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.