Prom playlist: what’s missing?

Amazing comments = this updated version. Feb 19/09 1720EST.

People in Toronto (and people following me on Twitter) will know that Tonya and I are turning 40 soon … and this weekend is our party. The theme is ‘The Prom You Never Had’, rebooting 1987 and making it what we wished it had been.

I’ve been compiling the party soundtrack for a while now. Some of it’s stuff I love. A bunch of it is stuff I know people want to hear, and dance to. This is what’s on the list so far (new or re-added stuff in red):

54.40 – Baby Ran
ACDC – You Shook Me All Night Long
Aerosmith + Run DMC – Walk This Way
Aha – Take On Me
Alarm -Sixty Eight Guns
Alphaville – Forever Young
Art of Noise_04_Close (To The Edit)
Art Of Noise – Peter Gunn
B52s – Love Shack
Bananarama – Cruel Summer
Bananarama – Venus
Bangles – Walk Like an Egyptian
Beastie Boys – Fight for Your Right to Party
Big Country – In A Big Country
Billy Idol – White Wedding
Blondie – Call Me
Bobby McFerrin – Dont Worry Be Happy
Bow Wow Wow – I Want Candy
Bronski Beat – Smalltown boy
Cameo – Word Up
Clash – Clampdown
Clash – London Calling
Clash – Police & Thieves
Clash – Rock the Casbah
Clash – Should I Stay or Should I Go
Clash – (White Man) in Hammersmith Palais
Cramps – Goo Goo Muck
Crowded House – Something So Strong
Cult – She sells sanctuary
Culture Club – Do You Really Want To Hurt Me
Culture Club – Karma Chameleon
Cyndi Lauper – Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
Cyndi Lauper – Time After Time
Cyndi Lauper – True Colors
David Bowie – Lets Dance
Dead or Alive – You Spin Me Right Round
Depeche Mode – People are People
Devo – Whip It!
Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Come On Eileen
Dire Straits -Money For Nothing
Doctor and the Medics – Spirit In The Sky
Dream Academy – Life In A Northern Town
DreamWarriors-MyDefinition
Duran Duran – Hungry Like The Wolf
Duran Duran – Rio
Eddie Grant – Electric Avenue
English Beat – Can’t Get USed to Losing You
English Beat -Mirror In The Bathroom
English Beat -Save It For Later
English Beat – Twist And Crawl
Eurhythmics – Would I Lie To You
Eurythmics – Sweet dreams
EWF – Wanna Be With You
Falco – Rock Me Amadeus
Ferris Bueller – Oh Yeah!
Fine Young Cannibals – She Drives Me Crazy
Flying Lizards – Money ( That’s what I want )
Foreigner – I Want To Know What Love Is
Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Relax
George Michael – Faith
Go Gos – Our Lips Are Sealed
Go-Go’s – We Got The Beat
Guns n Roses – Sweet child of Mine
Human League – Don’t you want me
Husker Du -New Day Rising (Live)
Jesus and Mary Chain -Just Like Honey
J Giles – Angel is a Centerfold
Joan Jett – I Love Rock And Roll
John Cougar Mellancamp – Jack and Diane
Joy Division Cover – Love Will Tear Us Apart
Katrina and the Waves – Walking on Sunshine
Kim Mitchell -Patio Lanterns
Kool and the Gang – Celebration
Laura Branigan – What a Feeling
Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven
Level 42 – Something About You
Lionel Richie – All Night Long
Lipps Inc. – Funky Town
Loverboy – Everybody’s Working For The Weekend
Madness – Our House
Madonna – Holiday
Madonna – Like A Prayer
Madonna – Like a virgin
Madonna – Papa Don’t Preach
Madonna -  Vogue
Maestro Fresh Wes – Let Your Backbone
Martha and the Muffins – Echo Beach
Men At Work – Land Down Under
Men Without Hats – The Safety Dance
Michael Jackson – Bad
Michael Jackson – Beat It
Michael -Jackson – Billy Jean
Modern English – I’ll Stop the World and Melt W
Motorhead – Ace Of Spades
Murray Head – One Night In Bangkok
Musical Youth – Pass The Duchie
Nena – 99 Red Balloons
Pat Benatar – Hit Me With Your Best Shot
Peter Schilling – Major Tom
Pet Shop Boys – West End Girls
Pink Floyd – Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)
Pogues- Fairytale Of New York
Police – Every Breath You Take
Police – Roxanne
Pretenders – Don’t Get Me Wrong
Prince – Kiss
Prince – Let’s Go Crazy
Prince – Purple Rain
Prince – Raspberry Beret
Prince – When Doves Cry
Pursuit of Happiness – I’m An Adult Now
Queen – Another One Bites the Dust
Queen – Flash
Ramones – Bonzo Goes To Bitburg
Ramones – Do You Remember Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio?
Ramones – Rock N Roll High School
REM – End Of The World
Rick James – Super Freak
Rush – Tom Sawyer
Sade – Smooth Operator
Sigue Sigue Sputnik – Love missle F1-11
Simple Minds – Don’t You Forget About Me
Simply Red – Holding Back The Years
Sinead Oconnor – Nothing Compares 2 U
Soft Cell – Tainted Love
Spandau Ballet – True
Specials – Free Nelson Mandela
Specials – Ghost Town (12″ Ver.)
Specials – Too Much Too Young (Live)
Styxx – Mr.Roboto
Talking Heads – Burning Down The House
Talking Heads -Once In A Lifetime
Tears For Fears – Shout
Thomas Dolby – She Blinded Me With Science
Toni Basil – Hey Mickey
Toto – Africa
Twisted Sister – We’re Not Gonna Take It
U2 – In The Name Of Love
UB40 – Rat in mi kitchen
UB40 – Red red wine
Van Halen – Jump
Vapors – Turning Japanese
Violent Femmes – Blister in the Sun
Violent Femmes – Gone Daddy Gone
Waitresses – I Know What Boys Like
Wall of Voodoo – Mexican Radio
Wang Chung – Everybody Have Fun Tonight
Wham – Careless Whisper
Wham – Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go
ZZ Top – Legs
ZZ Top – Sharp Dressed Man

What’s missing? If you we’re rebooting a 1987 prom, what would you want to hear? What’s so lame we should dump it?

Interview > Pascal Finette > MozLabs, Students and Open Innovation

In addition to working closely with colleges and universities, the current education pilot will also include a number online courses offered directly by Mozilla. Online courses give us a quick way to try out new ideas for learning content. They also offer an opportunity to reach out to anyone anywhere who wants to learn alongside Mozilla, college student or not.

The first online ‘course’ is the Mozilla Labs Concept Series Design Challenge. It mixes up webinars by people from the Mozilla community with a future browser design contest. It is targeted primarily at user interface design students, but others can participate as well.

I interviewed Labs’ Pascal Finette about this course and Mozilla Education in general:

The interview is about 13 minutes long. Well worth the listen. If you’re in a rush, here are some high points:

• Mozilla Education has the opportunity reach people from a real diversity of backgrounds, and to help them to understand the principles and values of open source software.
• We also have a chance to engage students and others in an open innovation process. This brings fresh blood and ideas into the community.
• In Mozilla Labs, the Concept Series Design Challenge will be aimed at students in human interface design. There are two parts:
  • Part one has students submitting their design ideas on what the browser would look like if it was the only application on your computer.
  • Part two mixes webinars and mentoring by leading Mozilla developers, with an aim to helping students prototype their design ideas.
• Of course, there will be a nice side effect — recordings of the webinars basically become courseware that other people will be able to download and use for their own purposes.
• Mozilla has the potential to help educators, students and other people who want to learn at a huge scale. The Lego Mindstorm education community is an example for us. They support classrooms in 30,000 schools around the world.
• Getting to this goal we need to build education materials that target specific disciplines. Seneca is already targeting engineering. Now Labs is moving to students in design. But this is just the beginning.

You can track or even get involved in the Mozilla Labs course. There is info on the Labs Concept Series page and in the Labs online forum.

What’s up w/ MoFo – February Update

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

The last month has been focused primarily on moving into action mode with Mozilla Education, and working to refine our ideas on Mozilla Research and our social movement experiments. It was also a significant month in terms of community outreach. Highlights:

• Began work on Mozilla Education, finalizing plans and putting in place resources with Seneca, URJC in Madrid and others.
• Also, we convened EduCamp in Brussels for people working on open source in higher education. Mozilla, Red Hat, Google Summer of Code, URJC, Oxford University, UN University and others participated.
• Continued discussions on Mozilla Research and the social movement program, but still a number of things to clarify before we’re ready for board discussion.
• Participated in Mozilla FOSDEM activities in Brussels, including Mark giving the opening keynote for the overall conference.

February will focus on getting a basic version of education.mozilla.org and helping with the development of new Mozilla Education assets at Seneca. The first meetings around the mozilla.org redesign will take place (this was slightly delayed). By the end of February, we hope to have a solid concept note for Mozilla Research and a more articulated picture of the social movement program.

Program Update

In January, we decided to move ahead with Mozilla Education (Frank) pilot activities, while at the same time continuing planning work on Mozilla Research (Mitchell and Mark) and small experiments with our social movement program (Zak). Specific progress we’ve made includes:

• Refined the strategic framework for Mozilla Education based on feedback from last month’s board meeting and community comments. This is reflected in the Mozilla Education planning wiki and in a shorter executive summary written to provide people with a quick overview of the program.
• Further definition of Seneca’s role in Mozilla Education. Dave Humphrey will spend almost all of this time this year focused on Mozilla activities: opening up his existing courses to students outside Seneca; setting up student collaboration infrastructure at education.mozilla.org; and developing a rich, regularly updated student projects database that covers not only Firefox but also Fennec, Thunderbird and other Mozilla projects. A draft grant agreement is in Seneca’s hands and is almost ready to sign.
• Held first face to face meeting with Universidad Rey Juan Carlos from Madrid. They have confirmed plans to run a Mozilla course similar to Seneca’s starting in July. One week will be residential in Madrid and the rest will be online. Professor Gregorio Robles will take the lead, with support from Pascal Chevrel from the Mozilla Paris office. Gregorio will spend a few days at Seneca in May to share ideas and curriculum. Frank, Gregorio and Pascal are currently working out budget details.
• Talked to Pascal Finette about the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge online course. This course will combine online lectures from Mozilla contributors (via a web conferencing system) with a design competition around future user interface design for the browser. We’ll work with Pascal to monitor the course structure and see if it could work for other Mozilla online courses. We will feature participating students and archive online lectures as a part of education.mozilla.org. We may also try online courses with Mozilla Evangelism or SUMO in parallel to monitoring what Labs is doing.
• Wrote a series of blog postings explaining our thinking about Mozilla Education. Pushing the conversation out into the Mozilla community has surfaced a number of people who want to participate in Mozilla Education and, more impressively, a bunch of educational activities within Mozilla we didn’t even know about (e.g. a XUL course in Denmark).
• Established a weekly public conference call for Mozilla Education. In general, we want to mirror how other Mozilla projects work out in the open – weekly call, a wiki, IRC, etc. This is a first step. Dave Humphrey and Frank will jointly lead these calls.
• Met with Brendan, Mitchell and David Ascher to discuss Mozilla Research. The roadblock is finding an approach that is open and leveraged while at the same time being attractive to academics who need to publish. We came up with a ‘funnel’ model that starts with a research event and builds a network of researchers around a particular problem from there. A small number of grants may be available to people within this network. The plan is to write this idea up and refine it throughout February.
• Began a small online video project that asks people to submit very short clips explaining ‘How the Net Has Changed My Life’. This is a part of an effort by Zak to help us articulate our thinking around social movement programming. It’s too early to tell what the results will be.

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.

Internal Operations

There was limited work on internal issues as a number of staff were on leave or traveling extensively. What we did do included:

• Worked with investment committee to finalize recommendations for the selection of a new investment advisor.
• Schedule initial meetings with the the web development firm and community members participating in the mozilla.org redesign.

We had hoped to finalize staff objectives and job descriptions this month, but made little progress. This is a priority for next month.

February Priorities

• Implement decision on new investment advisor if current recommendation gets board approval.
• Develop workable pilot plan for Mozilla Research for presentation at March board meeting.
• Work with Seneca and others to set up skeleton of education.mozilla.org and start work on other Mozilla Education efforts.
• Continue video contest and other learning activities on ‘Mozilla as Social Movement’ program. Begin assessment of whether we’re getting traction / what we’re learning.
• Finalize 2009 objectives and work plans for individual team members.
• Reach out and gather feedback as part of mozilla.org redesign process.

A quick comment on open, yin and yang

Just now, I was commenting on my friend Steve’s post on The Yin and Yang of Open. As sometimes happens, the comment grew into a bit of a tome. Or, at least something long enough that I figured I should make it a post instead. So here it is.

Great post, Steve. While I am always waving the flag of open, I am also a big yinyanger. Balance is important.

But, for the most part, I think were already surrounded by enough ‘closed’. Getting to balance is a long way away. So, closed mostly doesn’t need our help.

There are exceptions. Privacy is a big one. We’re losing it quickly. And it’s a pretty critical part of the balance. You need the privacy kind of closed in order to protect most of what we value in freedom and openness.

On the elements of open, I think you mostly have them. The three that I stick to these days are:

1. Transparency: Can you *see* inside something, and understand how it works.

2. Permeability. Can energy / labour / ideas / whatever get in *and* out of the open thing you are talking about.

3. Malleability: Can you shape / remix / make something new. This is similar to Zittrain’s generativity. Or, in layman’s terms, it’s hackability.

I did a similar exercise to yours here:

http://commonspace.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/open-vs-open-vs-etc/

… and then iterated and tested by talking to alot of people in alot of ‘what’s open?’ conversations.

A fourth item that may be on the list: permission. As in, you don’t have to ask for it to do something. I am not sure it’s quite the right word. But my colleague Jay suggested it as we were talking about what an open mobile ecosystem would look like. It would be one where you don’t have to ask permission to add new apps, invent new services, and so on. Like the internet.

One small area I disagree: you say ‘openness is not in and of itself a virtue’. Something can be virtuous but, like all things, require moderation and balance. Personally, I see both ‘openness’ and ‘privacy’ as virtues, and don’t see much of a contradiction.

That’s all for this sunny Friday. ‘Hi’ to family and all in Durbanville.

And, to anyone else reading this, happy Friday to you too.

Interview: Gregorio Robles from URJC in Madrid

Over the past few months, Pascal Chevrel has been introducing Gregorio Robles to the world of Mozilla. Gregorio is part of Libresoft.es — a unit of the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid that offers a masters degree in free and open source software development. After some discussions and small add ons workshop, Gregorio and Pascal have agreed to develop a Mozilla development course that will run this coming summer.

As a part of my interview series on Mozilla Education, I asked Gregorio to share his thoughts while he was at FOSDEM:

For the non-video-inclined, here is a quick summary of Gregorio’s comments:

• Mozilla is important for education. This is the first time in history where students can learn by working on real live code in an open project. But education is also important for Mozilla. Projects like Mozilla need people who know our technologies, and universities can help solve this problem.
• We already have a masters program on free and open source software, but it is mostly on general topics and technologies. We want to add courses on specific technologies so students can get involved with the community around that technology. Mozilla is a good place to start.
• Our specific plans for Mozilla are to have a face to face week in the summer followed by a longer online component. Students will take on projects where they get to really touch the code and know the Mozilla community.
• In terms of Mozilla’s broader educational effort, the priority should be to get materials done and then to re-use them. I am sure there will be lots of people wanting to use these materials. This will make life easier and make it easier to become a Mozilla contributor.

Gregorio will be working with Pascal, Frank as well as Dave at Seneca to prepare his course over the coming months.

Brussels EduCamp debrief

Last week in Europe was a wonderful whirlwind. One of the highlights was EduCamp — a small, pre-FOSDEM unconference about the link between open source and higher education. It was a bunch of people I knew (eg. Greg DeKoenigsberg from Red Hat, Leslie Hawthorne from Summer of Code), and a bunch I hadn’t met yet (eg. Ross Gardler from Oxford and Gregorio Robles from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos). Plus a bunch of Mozilla people working on education. All great, and all passionate about the learning potential inherent in the open source development process.

Much of the day was spent sharing info about the projects that people are working on or developing. Some things that struck me as interesting:

1. Folks at Oxford are planning to develop simple training for open source contributors to help them become more effective student mentors. The ideas is to help people know what they’re getting into, and what to expect in return, when they take on a student.
2. In addition to planning a Mozilla course as part of it’s current programs, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos is also working with a number of universities to develop a Europe-wide masters program in free and open source software development. This would mean standard accreditation and significant numbers of students across the continent.
3. There is a group at the UN University in Maastricht doing research on how learning happens in open source projects, and how best to link university students into the process.

I knew about the people behind all of these efforts and vaguely understood what they were up to. But getting together face-to-face always brings things to life more. I was impressed by the things people are working on.

The last bit of the day was brainstorming simple actions that might keep the energy around teaching open source going. Top ideas from the flip chart included:

• Plant a flag in the ground, and come up with a name for what we’re all working on (‘teaching open source’ and ‘open source education’ don’t really to work).
• Figure out how to tell the story of why open source projects are such great learning environments, and about efforts to make the link to formal education. (Chris Blizzard claims ‘tell the story’ is his answer to everything)
• Develop a simple way to map what people are doing in the open source education space. Maybe this is an online survey?
• Write compelling (and critical) case studies of people teaching open source in colleges and universities. Maybe this is an O’Reilly book?
• Create a blog planet of everyone who attended, and others working on open source and education.
• Develop a monster.com-style site for open source interns.

Truly a brainstorm. But some good ideas here. And some similarities to ideas that came out of the Teaching Open Source track that happened at FSOSS back in October. There is another meeting of people working on open source education happening in Chattanooga next month. It feels like there is momentum building around this whole idea. Hopefully that means some of the ideas above can turned into something real.

The future of open: what’s on your map?

On Saturday, I gave a keynote at FOSDEM called Free. Open. Future? My goal was to encourage people think of free and open as concepts that extend beyond software, and to spark a conversation about the ideas / design frameworks / mental maps we’ll need to make sure complex spaces like mobile and messaging are open in the future.  The slides are here:

If you don’t feel like flipping through the slides, the basic line of reasoning goes something like this:

1. Free software and open source have been successful in part because there is a clear mental map and values. RMS‘ four freedoms — use, study, modify, copy — and similar ideas make up this map.
2. The mental map that guided free software has also contributed to the creation of an open web. Transparency (study) and remixability (modify) are particularly critical to the web feeling and being open, and have started to bleed into more than just the code that makes up web pages but also into how regular users experience the web when they remix content and reconfigure their online tools.
3. The challenges we’re about to face in coming years are complex, and it’s clear we will need more than just use / study / modify / copy to chart our future course. If you just look at mobile, we need to figure out what ‘open’ means not only at the hardware and software level, but also in cloud services, carrier pricing, end user rights over their devices. There is a great deal to sort through if we want to get anywhere close to the success we’ve had with free software and the open web.

All of this ends up with a question: what new ideas can we add to our mental maps to make sure we can take free and open even further? Similar to the mobile scenario above, the current state of online shows why this question matters. David Ascher pointed out in his FOSEDM talk that things like Facebook and Twitter now make up a huge percentage our online conversations. Yet they are mostly closed and walled off, much more so than standardized email. If we want messaging to be a part of the open internet we’re building for the future, we need some sort of shared (but probably quite rough) mental map that includes criteria to answer ‘is this approach toonline  messaging open?’ Without this, it’s hard to build innovative products will win win in the marketplace, which is critical to ensuring that ‘open’ wins. The same is true for spaces like mobile and cloud computing.

I gave a couple of quickly hacked together ideas on what I think our future maps need to include, and listed them near the end of my slides:

• Strong values, freedom beyond just code
• Great free software, that people love to use
• Users as hackers, anyone can bend anything

These aren’t necessarily the most important ideas, except for maybe the last one about ‘users as hackers’ — that’s critical to the future of open innovation. And there are definitely places like the Mozilla Manifesto that have key elements for the mental map we need. However, my main goal here was really just to spark a conversation.

And, I must say, I failed dismally at that goal. One question from the floor, and it was off topic. Some good comments from Mozilla people afterwars. But the conversation I wanted.

On the plane to Munich, I asked a fellow FOSDEMer about this — someone who works in big car company and also attends Chaos Computer Club every year.  I figured he’d have a good perspective. His response: “You made some inroads. Ideas like these take time to settle in, and make cracks. But you also need a broader audience. Ask more people.”

Funnily enough, simply throwing my slides online yesterday sparked a few replies. One about the importance of open innovation. And another about the value that comes from ‘acting’ online, simply being a contributor to the openness of the web by posting content. Interesting.

So, taking my flightmate’s advice, this post is another chance for people to answer: what’s on your map? What are the critical ideas that will help us succeed with free and open in the future? If you think these are interesting questions, comment away.

Interview: Dave Humphrey on Mozilla Education

In addition to blogging about the plans and rationale for Mozilla Education, I’ve also been wanting to describe the actual courses and content we want to pilot this year. As I noodled this, I realized: I’m the wrong person to describe these things. Better to have the educators and contributors who we’re working with talk about how they want to make Mozilla Education real. So, I’ve decided to do a series of interviews.

My first interview is with Dave Humphrey from Seneca College. Dave has been offering a Mozilla-based course for a number of years. Now he wants to open up the materials, community and mentorship system he’s been using to students and professors all over the world. Here’s the interview:

For people who are more text oriented, some of the things that Dave touches on in the interview include:

• Mozilla is a great place for students to learn because both the community and the technology are open. Students can do real work with Mozilla technology.
• On top of the technical skills, students also learn what it’s like to work in a global community, collaborating across timezones and languages. This ability to work in an open source way is a benefit to students even if they don’t continue to work with Mozilla.
• The opportunity for Mozilla in 2009 is to move beyond Seneca, collaborating across institutions. This sounds easy from a Mozilla perspective, but it’s radical in education.
• Succeeding requires people in Mozilla who are willing to support and work with students. Seneca has been able to find mentors because their students are contributors from the beginning. We need to see if this can scale.
• We need a site like education.mozilla.org to manage the the signal to noise ratio, creating a place that mirrors how Mozilla works but that is also a sandbox for students. This new site should also have Mozilla educational content and courseware.

In addition to extending the Seneca program for students and profs everywhere, Dave has agreed to help lead the process of thinking through and rolling out Mozilla Education. Frank Hecker and Dave will be hosting weekly Mozilla Education calls on Monday’s at 11am eastern time. Like other Mozilla calls, these are open to anyone who is interested.

Upcoming interviews: Gregorio Robles from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid and Pascal Finette from Mozilla Labs.

Why Mozilla Education?

As we scribble and plan for for Mozilla Education, a question sometimes comes up: why? Why is this interesting to Mozilla? Why not just leave educating to the educators? There are at least two different answers to this question.

The first is straightforward: providing people with high quality, easy to access learning opportunities helps with Mozilla’s goal of promoting openness and participation as a part of Internet life. We can offer courses about things like open source work methods and open web technology. People in Mozilla know these things inside out. By sharing what we know, we increase the number of people skilled in these areas, and we probably pick up new contributors along the way. This is pretty simple, and is reason enough to experiment seriously with education programs.

The other answer to ‘why?’ lays in the fact that well run open source source communities are inherently engines of learning.  People can show up to a project like Mozilla with basic skills and a willingness to contribute. From there, they can: study the code and the project; get feedback on their contributions;  work with more more experienced contributors to create things and solve problems. If all goes well, they leave (or move on to help others in the project) not only with better coding skills, but also with a deep understanding of how to work in a global collaborative community environment. While it’s more like apprenticeship than a PhD, there is no question that this is a process of learning.

Of course, this alone isn’t reason to create something called Mozilla Education. In fact, some might see it as an anti-reason: people are already learning, so why do anything different?

The answer is: we may be able to amplify and broaden the learning opportunities that flow from Mozilla by looking more systematically at the education side of things. Take the upcoming Labs Design Challenge as an example.  It will use a course-like approach (interactive online lectures, competitive assignments, access to mentors) as a way to engage with human computer interaction design students. By doing this, the Labs people are opening up Mozilla participation and learning opportunities to a group of people that have been traditionally hard to engage through the regular open software development process. They are using education to expand our community and the number of people we reach deeply with Mozilla’s approach to open innovation.

The hope is that Mozilla Education can have this sort of broadening effect writ large: giving more people a chance to learn with and get involved in Mozilla. And not just technical students. Also students from disciplines like design, marketing and business.

On related question that a few people asked in response to my last post: why just focus on Mozilla, as opposed to looking at open source and education more broadly? The reasoning here is that you need real and concrete problems to learn around. In a traditional classroom, students work on ‘exercises’ — problems that someone else has already solved or that won’t actually get used in the real world. Whether its fixing a bug or developing marketing materials or coming up with design ideas, open source projects offer learning opportunities that are built around real world problems. By extension, these are learning opportunities that have potential for significant real world impact. The solution you come up with might just end up in a product like Firefox.

While Mozilla may eventually choose to champion the idea of open source as learning environment in a broader arena, the starting point has to be with the assets we have on hand: real problems in Mozilla projects, and mentors who can help people solve those problems. Eventually, we may learn enough about how open source and education  work that we could do something broader than just Mozilla. But we’ve got to start somewhere more concrete than that if we want to have an impact.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t evangelize and connect with others who share our vision about teaching open source. We have alot to learn from initiatives like Summer of Code that are already making the education + open source link. Mozilla is hosting a small EduCamp event on the day before FOSDEM with this in mind. If you are going to be in Brussels, please consider dropping in. It’ll be a great place to share your ideas and learn about this whole space.

Upcoming posts: explaining education ideas we have on the table by interviewing some of the people who are making them happen.