their data so citizens can mash it up and add value.
• Web apps created by normal people that do things city hall should do (e.g. transit maps), but do them better.
• Examples of cities listening effectively to their citizens at a customer service level (i.e. whether people are happy with how clean the streets are).

A few people (thanks, Sameer!) have already fed me great examples. FixMyStreet.com. The City of Portland (first to have google transit thanks to open data). Washington, DC’s recent useful-services-for-the-city mashup contest. But I need more. If you’ve got ‘em, please comment on this post.

On the ‘challenges’ front, I want to come up with some concrete things city tech managers can do to make Toronto more open, participatory and mashable. I’m going to challenge them to:

1. Open (y)our data. Transit. Library catalogues. Community centre schedules. Maps. Expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city. I bet somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen.
3. Listen to citizens. Not just in a policy-consultation-ish kind of way, but also on everyday things-I-need-from-my-city customer service issues. First step: send a copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto to every manager in City Hall.

The City of Toronto CIO has promised more Web 2.0. That’s great. Maybe it’s the right time for challenges like these to actually be taken up. In any case, my question is: are these the right three things to push? If not, what would you ask for? Again, comments below encouraged.

Mozilla Foundation Brown Bag Video

Two weeks agao, the Mozilla Foundation team did a lunch presentation for people in Mountain View. Asa has just posted (thanks!) a video version online:

The presentation overviews what the Foundation has been up to over the past few years plus likely activities for (early) 2009. There are slides (which you can’t really see in the video) on Slideshare:

IMHO, the audience conversation was way more interesting than us doing a presentation. Or, at least, more valuable from a Foundation perspective. We received a number of helpful ideas (a community think tank on emerging issues like data) and encouragements (try to include regular-users-backing-the-NYTimes-ad-style community engagement in how the Foundation works). A few people also expressed interest in helping to make these things happen. Very, very, very great.

As we embark on a vision and roadmap process for the Foundation, we’ll need more conversations like this. We should start lining up some variously time-zoned Air Mozilla slots and other sorts of conversations soon.

What’s up w/ MoFo? November Board Report

I’m experimenting with our board report format. Following Frank’s tradition w/ status reports, I want to post these for all to read. No point writing stuff just for a few people. So, here’s November. Comments and questions heartily encouraged.

The last month has focused on getting things rolling. Defining program experiments. Team building. Mozilla-wide and Foundation-specific planning. It’s also been about building bridges within the Mozilla family: MozDev; MoCo; MoMo and especially Mozilla Europe. A significant amount of Mark’s time this month went into routine charitable org reporting. A good month, all in all. Highlights below.

Program Update

At the last board meeting, we talked about doing small program experiments (‘early swings at bat’) to get promising ideas rolling and inform our strategic planning process. With this in mind, we …

• Investigated ways to expand our open source education efforts. October’s Teaching Open Source event at Seneca helped us better understand the professor + contributor combo we need. It also introduced us to education people at Red Hat with thinking similar to ours. We have generated early professor and contributor leads in Canada, France, India, Romania, Spain and the United States. We are also doing research on who else is working in the open source education space. Next steps: invite others to add to our research plus find 1 – 3 places to start experiments starting in new year.

• Worked with Brendan and Chris Beard on early thinking about an open web research program focused on tech challenges 1- 4 years out. This would tackle issues like: virtual machine performance and security; better transport protocols; open video and multimedia formats. The working concept is that Mozilla would build a ‘research commons’ to gather the brightest minds and move the ball on these issues. Next step: write up and share concept before December board meeting.
  

• Had a ton of conversations about engaging a broader public around Mozilla’s values. Almost everyone we talk to — inside and outside the Mozilla community — thinks this is a good thing to do. However, concrete ideas on what it actually looks like are few and far between. The two exceptions are the MozCamp+ idea floated by Gandalf in Barcelona and Zak + Frank’s ‘open web literacy’ concept. We need to simply try out some of these ideas. Maybe they will work. Maybe they won’t. We’ll learn either way. Next steps: scope net literacy idea and template and run MozCamp+ events. Also, start work work Innovation Protocol on how to better explain Mozilla’s values (they are donating their time).

We need help on all of these fronts. If you know people who want to pitch in, send them our way.

Planning – 2010 Goals

Mozilla is in the midst of a project-wide 2010-goals discussion. During the early November Foundation team meeting in Mountain View, we agreed that the Foundation should propose and champion the following 2010 goal:

• More people understand and embrace the principles that underpin Mozilla.

We also reviewed Mozilla-wide goals already proposed on Mitchell’s blog. Amongst these goals, we agreed the Foundation could contribute signifcantly to:

• 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

These are only proposed goals at this stage. They relate to Mozilla as a whole and not just he Foundation. We will carve out time to reflect on these goals and how they link to the Foundation at the December board meeting as part of the vision + roadmap discussion. There is also a chance to provide feedback now by jumping into existing project-wide discussions on 2010 goals, which are active and ongoing.

Planning – Mozilla Foundation

The team meeting also included discussion about priorities for the 2009 budget and operational plan. Items on the radar at this point include:

• Better explain ‘Mozilla values’ to a broad public
• Support widespread, community-driven grassroots events (eg. Mozcamp+)
• Promote Internet (or ‘open web’ ?) literacy
• Accelerate the Powered by Mozilla program
• Expand our open source education experiments
• Experiment with research programming
• Revitalize www.mozilla.org site

• Develop a clear Mozilla Foundation vision and roadmap
• Create a strong team and organization
• Broaden our community and geographic reach

The team is currently refining these ideas and rolling them into a plan for presentation at the December board meting. Some of these ideas also tie to the early program experiments mentioned above.

Finally, efforts are underway to get the longer term Mozilla Foundation vision and roadmap process underway. A proposal will be brought forward at this board meeting. (blog note: post on this coming soon)

Internal Operations

In addition to the team meeting in Mountain View a fair bit of time has been spent on operations and internal issues over the past month. This included:

• Extensive meetings with the ‘Mozilla Europe board in Barcelona. A number of good things came from this including agreement that MozEu will play a strong role in the Foundation vision and roadmap process.
• Documentation and improvements for the Certificate Authority review process. The documentation should help us get most of the CA work off of Frank’s plate in the new year.
• Brown bag lunch and other meetings in Mountain View during our team meeting. A number of MoCo people have mentioned that they understand the Foundation a little bit better now, and that they are happy to see things in motion. This was encouraging.
• Building up a new working budget template that we can use for 2009 planning and ongoing reporting.
• Ongoing renovations to www.mozilla.org, including a great deal of archiving work that makes the site better but is not noticed by regular users.

Next Month’s Priorities

• Draft 2009 budget and operational plan to present to board.
• Develop early MoFo Vision and Roadmap strawman document.
• Confirm details for experimental program efforts in areas like education and research.
• Make first experiments with MozCamp+ model in Victoria, BC (tentative). Document and share.
• Write and gather broad feedback on ‘Internet Literacy’ concept document.
• Continue to make updates to www.mozilla.org. Develop and sign contract with developers to create new page templates.

2010 goals: hmmm, a broader public?

About 10 days ago, I posted the question ‘how can Mozilla engage a broader public around its values?’ I also asked this question to alot of people face to face. Mostly I got blank stares, which may mean I asked the question the wrong way. Or that it’s too abstract. Or just that people are busy.

I did get a very thoughtful response by email from the always-articulate Glyn Moody. Here it is in full (with permission):

Marketing: The “Open Web” lies at much of what Mozilla is currently talking about. I don’t think enough has been done (a) to explain what it is (b) why it matters or (c) to promote it. Given that it’s a nice phrase, milk it: put together more info on what it means and why *end-users* should care. Devise a logo for it; set up some rules for who can use that logo (make it a desirable brand like “open source”, and use the community to police it – no teeth, but plenty of shaming). Then push that logo hard across the Web: where the logo goes, so does Mozilla and its ideals.

Technical: This flows from the Open Web stuff. Put your money where your mouth is, and get more involved in defining the Open Web through technical work. Get involved in standards bodies (no, not the ISO….), get involved in open source projects that impact on the Open Web. Help more projects *use* Mozilla code (OpenOffice.org strikes me as a prime candidate for both Firefox and Thunderbird – you can really help each other.)

Educational: Education not just in the metaphorical sense used above – telling people what the “Open Web” is, but really pushing into the educational system. I know you’re starting to do this, and I think that’s really good. One of the most annoying things is how deep Microsoft’s fangs are embedded in the body educational as far as Windows and Office are concerned: people grow up thinking they are computing, not just examples (and bad ones at that). The more Mozilla can get involved in spreading the word about what computing/coding is, the more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young coders you will have contributing.

Political: This one is harder, but potentially even more important. As Mozilla grows in stature, it can become an important voice talking to governments, especially when the latter are making stupid decisions about computer technology (i.e. nearly always). Call it soft lobbying: you’re not really asking for anything, but offering a lot. Create a post for someone to do this full-time (ideally several around the world in different jurisdictions). The more politic you can be in this – as in not rubbing their faces in their own stupidity – the better you will succeed. There is no respected source of info for governments that has no agenda (hello Microsoft/Google/IBM etc.). Once you have established your independence and usefulness, governments should be beating a path to your door.

I also got useful quick verbal hits from people like David Crow:

Focus on the ‘one web’ message. Help people see that applications that only work on one phone or one browser are a threat to their future enjoyment of the Internet.

… and Tomcat:

The message is that we make our software differently. We are a non-profit hybrid. We aren’t trying to make money. We’re trying to make the web open.

All of this is great food for thought. I’d like more. So, I am going to ask the question in some different ways over the coming weeks. I am also going post soon about a proposed 2010 goal for Mozilla Foundation that builds on this theme. In the meantime, feel free to comment or blog on how we engage a broader public w/ our values. It’s a question that matters.