Category: Mozilla

What’s next for Firefox advocacy?

Photoshop Tennis for SFX Theme with JoshI can’t help but notice that not much has happened with Spread Firefox since I left, even though my good friend Jamey continues to feed me mockups and possible redesigns of the site (note: the photo at right isn’t Jamey’s work but an early redesign attempt between me and Josh Jarmin).

And though the Firefox Flicks Campaign was a considerable success, it didn’t seem to arouse the same kind of passionate support that the New York Times ad campaign did in its time (though it did drive a considerable amount of traffic). It seemed isolated and somewhat self-congratulatory… preaching to an audience that was already aware of and promoting the open source browser, rather than those who wouldn’t be able to separate the “Internet” from “MySpace” from “the blue E”.

And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a criticism so much as something I’ve been stewing on for some time, trying to figure out, y’know, what comes next?

When I was at (and I continue to champion this idea mind you) I wanted Flock and Firefox to team up — to work together to show their collective usefulness across a wider and more diverse community — one that a single browser simply wouldn’t be able to appeal to as effectively as two designed with different intents. In fact, with Internet Explorer 7 on the horizon, incorporating many of the features that have set Firefox apart, I wonder whether either Flock or Firefox will have much of a chance at widespread adoption without a concerted effort to spell out more clearly the benefits of both platforms — and how developers can leverage their work across both simulataneously.

This is the challenge as it stands and as I see it. As the features that formerly set Firefox apart become standard fare in modern browsers, one way to form the question is to consider whether Firefox has served its purpose — causing Redmond to wake up and to change its flagship browser. If so, then ok, keep building it out and improving it, but tell the fans that they can go home until next season.

If the fight or the battle or the … non-violent conflict … is only beginning, then I guess I’d like to see a clear declaration of intentions. I’d like to see Mozilla stand up and declare the principles, ideas, dreams and ambitions that set it apart and keep its proponents up at night, dreaming of ways to get the story out there to an ever-widening audience. Anything less, and the juggernaut will bowl us over, diminishing the effects of the incredible achievements that have been made in the past two years. I’m looking at this as a ten-year struggle — as a hugely powerful Hydra that must be faced on each branch, what I’m talking about is the future of the web and the tools that we will use to navigate, explore, publish and own it with. In order to stay in the game and continue to participate in the conversation (or ever set the tone), we need a strategy, we need a plan, we need people and we ought get started now.

I’m open for ideas, have a few of my own, but mostly just want to know: What’s next for Firefox advocacy?

The future of open leadership

ObeyWith the Feed Icon Trademark debate, I’ve become fascinated by a number of Mitchell Baker‘s recent posts on open source leadership (or perhaps more appropriately community stewardship).

Just last night we held our second coworking meeting to discuss a number of topics (of which we were able to plow through very few)… Key among them was the question of how to best open up the space for non-anchors while not overly burdening the existing key-holders. And, in opening up the space, how to we set a fair pay-for-the-time-you-use rate that doesn’t burden the project with excessive overhead or rules.

After an exhausting discussion for over an hour and a half, we had to adjourn the meeting following Brad’s Snooze Button Guideline. We covered quite a number of possibilities, from hourly rates to hosting quarterly “supporters”, but ultimately ended up without a final resolution other than to submit proposals to the mailing list for continued debate.

Here’s what’s strange about it: throughout the meeting (I can’t be sure but…) I did feel like I was sitting in the role of facilitator — not exactly the leader, but close enough. I mean, that’s a pretty common role to play, right? Most meetings need a leader of sorts, right?

So now the question that I have is, or perhaps what I’m most confused about, is what kind of leadership does the coworking project need? What kind can it stand? I agree with Mitchell that relying on the “community to decide” will moreoften than not result in disappointment or frustration for communities actually don’t decide anything, they only appear to make decisions. And yet, there is this apparent allergy in open source communities that forces the subversion of the ego and the consequent vilification of those who attempt to make a decision on behalf of the group.

Ian responds to Mitchell:

Good leaders do not make decisions – they simply help the community to make better decisions. To do this they listen well, and they think long and hard. Then, when they see the prevailing wisdom surface, they communicate those decisions more fruitfully.

…which sounds pretty good and egalitarian on the surface. In fact, not a bit unlike what they call representative government. And yet, I think that that only captures a fraction of what a leader, in the community context, really does.

It is my belief that good, reflective and responsive leadership is needed for any project to find success. But that leadership need not be hierarchical. Or dominant. Or, most of all, exclusively masculine. And it also can’t be cowardly or cow-tow to the imposing and voluminous voice of the community it serves. That’s why leadership is important; it’s not about power, it’s about clarity of purpose and of seeing things through to their desired conclusion, deterring that which threatens to scuttle the intentions of the group.

Case in point, the witch-hunt that O’Reilly recently survived suggests that communities can easily be turned into echo chambers for groupthink and channeled hostility. Without strong leadership, you’re liable to end up with a neverending succession of teapot tempests without accomplishing anything productive.

So, coming back to the meeting last night, we have goals in common, even if the path is not clear. Which is precisely the kind of opportunity in which leadership emerges — the kind that isn’t focused in any one individual but is shared among the individuals in the collective. In a very real sense, it is the BarCamp model of leadership, of self-determination, of personal responsibility and of realizing your own role in consciously creating circumstances for yourself.

The point is this: open source leadership is not a contradiction, it’s just deeply misunderstood. And it seems high time that, as we open up to serving wider markets and communities, that we learn what it really means to embrace a kind of leadership that does not rely on traditional concentrations of power or of exclusivity or malevolent competition, but instead works to helps us each reach beyond ourselves to reveal each our own potentials. I don’t know clearly what it looks like, but I do think that Mitchell is on to something and that somehow, this little coworking experiment of ours might bring us steps closer to discovering just how open, modern leadership will actually bring us forward.

Patent the baby, trademark the bathwater

Feed icon registered trademark?

If you take anything away from the second trademark brouhaha in as many weeks, it’s this quote from Mozilla Chief Lizard wrangler, Mitchell Baker:

I believe the Free and Open Source Software world is due for a long discussion of trademarks, how we use them, what their value is and so on. Ultimately I’d like to see some Creative Commons type options available for trademark- type purposes. (Creative Commons licenses are all copyright licenses, and do not purport to address the trademark – like issues of providing clarity to consumers about what consumers are getting.) We haven’t had this discussion yet.

So obviously, this points to the discussion I’ve been waging towards the establishment of something akin to the Community Mark idea. It’s not that trademark should necessarily go away; instead it’s about providing a choice when traditional trademark law simply does not make sense and only stands to incense and divide communities — which, ironically, such laws were intended to protect.

I don’t think the question in this case really revolves around the question of the meaning of icons so much as the enforcement and consistent use of symbols that come to mean something to a given community. For what Mitchell is really proposing is something more like reverse trademark, where you compel someone to use your mark in a certain way in order to produce consistency. Let’s face it, by restricting the use of the mark or icon, you’re actually moving away from your goal, which in this case is to establish a symbol, to be used in common, to identify a particular interface interaction.

It doesn’t seem like trademark is the appropriate means to the end in this case… and I’m very happy that Mitchell has proposed that the best solution is likely her option #3, “to try a less formal process with more authority resided in community norms and [see] how that works.” This is, I believe, the only true option that stands a chance of gaining widespread adoption as well as heading off the kind of scorn and antipathy that members of the open source community simply don’t need.

I want a Tails topbar

Calvin Yu has done a great job with his Tails extension and I’d like to see something similar in Flock — but much fuller featured. How about a microformat vaccuum cleaner thingamahoogie that sucks up all the mFs it finds, indexes them with Lucene and then spits them back out in a Greasemonkey-created address book or calendar? Eh eh? Any takers?

Microformats + Thunderbird

Microformats + ThunderbirdThe things that bother me about Thunderbird on OSX are certainly many, but I can come up with one above all others that totally kills me: the lack of integration with the Apple address book. Nothing more than this illustrates the source of Tantek’s fervor for wanting data portability and his resultant hope in microformats.

Think about it. If Thunderbird stored hCards, and Address Book.app read hCards (or used them as its storage format), there’d be no problem.

One format to rule them all: XHTML! Best of all, you could use Spotlight, Applescript, and whatever other Mac-centric technologies on this data as well. No weird one-off formats that nothing else supports, no conversion, no special readers or parsers… and you could upload your address book and view it on the web… anywhere.