What makes the web better?

When we describe Mozilla, we often talk about the open web and ‘making the internet better‘. Phrases like these are critical to explaining our mission. However, they are also pretty fuzzy. They could mean many different things.

At a recent retreat, Mitchell took a shot at making the idea of a ‘better internet’ more concrete by sharing the following slide:

Photo by John Slater

The idea was to look at what characteristics make up ‘better internet’ by contrasting them against things that make the internet worse. I found this approach super helpful, as did a bunch of others at the event. Daniel Einspanjer suggested that if we could tighten this list it would make a great tool for quickly explaining Mozilla (and good text for a business card). I agree.

With the aim of starting a conversation and refining this idea, I decided to riff on Mitchell’s slide at a talk I gave earlier this week. My version looked like this:

I kept most of the concepts that Mitchell had, spun a little bit to work with my own style and tone. I also added in ‘hackable’, which could also be ‘remixable’ or ‘bendable’ for people who don’t want to say ‘hack’. Whatever term you use, the ability to hack, bend and remix things to suit your own needs seems pretty important to innovation and vitality on the web.

What I like about lists like these is not only that  they help us describe what Mozilla is and what we are trying to build. It’s also that they could give us a simple tool for testing particular ideas, projects and web sites. If we had version of this list that we all agreed on, we’d be able to ask things like: “Is that web site / software / organization making the internet better?” That would be a helpful thing to be able to do.

Here is the question I want to ask: What characteristics *do you think* are critical to making the web better? What three or four words would you use? What are the opposites of these words? What does this kind of list look like in your language? Brainstorming on this would help a ton with some of the Messaging Mozilla’s Mission stuff that is going on. It might also help Mozilla people make better business cards .

Wordle-ized Mozilla sentence

Creative and great feedback so far on the question of ‘how would you describe Mozilla in one sentence?‘ For fun, I threw all the ideas so far into Wordle. It looks like this:

If you’ve got your own ideas on how to best describe Mozilla in a sentence, please post them here or here. I will clean up and synthesize in a while. Also, I’ve got a related post coming riffing on Mitchell’s ‘what is a better internet?’ slide.

Mozilla in one sentence

Over the last few months, I’ve been suprised by the number of people I meet who don’t know that Mozilla is a) a public benefit organization that b) exists to promote and protect the open web. This has got me thinking more and more about the importance of messaging our mission. For Mozilla to succeed in the long run, we need everyone we touch to understand that we’re on very important (and cool) a mission, and that they’re invited to join in.

With this in mind, Paul Kim and I recently organized a Messaging Mozilla’s Mission brainstorm. We got about 25 people in a room and gave them this assignment:

Describe Mozilla and it’s mission in a simple and inspiring way. Keep it short. Stick to one sentence if you can.

Armed with sticky notes and a great deal of enthusiasm, the group came up with some wonderful statements. Rising to the top of the clapping-based popularity contest was:

The Internet is the greatest development of our lifetimes. Mozilla exists to foster the Internet such that all people are able to realize its full benefit. We are a people-driven movement to protect choice and freedom on the Web. Join us!

…. by Tristan, Mary and Patrick. There were a bunch more. Some of my other favorites included:

Mozilla is a global community of people having fun building a better Internet for each one of us.

Mozilla is a people driven, global organization committed to making your web experience awesome by building products that are safe and accessible to all.

Mozilla is here to make the Internet better. We believe the web should work for the world through openness, innovation and opportunity. Learn more about us at www.mozilla.org.

The idea wasn’t to develop a perfectly honed statement on the spot (although do we need one). Rather, our hope was to get people thinking about the very basic but incredibly important task of messaging Mozilla’s mission to everyone we touch. This is something we all need to take on together.

Of course, it is worth coming up with some tight, solid statements that we can all use. Paul, Melissa and I are going to be working on this in coming months. In the meantime (and as part of the process), I’d encourage others to step up to the Messaging Mozilla’s Mission Challenge. How would you describe Mozilla and it’s mission in a sentence or two?

What challenges do hybrid orgs face?

It’s probably clear by now that I’m a keener for orgs mashup public benefit mission + market disruption + the participatory nature of the web. Mozilla is one such organization and, as I look around, I see others. There is alot of up side to how these orgs work, especially the potential to move markets towards the public good at a global scale. But there are also a ton of very real challenges in making these orgs work. That’s what I want to write about today.

From where I sit, the biggest challenge is explaining ourselves. The hybrids that I am talking about tend to have both missions and org models that people haven’t seen before. As shaver said to me in a tweet, this means we ‘…have to use 500 words to explain what we do, vs. five words for a pure for-profit or non-profit play.’ Fixing this is no small task, and it quickly cascades out into other problems.

Think about this in the Mozilla context for a moment. First off, we need to explain that we exist to promote and protect the open nature of the internet. While this mission fits well within the centuries old tradition of public benefit organizations, it’s not easy to point to similar examples that help people immediately understand what kind of beast we are. Red Cross? Sierra Club? Public radio? There are overlaps with all of these, but none provide a perfect parallel. The result: a whole bunch of long winded explaining.

Even if the mission comes across, there is still the organizational model to communicate. This matters less at first blush. Who but the taxman really cares whether an org looks like a company, a charity or a little bit of both? It turns out that many people do. As I travel around talking to people about Mozilla, I am finding that everyone loves Firefox (no surprise) but almost noone knows it’s made by a global community of volunteer contributors backed by a public benefit org (this has surprised me). When I explain a bit, I get happy surprises. Things like “wow, that makes Firefox even cooler’ and ‘I didn’t know I could get involved’. Once people get Mozilla’s model, it excites them. However, the lack of a shorthand way of explaining all that is bundled up in ‘hybrid org’ means it takes a bunch of explaining to get to that point of excitement.

This challenge of explaining ourselves is what lilly might call a ‘big poetry problem‘. Getting the poetry right is an essential element of success. However, hybrid orgs also face a ton of significant challenges on the pragmatic front. Decision making. Structure. Engagement. Investment. Staff recruiting. Management. Participation. Product. Public relations. Organizing resources. Revenue. Leadership. It’s not that other orgs don’t face challenges in these areas. However, the nature of these problems is often quite different when you’re working with a hybrid model.

Take the intersection between ‘participation’ and ‘product’ as one example. Many non-profits are focused on public participation. These orgs use well honed engagement and facilitation techniques to get people out, harnessing community effort to raise important issues, clean up parks and so on. However, until recently, this kind of mass participation was rarely used to make specific, high quality products (or services) that need to ship at a specific time and succeed in the market. Until recently, creating products and services that will be used by large numbers of people has been the domain of big companies and governments who can marshal trained specialists and set up big management structures.

Organizations like Mozilla turn this upside down and sideways. They combine the mass participation of social movements with the ability to create high quality, desirable (public) goods that people will use every day. This is where the challenge comes in: we don’t have well established models managing, facilitating and leading in this kind of environment. Hybrid orgs are inventing these models, finding ways to create good goals and scaffolding, focus on participation, let people scratch their own itch. The thing is, there is no clear roadmap on how to do this and the daily pragmatics are hard. There is a need for constant reflection, tweaking and a kind of personal + collective honesty that’s hard to come by.

‘Structure‘ is another good issue to look at from a hybrid org perspective. We have well established legal structures for create non-profit, public benefit organizations. Yet, in every country that I know about, these structures work poorly when people try to hybridize and innovate what it means to do public benefit work. They have trouble keeping up with new and emerging public benefit roles in society (example -> Wikipedia providing universal access to all human knowledge). They aren’t well tuned for organizations that participate in the market with a public purpose (example -> Firefox pushing open standards back into the mainstream of web development). And they don’t account for the critical role that volunteer contributors play as a form of public support and participation (example -> Mozilla localizations). The frameworks we’ve developed for charities over the last few hundred years just haven’t caught up to these new ideas yet.

The result is that many hybrid organizations must engage in pretzel like contortions in order to find a structure that works. In Mozilla’s case, we’ve set up a charitable foundation as well as a number of wholly owned commercial subsidiaries. All of these organizations share the same mission of promoting the open nature of the internet. All of them engage with community members to create products and services that advance this mission. And all all of them can demonstrate huge public support and participation. Yet, we run them as separate organizations. In some ways, this isn’t the end of the world, and it certainly seems like the safest option given the ambiguities of charity law. But there is no question this pretzel like structure adds strategic and operational overhead, and can just plain confuse people. There are definitely days where I wish we could just be one public benefit organization called ‘Mozilla’.

Of course, ‘participation’ and ’structure’ are only two examples of pragmatic challenges that hybrids face. You could also dig into the question of investment, and in particular the fact the hybrids are percieved as a bad fit for both private investors and traditional grantmakers. This makes it tough to scale, compete and move the market. Or you could explore the revenue side. Hybrids must constantly ask: what kinds of income are going to align with — or at least not disrupt — our public benefit mission? Leadership — and how you balance it with distributed decision making and the culture of the web — also seems pretty central. The list of questions and challenges is pretty long.

My goal here is not to go deep on every major challenge, but to set the tone and get others talking. What do you see as the biggest challenges that hybrid orgs face? And do you know of hybrid orgs that have overcome these challenges? I’d love to see responses to these questions as comments and trackbacks. Also, we’re planning to talk about these questions with a few organizations that feel similar to Mozilla at a small gathering next month. My hope is that simply mapping the challenges and looking at how people have tackled them will go a long way towards helping us make our hybrid organizations better. Once we’ve done a bit more of this, I promise to loop back and synthesize what people are saying. Should be interesting.

What’s up w/ MoFo – May Update

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

Building on the team priorities list posted in early April, the MoFo team is focused on a small number of activities aimed at having impact in impact in 2009 as well as creating a framework for future growth. Current highlights:

• Programs. Good early results from education, contact with 25+ colleges. Accessibility plan ready and gathering comments.
• Communications. Collaboration across Mozilla on mission messaging increasing, plus mozilla.org redesign and recruitment for fundraising manager going well.
• Community. People ping us regularly with ideas. We aren’t well set up to respond. This should improve somewhat when Gerv Markham returns full time.
• Org Development. Board development proposal on table. Staff-wise, MoFo team becoming stronger and more focused.

More details on each of these areas are outlined below.

Program

• 2009 team goal: develop a small handful of programs that go beyond software as a way to promote Mozilla’s mission (e.g. education).
• On track and good early results from Mozilla Education, especially at college level.
  • Seneca in contact w/ 25+ colleges, w/ at least five good leads for colleges that will offer Mozilla courses this fall. Students from 14 schools already doing projects.
  • Major roadblock is building deeper / wider involvement from Mozilla community, getting people to see students more systematically as new contributor pool.
  • Online courses by Mozilla Labs and Mozilla / Creative Commons demonstrated there is interest for more general education products, but implementation bumpy.
• Draft accessibility plan circulating for comment. Focus on 1) ubiquitous a11y and 2) integrating a11y deeply into innovation and product development. See Section 7 below.
  • a11y = good opportunity for Foundation leadership and story telling here, and possibly also fundraising. However, specific projects quite tied to product and open web tech.
• While no progress on big picture plan for Mozilla Research, interest is bubbling up.
  • Could make progress by a) starting a public conversation w/ people who have expressed interest (now) and doing small MozResearchCamp on specific topic (Q3).
• Building good framework for growth in strategic programs over the term.
  • Team learning how to run programs in leveraged, open manner.
  • Making progress on grant coordination system across Mozilla orgs.

Communications

• 2009 team goal: dramatically increase awareness of Mozilla’s mission and public benefit nature amongst the broader public.
• Working closely people across Mozilla to better message Mozilla’s mission and status as a public benefit organization.
  • Includes overall messaging, plus Mozilla Service Day and local Mozilla events.
• mozilla.org redesign moving, forcing us to work harder on mission-focused web content.
  • Attracting interest and new volunteers to MoFo, which is one of our goals.
  • Should launch as planned end Q2 or start Q3 within budget. May benefit by investing in more more features and content later, but no concrete plans yet.
• Organizing ‘hybrid summit‘ in June to learn from other organizations like Mozilla.
  • Aim is also to get media coverage and start public conversation on hybrid orgs.
• Recruiting for fundraising and communications manager progressing well.

Community

• 2009 team goal: improve the Foundation’s ability to support, strengthen and grow the Mozilla community.
• Some of this just happens naturally through other activities. However, generally get the feeling that Mozilla community expects more from us here.
  • People ping us regularly on items like project-wide metrics, the community directory, bringing in new contributors, innovating infrastructure like Bugzilla.
  • There are also issues like updating module ownership where we could to move the conversation forward.
• Will be better able to respond on some of these things when Gerv becomes available full time in July. From there, we can assess and look at how to apply resources in 2010.

Organizational Development

• 2009 team goal: consolidate and strengthen the Foundation team, and develop a long term vision that clarifies the Foundation’s role within Mozilla.
• Pending decisions at this meeting, board expansion begins soon. Hopefully two new board members by year end.
• Plan is to loop back to vision and roadmap process in September. Should ask vision questions quite broadly, more so than in previous roadmap discussion.

Why do hybrid orgs matter?

I’ve been poking at the question ‘why do hybrid orgs matter?’ for a couple of days now. Emailing friends and colleagues. Grilling people over dinner. Drawing little doodles. As I did this, I kept stumbling around ideas like ‘huge impact’ and ‘creating public goods’ and ‘massive participation’. Important ideas, but not quite what I was hoping for. It turns out that coming up with a crisp, helpful ‘why hybrids matter’  statement is tough.

It’s tough because the ideas we’re playing with here are (in part) very new, and the term ‘hybrid organization’ is still quite fuzzy (there are many different takes on hybrids beyond what I am talking about). However, the more I dig, the more I am convinced that organizations like Mozilla, Wikipedia, Kiva, Miro and so on that mashup mission, market and the culture of the web represent a new pattern worth understanding. Even if we don’t yet have the right words to describe this pattern yet, we need to dive in, think and play.

So, that’s what I did. I rolled up all the notes and email comments I gathered in the last few days into a short ‘why do hybrid orgs matter?’ blurb that goes like this:

Mission + market + web hybrids matter because they can wield the power needed to move markets at a global scale, while still looking out for the small guy, taking the long view and staying true to their public benefit mission. They show us how organizations could — and maybe should — work in the future.

It’s pretty awkward and wordy, and in a number of ways not quite right. That’s okay. Even more than earlier, my hope here is to spark conversation. Why do mission + market + web hybrids matter to you? What would you add to this statement?

As a way to feed the conversation, I figured it would be useful to share some quotes from the email conversations I’ve been having and notes on my own thinking. They break down into six things that matter about hybrid orgs:

1. Power to move markets …

This one comes from something johnolilly said in email: “Sometimes we need organizations with financial and market strength but mission-orientations to keep capital-only-organizations doing the right things for the commons. Historically, those with money, and money-missions, have had all the power. Hybrids are important because they have the potential to let mission-oriented orgs wield similar power, but for human-oriented needs.” No question this is at the core of what matters.

2. … at a global scale …

tonyasurman agreed but pushed one step further: “What’s unique about hybrids is the ability to take move market but also the ability to do this at a global scale without losing the integrity of the small. This is really important. Non-profits and social enterprises have never had the potential for this kind of impact. Hybrids can take public benefit products and services to a scale never before imagined.” The global scale that comes w/ the web also seems critical, and not just on the market transformation side. It’s an essential part of creating high quality products and services using peer production.

3. … while still looking out for the small guy …

Global scale, high quality product and public benefit mission mean that hybrids tend to be good at getting great stuff into the hands of incredibly tiny, otherwise-ignored markets. nreville said: “These hybrids are able to bring the full benefits of market influence to underserved constituencies that would otherwise be completely ignored a big company or poorly served by traditional charity. If someone made a special browser for just for people who speak Telugu it would probably suck. But Mozilla is willing to put energy into translating Firefox into Telegu, even when it’s not profitable to do so. The result is that a small constituency gets a world-class product.”

4. … taking the long view …

Similarly, hybrids can think beyond short term gain and consumer support. beltzner wrote: “Hybrid organizations have a distinct advantage over traditional organizations in acting for long-term benefits. Many traditional organizations, concerned with quarterly performance and growth, are consumed with what they can do to increase their immediate position at all costs. Hybrid organizations, concerned with public benefit and ecosystem growth, can trade off immediate short-term advantage with long term development more easily. For example, while a traditional organization may find it difficult to stop activities which have a short term benefit but a long term detriment, a hybrid organization approaches that decision differently. Practically speaking, this also means that hybrid organizations are as concerned with *how* they do things or develop systems as they are concerned with the things themselves.”

5. …. and staying true to their public benefit mission.

Responding to my first post, stephendeberry asked: “how do you ensure the public benefit remains core to the hybrid model?” This is actually a huge challenge for both traditional non-profits (grantmaker demands trigger mission drift) and social enterprises (can become more about the market than the mission). And it’s somewhere I think hybrids built on the idea of mass participation and peer production have a special advantage. They not only have boards and leaders committed to the mission, but they also have huge communities actively involved in interpreting the mission every day by helping to make something. The aggregate decisions of people who contribute to Firefox, or Wikipedia, or Kiva help shape what these things are in very real ways, which is in turn likely to make sure things stay more or less on mission. This isn’t to say peer production is democracy. Usually, meritocracy is the rule. Still, having a massive number of stakeholders involved in building things helps hybrid orgs stay public benefit focused.

6. Hybrids can show us how organizations could — and maybe should — work.

The organizational tools available to us as a society are quite broken, or at least don’t fit all the things we need and want to do. The current economic crisis shows this. The overly bureaucratized world of grant dependent non-profits shows us this. And, on a more positive side, the growth of massive informal social movements shows this. We don’t have good organizational models (or legal incorporation structures) to figure out how to channel the energy of huge numbers of people who want to play across mission and market make things better in a coherent, collaborative, high-impact and sustainable way. The hybrids I am talking about are taking a shot at fixing this, inventing and evolving new ways to organize as they go. This is pretty meta, I know. But it’s also pretty important.

7. ….?

I think there is some good stuff in here. But it definitely isn’t completely right yet. So, the question now is: what’s the seventh item on this list? The eighth? And the ninth? I really want people to add to this list, to poke at it further and to call out the bits that feel like just plain bull. The more I struggle with these ideas, the more I think conversation is useful.

Why? Because figuring out why these organizations matter, what makes them tick and what challenges they face (my next post) is a part of making them work better. Working in uncharted waters is hard. Sharing what we’re learning along the way helps. It helps those of us trying to nurture organizations and communities that mix mission, market and the web. And it provides fuel and encouragement to people who want to set up such organizations anew.

Mozilla Education: map of active students

One of our Mozilla Education goals for this year is to get students from around the world working on projects similar to the ones we see coming out of Seneca. There are two ways that this might happen: 1. more colleges offer courses like the ones at Seneca; or 2. individual students build on the existing Seneca program to do their own independent study projects. A couple of months ago, we asked Dave Humphrey to see what he could do to help on both these fronts out.

Mozilla Education - Active Students, April 2009.

Last week, I asked humph for a quick update. He’s been in touch with about 25 colleges, five or more of which look like good bets for courses. While this is promising, we won’t know if anything comes of it until this fall. Setting up courses takes time. He also said that there are currently 50+ students from 14 schools actively working on projects in the #seneca and #education channels. This is the list he gave me:

1. Seneca – 12 (2-Fennec, 1-Songbird, 1-XULRunner, 2-Canvas3D, 1-Platform-DOM, 1-Build/Release, 2-TB, 1-MDRK, 1-Platform-NSPR)
2. Carnegie Mellon – 2 (1-Fennec, 2-Platform-XPCOM)
3. National University of Singapore – 4 (mostly TB, couple FF and extensions)
4. Simon Fraser University – 24 students working in groups of 3 (mostly FF XML and SVG platform code)
5. UTas (Formerly University of Tasmania) – 1 (Ph.D. student working on pure JS-XPCOM implementation of bittorrent)
6. Delhi college of engineering, India – 1 (LIR compiler working with Jason Orendorff)
7. University College, London – 1 (Platform – network)
8. University of Vermont – 1 (Bespin, Ubiquity)
9. Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur) – 1 (TB Windows Vista integration)
10. Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) – 1 (FF extension)
11. duPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky – 3 (Prism, Educational Testing app)
12. Johns Hopkins Engineering – 1 (Labs/Extension)
13. Yale – 1 (FF – Cookies)
14. Florida State - 1 (FF Extension)

While we’re a long way from declaring success, this list is pretty amazing. Less than six months ago, most of Mozilla’s education efforts were limited to Seneca students, and a few others who snuck in on the side. Now we have students from around the world (welcome!). Sure, some of these students may have shown up anyways. But it does seem that saying ‘all are welcome’ and asking humph to focus some of his time on students in other places is having an impact.

This isn’t to say that scaling what’s happened at Seneca will be easy or effortless. Finding good projects and mentors from the Mozilla community is still hard (Mozilla developers: humph needs your help!). Supporting professors who want to ‘teach Mozilla’ is way more ramp up and work than supporting individual students. Building out the web presence to explain what we’re doing and guide interested participants harder than we thought. There is still tons of work to do.

Still, I have to say, I was surprised that we’ve reached out so far just a few months in. The map above makes me smile. I am super happy to have all these students involved. And very impressed by humph and all the other Mozilla contributors who have welcomed and helped these new faces.

Hybrid orgs. What’s old? What’s new?

It’s been fun reading reactions to my first post on hybrid organizations. The conversation so far has underlined one very critical point: we are talking about something that is at once very old and very new. While I hinted at this last time, it feels like its worth digging deeper on which bits are old and which bits are new.

The idea of people organizing for the public benefit is almost as old as the hills. England started calling these organizations charities and created a law to support them around 1600. Before that, maybe people just called it ‘community’, or took for granted that we should get together to help each other out? Whatever we call it, this impulse to make things better — and to organize around it — runs deep. It is not new.

What is new is the toolbox that hybrid organizations draw from. Cheap global networks. A willingness to use markets as a channel to drive change. Collaborative peer production. Combined with the 500 year tradition of public benefit organizations, these new tools make it possible to organize huge numbers of people to create massively scaled, tangible public goods that out-compete what’s broken and make things better on a global scale. For me, it’s this mix that makes hybrids interesting.

If we push on ‘what’s old?’ for a moment, it’s clear that the hybrid orgs I am talking about build upon well established public benefit roles and traditions:

1. Championing important ideas. One of the first things we think of when we hear ‘public benefit organization’ is championing a big, important idea. History is filled with examples of organizations gathering millions to do everything from claiming their civil rights to protecting our planet to toppling colonial governments. The public benefit organizations behind such movements have not just been important, they have in many cases been transformative. When successful, they have changed the thinking of not only governments and businesses but whole societies for the better.

2. Protecting the commons. The idea of building and protecting things we hold in common like ‘bridges, seabanks and highways‘ has been recognized as a public benefit right from the outset of charity law. And of course, organizing people — and money — to protect the commons remains a major role for public benefit organizations today. Just think of libraries. Or the neighbourhood watch. Or organizations that protect forests and wildlands. These common assets are not just ‘nice to haves’. They are essential ingredients in a rich, healthy society. They make it easier to learn, keep us safe and clean the air. And, in the end, they even make it easier to do business. Organizations that protect common public goods play an essential role in our world.

3. Making markets wiser and more humane. Companies and markets don’t always do the right thing. In the last 50+ years, we’ve seen an increasing number of organizations that have tried to ‘move the market’ in ways that make it wiser and more humane. Organizations like the Forestry Stewardship Council, which has become the gold seal for planet friendly wood products, have shown that creating incentive for market players to improve their behaviour can make the world better for everyone. Many other organizations try to move markets in similar ways, using everything from humour to boycotts. The goal is not to be the market, but to make it easier for markets to feed, strengthen and respect the rest of what makes the world tick.

All three of these public benefit roles and traditions are important. But pursing these roles using the traditional organizing models of the not-for-profit sector has significant limitations and challenges. Turning big ideas and mass movements into concrete change is hard, and a bit of a crap shoot. Scaling the commons and out-competing enclosure requires — or at least has required — huge resources. Finding enough strength and influence to truly move markets has proven tough for players who are not in the market themselves. For these reasons, public benefit organizations often struggle to have the impact they want to have, or accept that their impact will be small and local.

What’s happening with hybrid orgs is a mashup of old traditions with new tools and ideas in ways that make it more likely that public benefit organizations will have the massive impact they want and need to have. Some of the new tools include:

a. Cheap networks, global scale. Clay Shirky has made it trite to say that the cost of organizing has gone through the floor. The thing is: he’s right, and it’s important. Cheap networks have made it possible for a very small group of people to organize effectively on a global scale. This is especially important for public benefit organizations which have typically had limited impact just because they couldn’t afford to reach out far and wide. The networked world makes it possible — in some cases even easy — to champion big ideas, build the commons and move markets on a global scale. This is genuinely new.

b. Mixing mission and market tactics. The idea of mixing tactics from the mission (volunteerism, calls to action, donations) and market (products, competition, earned revenue) worlds is also fairly new. Social enterprises that develop products and services as a way to pursue their mission have really only been around since the 1980s. Organizations like Mozilla and Kiva that try to keep markets doing the right things for the commons on a massive scale are even newer. Despite this newness, the idea that mixing mission and market is a legit public benefit strategy is seeping into the public (and more slowly government) consciousness.

c. Collaborative peer production. In the past, it the public goods created by non-profits and charities were by there very nature small and local. Collaborative peer production — the idea that many people on the internet can pitch in a small amount of effort to make something big — has changed that dramatically. A top quality, standards-based web browser. A massive, high quality encyclopedia. A huge alternative financing pool for poor entrepreneurs. No — or certainly few — public benefit orgs could have created such things 25 years ago. Peer production and open source changed this. The result: there are now organizations that can create public goods of a quality and scale that can directly move markets in ways that benefit the commons. These organizations don’t just describe big new ideas. Using the power of mass contribution, they make them real.

It’s the mashup of all these old and new elements that is the hallmark of the hybrid organizations I am talking about. Mozilla protecting the Internet commons by engaging millions of people to move the market. Wikipedia organizing people to create tremendous public asset that gathers the sum of all human knowledge. Kiva building a collaborative bank to move the finance market for the poor. These organizations are mixing the old and the new. They are in the public benefit remix business, figuring out how to get beyond the limitations of the past. From where I sit, that’s exciting, and important.

In my next post, I want to dig deeper into the question of ‘why do hybrid orgs matter’? The fact that we are seeing innovative public benefit organizations mash up the old and the new is cool. But what specifically does it get us? After that, I want to loop back to the challenges faced by public benefit orgs and look at the Mozilla case in a bit more detail. In the meantime, please comment, post and trackback to keep this hybrid org conversation rolling.