Mozilla Education, a scribble

As I mentioned earlier in the week, education is one of the first program areas where Mozilla Foundation wants to experiment in 2009. I spent some time this afternoon scribbling out an overview the ideas we’re bouncing around. This is what I came up with (bigger version on Flicker):

Frank and I have also updated the Mozilla Education planning wiki with explanations of the ideas in this scribble, and detailed info on each of the activities we’re considering. The high level summary at the top of the wiki page says:

During 2009, we want to experiment with Mozilla Education — helping people learn about Mozilla through an open, participatory and distributed approach to education.

Building on Mozilla’s 2010 goals, our big picture aim is to:

Make openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life

We think that education can help us reach this goal by helping more people to:

1. Understand and use (Mozilla’s?) open source work methods
2. Learn about and build with open web and Mozilla technologies
3. Participate in Mozilla and other open source projects

In 2009, we’ll test out a number of small programs aimed at reaching these objectives. They include:

1. Seneca Expansion / Virtual Seneca offering Mozilla learning resources and support to students everywhere.
2. Madrid Summer Course at URJC, establishing the first formal Mozilla course beyond Seneca and establishing an educational foundation in Europe.
3. Online Mozilla Courses that provide learning and engagement opportunities directly to potential Mozilla contributors.
4. education.mozilla.org where all Mozilla courseware and learning information can be found.

Over time, we hope these programs will also make a broader contribute to creating a new participatory learning model based around open source contribution … and to work with others who share this vision. However, for now, we want to start with something doable: making a formal link between education, learning and the Mozilla community.

I am posting this in the hope that people will offer initial reactions. While we plan to act quickly on some of this (especially Virtual Seneca), the overall plan is still very much in flux. It’s evolving pretty much daily as we figure out how to put things into action. So, slings, arrows and offers of help very welcome in the form of blog comments (we’ve already got a good list of Mozilla people who want to help). Also, feel free to dig into the wiki. Much more detail there.

Next week, I’ll post more thoughts on why this approach to education is interesting for Mozilla and what sorts of things we might be able to achieve in 2009. This should give people even more to work with and respond to.

Mozilla puzzle pieces (or, what is MoFo?)

If you’ve been following my blog for the last six months, you’ll know that I’ve wrestled a great deal with a very basic question: who and what is the Mozilla Foundation?

The answer to this question should be simple, I know. But, being new to the world of Mozilla, it isn’t. And, it’s pretty central to figuring out what the Foundation team should be working on, and how we can be helping Mozilla as a whole. Which is what I think about most of the time.

The good news: some bits of the ‘who and what’ question have become clearer — especially when I look at Mozilla as a whole. Here are some of the things I’ve learned so far:

1. There is just one Mozilla. All of Mozilla has the same mission: to guard the open nature of the internet. When I talk about Mozilla these days, I’m referring less and less to Mozilla Foundation. I talk much more about this big idea that is Mozilla’s mission and the global community of people that is making it real. It feels like that’s the right way to tell the world about Mozilla.
2. The Mozilla Project is bigger than the sum of its organizational parts. There are lots of organizational bits within Mozilla. Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla Messaging. Regional affiliate organizations around the world. Individual community projects and sites. While it’s more an idea than an organization, the Mozilla Project is the thing that contains all this. Figuring out the role of Mozilla Foundation happens inside this context.
3. We need to be in this for the long haul. Recently, I’ve heard John Lilly asking what it means to be a champion of the open web for the next 50 to 100 years. I think Mozilla’s mission will be relevant for at least this long. In a funny way, recognizing this makes thinking about the work of the Foundation easier.

I wonder if these things sound right to people who have been around Mozilla for a while? I suspect one response will be ‘there is nothing surprising here’. And, indeed, all this fits with what I knew about Mozilla before getting involved. The difference now is that these ideas have become visceral — they are in my belly and they are guiding how I think, talk and act. Which I suspect is good.

Still, I struggle with day-to-day questions about the role of the Foundation. In December I tried to tackle this by drawing a map of the bigger organizational bits within the Mozilla universe. This is different than Mitchell’s Mozilla Tree, which does a great job of describing how and why things work. My map was more a collection of puzzle pieces, and is really aimed at helping me find my way. It looked something like this:

While this is really just a sketch, there is one thing this map has already helped me with: understanding that there are at least two functional roles for the Mozilla Foundation.

The first role is driving Mozilla’s mission forward with programs that build on and move beyond Mozilla’s existing products. Up to this point, we’ve been talking about things like education, research and movement building. But these could be almost anything. The main point is that the Foundation needs to catalyze concrete actions that a) guard the open nature of the internet by b) leveraging and reaching beyond the good work Mozilla is already doing by building technologies that underpin the open web. I knew this was a role when I started out, and this is where the team and I have been spending most of our time.

The second role is ‘Foundation as support system‘, particularly at the Mozilla Project vision, policy and process level. This isn’t about unilaterally setting policy, vision, etc. It’s about making sure that this stuff happens, and supporting Mitchell in her Chief Lizard Wrangler role, the Foundation board and module owners in general. Part of this is looking after process issues. But it might also include fleshing out ideas, researching their implications, or helping to write up proposals. In some cases Foundation staff may also have primary responsibility for particular policies, as Frank does with CA review. I knew about this aspect of Foundation work from the beginning, but I’m finding it tougher to get my head around what it means in terms of people, resources and structures. It may be that we need particular people and roles that we don’t yet have. This is something our team will be actively thinking on once some program experiments are up and running. We’ll need help.

It is also worth explaining why I’ve pulled out Mozilla Labs as it’s own item on the map. It is not its own legal entity. Yet, I think it stands apart as idea and way of working that can serve all of Mozilla. When I was first blogging about Mozilla, I talked about the need for some sort of radar that could catalyze thousands of ideas about making the open web better, gradually surfacing the best, most scalable amongst them. In many ways, this is what Labs is doing. And, if we have a 50 year mission, all of Mozilla needs to be looking over the horizon in this way. Maybe that’s by working with Labs, or just by thinking differently. Whatever, I think it’s something we need to do more.

As noted above, I’ve done this mostly to help my own thinking. That said, I am very much interested in getting reactions to this. What is missing? What story isn’t being told? How would you tell this story? If you really have a different angle on this, what would your map of the Mozilla universe look like? I’d love to see other people’s maps.

Mozilla Foundation program ideas for 2009

Before the holidays, the Mozilla Foundation team spent a bunch of time thinking through the kind of programs we might work on in 2009. The idea was to come up with a short list of of activities that would a) contribute to Mozilla’s overall goals and b) really leverage the skills of our small team.

Drawing on what we’d heard in discussions we’ve had with Mozillians since Whistler, we settled on five areas where the Foundation could focus this year:

• Teaching open source: Help people learn about Mozilla’s open, participatory and distributed way of working. This could include efforts to leverage and scale the Seneca model, with students participating directly in Mozilla development.
• Mozilla Research: Solve big open web tech and user problems that no one else will tackle. Mozilla’s main role would be framing the right research questions, providing infrastructure and building networks of researchers.
• Movement building: Engage millions of people as promoters the open web, providing concrete ways to participate in projects like Mozilla even if they don’t have technical skills.
• Accessibility: Drive web accessibility for people with disabilities into the mainstream of web development, and continue to support open source accessibility projects that have potential to really scale.
• Community Support: Provide support for smaller Mozilla, open source and free culture projects, helping them to build community and sustainability.

In some ways, this list is meant as a strawman for programs section of the Mozilla Foundation Vision and Roadmap document we’ll produce later this year. We want to see what people think about these ideas, find out who is interested in working on them and work out the details of what they might look like in action. So, certainly, take this blog posting as a call for your ideas on all these fronts.

The other goal here is to give us some ideas to experiment with – programs we can actually start trying out in the real world as a way to feedback into our roadmap process. After discussion in the team and with the board, we decided that we should lean even more heavily into this side of things. We’re only going to know what belongs in the roadmap once we try some things.

With this in mind, we’ve moved into much more detailed thinking on the most promising and advanced ideas above. Education is first on the list, with both plans and action already emerging. I’ll be posting about this later in the week. We’re also working on the Mozilla Research and ‘consumer movement’ ideas. These will take a bit more time to develop.

Comments and expressions of interest on this stuff encouraged. This is all a work in progress.

What’s up w/ MoFo – January Update

Here is a brief Mozilla Foundation status update that I shared at last week’s board meeting.

December was a month of laying out the options, and deciding where to focus for 2009. Highlights included:

• Mozilla-wide 2010 goals finalized. Next step is to see how they can used creatively by Foundation and others in Mozilla community.

• Presented high level Foundation program strawman and 2009 budget to the board, opening up the ability to dig deeper into specific program ideas.

• Draft plan for 2009 education pilots developed, including making Seneca resources widely available to students everywhere.

Next month will focus on putting education ideas into action (pending board support), digging deeper into Mozilla Research and Social Movement program ideas and starting the redesign of mozilla.org.  Details below

Program Update

In early December, the Foundation team made a ‘program strawman’ presentation to the board. This summarized new and existing program ideas, as well as some ideas on how to think about the Foundation within the broader Mozilla universe. Based on feedback from this presentation, the Foundation team moved ahead with deeper research and planning on the most promising new program ideas.

• Frank and Mark worked with a number of community members to draft a Mozilla Education plan for 2009. It includes an effort to open up Mozilla@Seneca resources to students everywhere, a summer course at URJC in Madrid and a series of online courses run by the Mozilla Community. It also proposes the creation of education.mozilla.org as a simple window on Mozilla learning resources. This will be discussed at the January board meeting.

• We’ve agreed Mozilla Research is a priority for planning and discussion, but haven’t made much new progress with plans. Mitchell and Mark will be working with Brendan, Andreas and others to move this further in January. The plan is to have a detailed discussion at an upcoming board meeting.

• Zak has been working on ideas related to Mozilla as Social Movement idea. While thinking on this is less evolved than education, some simple ideas are emerging: a people’s history of the ‘net and a Mozilla Manifesto video contest. Gandalf and others are also working on an initial test of the MozCamp+ idea to reach out to students, bloggers and others not already involve din Mozilla. The aim here is to do things that will help us articulate what this program is about. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do these quickly enough that they’ll help us come with a more articulated plan — or at least opportunities to discuss — at an upcoming board meeting.

We’re also still talking about existing programs such as accessibility and community support. However, these are on ’simmer’ mode as we think through the newer ideas outlined above.

Planning

During December, 2010 goal setting wrapped up, and Foundation-specific planning moved from the ’strawman’ stage to the ‘digging into specific programs’ stage (see above).

The main milestone here was that Mitchell posted the final Mozilla-wide 2010 goals at the end of December. They are:

1. Make openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life.
2. Make the explosion in data safer, more useful and more managable for individuals.
3. Integrate mobile into one unified, open, innovative web.
4. Reinforce Firefox’s role as a driver of innovation, choice and great user experience.

These reflect feedback and changes from across the Mozilla community, including input received at the December 10 board meeting.

During January, we’ll be looking even more closely at how these goals can help guide the programs we’re developing (e.g. do mobile and education intersect?).

Internal Operations

Some progress on operations and internal issues over the past month. This included:

• Kathleen Wilson continued to grow her work on CA review. Mark and Frank are looking at plans to improve CA review overall.
• Decided to move ahead Happy Cog to help with the visual refresh of mozilla.org, which will start in a few weeks. We want this to be as open a process as possible. It could be that we borrow the Ubiquity logo process.
• Began sketching out a broader planning and engagement process for mozilla.org rejuvenation.

Also, in team news, David Boswell has a new family member.

January Priorities

• Develop workable pilot plan for Mozilla Research for presentation at February board meeting.
• Finalize plans and begin work on education efforts w/ Seneca, URJC and others, depending on outcomes of January board discussion.
• Run small test and learning activities on ‘Mozilla as Social Movement’ program, including video contest.
• Finalize 2009 objectives and workplans for individual team members.
• Start work on mozilla.org redesign process.
• Continued work to improve CA review process.

I was a teenage peace punk, and 6 other things

Unlike many, I was happy to be tagged with the 7 things meme. I’d been in a bit of a blog drought. This got my fingers moving again. Thanks, Axel.

The rules are these

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
• Let them know they’ve been tagged. (you’ll just have to trust me)

My seven things

1. My grandparents started a cooperative suburb. It was called Grenville Park. It’s a funny idea, I know. Cooperative. Suburb. But it worked. All of the parks and even some of the roads were run by the people who lived there. And there was an amazing sense of community. When my grandparents moved to the country, they let us live in their coop suburb house.  Those were some of my best growing up years. That time helped make me.

2. The first record I ever owned was by Billy Joel. It was called Glass Houses, and was (I’m ashamed to admit now) followed by a string of other Billy Joel records. And, yes, to be clear: these were long playing vinyl audio recordings. I bought them at Brian’s Record Option, a used record store run by a bearded hippie in downtown Kingston. I played them on an ancient portable record changer that my parents handed down to me.

3. My first computer was a TRS80 Model I. Every weekend, my friends and I would ogle early Apple products at the local computer store. I think we even played with a Lisa once. But all I could afford with my saved up paper route money was a clunky old TRS80 with a tape drive. I bought it from an engineer who was a friend of my parents. And, as it turned out, it was wonderful. This may explain why, to this day, I tend to think Apple products are nice to look at, but aren’t really for buying.

4. I was a teenage peace punk. Leather. Chains. Combat boots. Safety pins.  The whole deal. This was tough in a small paper mill town of 10,000 people in Northern Ontario. Imagine living inside the movie Fargo while listening to the Dead Kennedys with your stereo turned up to 11. It was like that. Of course, there were also alot of upsides. I listened to a ton of GREAT music. I jumped around alot. I wrote silly poetry. I upset my teachers. I failed to learn how to play bass guitar. Thank God the Sex Pistols saved my soul from Billy Joel.

5. When I was 16, I started my first non-profit organization. The organization was called K.I.N.D.R.E.D (guess what the overly earnest acronym stood for and I’ll buy you a beer). Mostly, our mission was to show peacenik movies in church basements. Occasionally, we arranged a caravan of cars to go to anti-nuke marches, which were pretty popular events at the time. I’ve started something like a dozen organizations since, most of which have faded away. Strangely, a couple have tenaciously kept kicking.

6. I proposed to my wife on a desolate rock. It was surrounded by many other desolate rocks, in a part of Ontario called Georgian Bay. Smoothed by glaciers long ago, the rocks there flow in and out of the water like snow drifts. It’s one of the most beautiful places I know. Which is important to the story, as I mumbled my proposal in a pretty awkward and silly way. Had Tonya not been distracted by the natural beauty, she might not have said yes. Our family goes back to Georgian Bay every summer to spend time with these rocks.

7. My oldest son’s middle name is Freedom. Tristan Freedom Surman. It says so on his birth certificate, although you might also guess it just by looking at him. Freedom is an important idea. But it’s also hard. Like parenthood. I wouldn’t give up either for the anything in the world.

Those seven people upon which I tag this wonderful curse are

1. Frank Hecker, wise, and mysterious
2. Helen King, always full of surprises, and usually more than seven of them
3. David Eaves, wonderful man, needs more levity in his blogosphere
4. Glyn Moody, ditto
5. Aza Raskin, doesn’t seem to have been bitten yet
6. Steve Song, who I trust to post with art and grace
7. Tonya Surman, I wonder what 7 things I don’t know yet

Back in the (blogging) saddle

I’ve got so much I’ve been meaning to blog about. Emerging Foundation programs. Open source and education. Mozilla puzzle pieces bouncing around in my head. But, somehow, the holidays knocked me out of the blogging saddle. Thankfully, Axel tagged me on 7 things, and it got my blogging fingers rolling again. That post coming in a few minutes. More posts on other stuff later in the week, and next.