commonspace

Mozillian brainpower and passion. Yay!

As the old saying goes: 'There's nothing like getting stuck behind a rockslide with 400 of your closest friends.' Okay, maybe it's not an old saying yet ... but it will be as people mythologize and remember the 2008 Firefox Plus Summit -- float planes, candles and all.

 

And mythologize they should. The brainpower and passion gathered at the Mozilla event was truly awesome. What's more, it wasn't just technology brainpower and passion (although it was certainly that in spades). Everyone I met to was just as stoked to talk about broader values like openness, the internet and community as they were about mobile browsers and data in the cloud. This is what drives it all. While this isn't really surprising, feeling this kind of passion emanate off 400 living, breathing human beings is waaaaaaaaaay more real than just thinking about it in the abstract. Amazing, really.

More concretely: there were many of great conversations at the Summit about both Mozilla's evolving identity and Mozilla Foundation 2.0. I will post in detail on these topics when I return from off-the-grid holidays in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, thanks to everyone I met for such a warm welcome to the Mozilla community. I am really hoping I have something useful to contribute.

Prototyping the open ed revolution

Frank Hecker has a series of posts up today on 'Mozilla and the Future of Education'. It's a bit of a thought experiment to imagine what Mozilla might do if it dipped it's toe further into the education pond. The line I like most is:

Mozilla Foundation could also work with others to change the entire manner in which the next generation of software developers is educated.

That's a great vision! Why? Because it could flow from Mozilla doing something related to its core needs (running more Mozilla developer courses) while at the same time contributing to the growth of a whole new way of working (collaborative global apprenticeship as a way to do computer studies).

This 'solve a concrete problem -> create something more broadly and mind blowingly useful as a side effect' itself seems part of the Mozilla DNA. The module ownership system is something that was created to meet a particular need. It's now something that has directly and indirectly influenced how all sorts of people work well beyond the boundaries of Mozilla.

The trick is: make sure to think about both 'what' and 'how' Mozilla engages with education. The 'what' could be quite simple and close to home. Computer studies courses on Mozilla development, and maybe even some courses on design for open source at art colleges or the history and economics of the open internet for communications students. However, making sure that the 'how' is built around open, collaborative materials and pedagogy means the Mozilla is already protoyping the open education revolution as it goes about its everyday business. That would be fun.

PS. I hope this is coherent. I have a cold! :(

A few concrete things Mozilla Foundation might do

Looking back over dozens of online and over-beer conversations, it's clear the Mozilla Foundation can play an important role in the world. This role is not to oversee or second guess the people producing Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, XUL and other technologies that fulfill Mozilla's mission of keeping the internet open. Meddling with this work doesn't help anyone. However, the foundation can and should build on this excellent work. It can fill gaps (accessibility). It can connect dots (amongst Mozilla communities). And it can reach out to new groups of people with something to contribute (the next million Mozillians). These are basically things that make Mozilla stronger, but are beyond and between what's already going on.

The question is: what does this look like concretely? Of all the blog postings from the last few weeks, David Boswell took the best kick at this can. Offer grants and collect donations (yes, and more strategically). Build bridges between people using Mozilla technologies in their own work (yes, and how it happens matters alot). Promote what Mozilla communities are doing (yes, but how do we do it well?). Use our broader community as a laboratory (for sure, and that was what I was dreaming of here). I totally agree that the foundation should be doing stuff like this.

Most of these things focus on the second layer of Mitchell's community spheres (what she calls 'community of action' and I call 'community of practice' ... we need to get clear on this language). This is the domain of shared tools and practices, which is a critical place for the foundation to play. However, as I have talked to Mozilla people, many have also emphasized things the foundation could do at the outer layers and even at the core of these spheres. I've listed a few here.

At the centre of the sphere sit communities producing Mozilla technology products. As above, it's not the foundation's job to do or meddle with this work. However, it can do things that build a better environment for the people creating these products. A good example is growing the number of colleges and universities offering community-based Mozilla courses like the one at Seneca. Work like this has the potential to benefit a wide variety of Mozilla communities through code contributions and, more importantly, a bigger contributor talent pool. However, people with heads down on individual products don't have time to grow something like this, especially as it takes long term investment and nurturing. The foundation could champion this kind of work in open source education -- and also further efforts in areas like accessibility and technology research -- in a way that benefits core Mozilla communities over the medium and long term.

At the very outer layer of the sphere is a vast community of users: 180 million people who interact with the internet everyday through Mozilla products. These are some of the most likely people in the world to care for and champion the open internet. Yet, a good chunk of them probably don't know what the open internet is and why it matters. The foundation could play a role in changing this. It could help people understand the issues emerging around data in the cloud. It could explain the role neutral networks play in driving innovation, commerce and community. And it could do these sorts of things in a way that activates, involves and showcases people from across Mozilla's many communities (think: FirefoxFlicks).

Reaching out like this to casual users of Mozilla products creates the opportunity not only to educate but also to engage. Some percentage of people touched through this sort of outreach will move into Mozilla's community of interest (the next layer from the edge). They will want to take action in some way. As David Eaves suggests, initial steps to support people like these could be quite simple:

a) greet these newcomers and make them feel welcome; and b) (create) some capacity to point them in the direction of a variety of institutions, organizations, projects and activities, where they can channel their energy.

The foundation could also give these people a simple way to demonstrate their willingness to contribute to the open internet. Maybe this is simply signing a pledge to shows how their work contributes to the goals of the Mozilla Manifesto. Or maybe it is something else. In some ways, the specific approach doesn't matter. What matters is that people feel a sense of belonging ... and that they feel encouraged to stretch themselves to contribute in even more concrete ways. Maybe these people are part of the community laboratory that David B. describes? Who knows? The point is to invite them in and find out.

This is not intended as a definitive list of things the foundation could do. Far from it. Instead, it is meant as an experiment: I wanted to see what it would look like if listed concrete things the foundation could do to add value in all the main spheres where Mozilla communities work.

Of course, the idea with an experiment like this is to create a starting point for seeking further ideas and advice. So: what else? What are the concrete things the foundation can be doing between and beyond existing efforts that also add value to the Mozilla community? I am hoping that the Air Mozilla tomorrow will provide a first chance to take this conversation further. I have no doubt there will be many more.

PS. Sorry for repeating the picture from my previous post. I felt it was worth showing the circles again as context ... knowing that this is my view and we still more discussion on these.

Me and Mozilla

Over the past few months, I've been musing a fair bit about Mozilla. The main reason for this is now widely known: I'm hoping to take on the role of Executive Director at the Mozilla Foundation. On Wednesday, Mitchell, Asa and I will be on Air Mozilla to meet the community and get advice on what a successful future for the Foundation would look like.

This conversation started with a simple itch to contribute. Reading a post by Mitchell back in March, it struck me that Mozilla was facing many of the same questions I've been struggling with for years. I wasn't yet thinking 'I want to be executive director' ... just that there was some interesting intersections here. I wrote this mail:

Mitchell

A few days back, I read your post about the ED hiring process. I haven't stopped thinking about the Mozilla Foundation since. I'm convinced I've got something to offer Mozilla as it charts it's future.

For the past four years, I've been asking: how do you build an effective foundation, NGO network or social movement with open source thinking built right into its DNA?

In 2005, I started and led a $26 million initiative that mixed grantmaking and community building to connect grassroots technology activists in emerging economies. After passing that off last year, I joined the Shuttleworth Foundation in South Africa to help integrate transparency, networks and iterative learning more deeply into their day-to-day work.

In both cases, I've really struggled with the right balance of organizational models: vibrant open source project; catalytic social investor; bottom-up mass movement. From the little I've read online, it seems like the Mozilla Foundation is currently grappling with this same question.

This question is an important one. We have the chance to weave the values of openness, innovation and opportunity not only into the Internet, but also into our economy and society as whole. Promoting and protecting these values requires a completely new kind of organization, fueled by emergence, community and creativity.

Building this new kind of organization is what I am committed to and driven by. And, to a great degree, it's what I've been working on for a while now

I believe my experience so far can help the Mozilla Foundation. This help might simply be a conversation. It might be a link between our work at Shuttleworth and the next iteration of Mozilla Foundation. Or, it might mean me stepping up as a Mozilla executive director candidate. I'm not sure yet.

What I know is we've got enough in common that it's worth a chat. I LOVE the work I'm already doing with the Shuttleworth Foundation, and I am not really in job search mode. But, there's an itch here. It's worth scratching.

Cheers ... MS

The dozens of conversations I have had since have been both inspiring and humbling. Not only have the Mozillians I've met so far achieved a great deal, but they've done it with a mix of feet-on-the-ground practicality and big picture vision that I've rarely seen. At the same time, they're constantly asking tough questions like 'how could this be better'? It is quite amazing.

These conversations have left no doubt in my mind: I could contribute -- and learn -- a great deal as Mozilla Foundation executive director. I want to do this. With all my heart.

Of course, these conversations have also left me with many questions. What role should the Foundation play within the broader Mozilla Project? What do existing Mozilla communities need from the Foundation? And how can the Foundation build on and leverage Mozilla technology to reach a broader community of people who want to keep the internet open? I've already asked alot of people these questions and started reflecting on my blog. I am hoping that Wednesday's Air Mozilla will provide a chance to dig deeper and learn what more people think.

In the meantime, I plan to share a few more thoughts on concrete things the Foundation might be doing in each of the 'community circles' mentioned in previous posts. I will post on this tomorrow.

Open Education at OSCON 2008

Danese Cooper has organized what promises to be an excellent conversation about open education at OSCON in Portland. Mark Shuttleworth will be part of the mix. Karien and I prepared some quick background notes for Mark re: what think is exciting in this space and the specific work we're doing. I figured it would be useful to share here:

1. A growing number of people are creating open, collaborative learning content. This is exciting. It not only increases access to knowledge, it also adds more creativity and collaboration to the classroom.

• The Open Courseware Consortium now has 200 member universities
• Leading sites like Connexions, Curriki and OER Commons house over 45,000 open educational resources
• Commercial entrants like Flat World Knowledge are stepping in and driving innovation

2. While it draws on the values and techniques of open source, open educational content is different. That's the point of the Cape Town Declaration: to define the principles that should guide open education.

• The Declaration calls for open approaches to content, technology and teaching
• 1600 people and 165 organizations have signed the declaration since January
• Signatories include everyone from Jimmy Wales to Desmond Tutu to Peter Gabriel

3. It's also important to do bold, concrete experiments where we figure out the techniques that make open education work. That's why we're creating a set of free, collaborative textbooks for South African schools.

• Will cover all core subjects in South African curriculum from k-12
• Focus is not just free beer: the aim is to get teachers to create collaboratively
• Helping to build a platform standard by working with Connexions at Rice University

Other open edu co-conspirators on the panel: Brian Behlendorf (who will hopefully talk about the super cool and disruptive Seneca / Mozilla open source course model); David Wiley (inventor of the first open content license and open ed super hero); and Bobbi Kurshan (fearless leader of the Curriki revolution). If you're going to OSCON next week, this panel is a must see. Sadly, I won't be there myself.

Unbundling education

One of the highlights of this week's PCF5 conference in London was Richard Heller's presentation on the emerging Peoples Uni.project.

Peoples-Uni offers online professional development courses to public health workers in developing and emerging economies. Interesting enough in it's own right, but more interesting is how they do it:

1. The focus is on teaching and online facilitation, not materials creation. Which means all the energy goes into responding to student needs. All the materials are off the shelf existing open educational resources from places like Johns Hopkins.
2. All the instructors are volunteers. The volunteer pool includes: a gaggle of retired professors; recent graduates from a public health masters program in the UK; and 30 health care economists. Heller is having to grapple with the kinds of volunteer management issues common in open source projects, but rarely dealt with in open education.
3. At the end of each course, students have the option of being accredited through tests administered by the Royal Society of Health. This is the same test that students taking similar courses in formal institutions would get. If they pass, they receive a certificate.

The intersection between 'hacked together volunteer run courses' and 'very serious, buttoned-down assessment and accreditation' is very cool. Right now, almost all education fuses instruction and accreditation. The result is often inflexible, boring instruction driven by the testing process. Unbundling accreditation from instruction changes this. It creates space for innovation on the instruction side, especially when combined with open educational resources. I think we are going to see more of this.

Heller's presentation was one of about 20 on open educational resources, mostly from poorer Commonwealth countries. Which, really, was amazing. All of the presentations are well documented on WikiEducator. It's worth taking a look.

Budapest + Cape Town: What's Open?

During our PCF5 workshop on the Cape Town Declaration, Paul West and I got into a collegial debate about the definition of an 'open educational resource'. He held up a book he's working on and said: "This contains legal advice that I've had vetted, so I want to release it under a no-derivatives Creative Commons license. I think this is an open educational resource. Do you?"

My answer was 'no'. For me, the fundamental test of an open educational resource is whether it is under a license and uses a format that allows remixing. This is how we defined it in the Cape Town Declaration:

Open educational resources should be freely shared through open licenses which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms.

The real promise of open education rests on this remixability. It's what creates space for increased innovation and creativity in learning.

Of course, there is an important place in education for fixed, authoritative works like the one Paul describes. And, there is no question, releasing these under an open license like CC-ND is a very good thing. However, I would label such documents as 'open access resources' rather than 'open educational resources'.

While may seem like nit-picking, it's important to be clear on the differences here. The stakes are high. The Budapest Declaration defined the minimum spec for an open access resource, which benefited the worlds of education and research tremendously. Cape Town has now set out a spec for open education resources. It may have a similar effect over time, but only if we are clear that open educational resources represent a separate and complimentary tactic to open access. They are about the potential of remixable education.

More on Mozilla: communities, circles and maps

Mitchell and others recently posted about the Mozilla community as a series of concentric circles. These posts make it clear that being a part of a community like Mozilla (or not) isn't a binary switch. Rather, people have varying degrees of involvement and connection. There are different kinds of community members. And, one person might be multiple places in the community at once.

This is a very useful idea. It provides a sort of map to help sort out all the ideas floating around about the evolution of the Mozilla Foundation might do. However, as Mitchell said in her first post, this map only works if the the language and concepts are fairly precise. More conversation is needed to get this point. My take is something like this ...

The centre circle in Mozilla feels like it's about the creation of specific artifacts (a web browser) and outcomes (a world record). For me, this is more than just a 'community of practice'. It's a community that makes things. Matthew Aslett gets close to describing this with 'developer community'. However, it would be great to have a term that incorporates people who create concrete things that aren't code (e.g. documentation or marketing campaigns). Maybe this centre circle is a 'community of production'? I am not sure. Whatever term sits at the centre should be about creating concrete things.

As Mitchell describes it, the next circle is much more in like with what I understand to be a community of practice: a group of people who work in a similar way (shared practices), often for a similar purpose (shared values). A loose association of cabinet makers in Vermont could be a community of practice. They swap ideas. They share local techniques. The might even share specialized tools. But they do not work together on producing a common artifact: they each make their own cabinets. Similarly, there are people and projects who share decision making models (module ownership), tools (Bugzilla) and values (an open Internet and others working on open source) with people producing Mozilla products, but these people are working on their own artifacts and activities. For me, this is what a community of practice looks like.

At the outer edges of the circle, Mitchell's take on 'community of interest' (share Mozilla values) and 'user community' (use Mozilla products) feels spot on. As Gerv points out, the potential in seeing these groups differently -- and helping people move from one to the other -- is huge:

The Community of Interest is formed from people who were in the User Community, but then became aware enough about the project to a) see that we have a mission, b) learn what it is, and c) decide that it’s a good idea. Exactly how we benefit from this will differ from person to person. It may be that ordinary users are more eager to recommend Firefox to their friends. It may be that a politician considers us when involved in patent policy. It may be that a web designer remembers us when his boss asks him to construct an IE-only site “because it’s quicker”.

In some ways, this is a much clearer articulation of what I was trying to get to with my Next Million Mozillians post: finding a way to get people to move from 'Firefox is cool!' to 'Firefox is important!'. Which hopefully leads to some sort of action, even if it is only telling someone else why Firefox and the open Internet matter.

Of course, thinking of Mozilla as a series of circles oversimplifies a little. Just as there is no single open source community, it's likely there is no single Mozilla community. Each part of the circle includes a myriad of people, projects and ideas. And people will often sit within multiple parts of the circle at once as they are working on multiple things. Which is a good thing.

Still, the circles provide a useful framework for thinking thinking through all the ideas people have been putting on the table. Strengthening, supporting and connecting various pieces of Mozilla 'community or production' is a very different activity than moving millions of people from 'user community' to 'community of interest'. Yet, both are important, and both are probably a part of what the Foundation should be doing.

As a part of the broader 'where should the Mozilla Foundation go' discussion, it might be useful to look at specific things the Foundation could do in each of the circles ... and I guess also what the other pieces of the Mozilla Project are doing in each area. I'll come back to this in another post. Unless someone beats me to it.

Mapping open education policy opportunities

Just before leaving for Italy, I spent a day in London talking with friends about the open education policy agenda. The friends in question were Darius Cuplinskas and Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Institute, James Dalziel from Macquarie University in Australia and Polish activist Jaroslaw Lipszyc. The conversation focused on how to understand and act on opportunities for government policy that supports the principles outlined in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

As we knew in advance, both Poland and Australia are fertile ground in terms of open ed. Polish activists like Jaroslaw have gotten the attention of politicians, a few of whom have expressed an interest in building ideas like free textbooks into their platform. And, as the large number of Cape Town signatures from Poland demonstrates, there is a great deal of academic and NGO support. In Australia, the opportunity is mostly around large scale computerization in the schools. As governments across the country roll out this agenda, they will eventually have to deal with the issue of content. James sees this as an opportunity.

Of course, there are lots of unanswered questions about the specifics of moving ahead with these opportunities. How to package and sell concrete open ed policy ideas? How are decisions made? Who are the right allies? We agreed that it would be worth going through a process to answer these questions and map the opportunities in each country. The rough schematic for the map looked like this:

Melissa is currently looking for someone to turn this sketch into a more formal spec for creating the maps. Once she's got a basic outline of what we are looking for, I will post it here. In the mean time, I am going to talk to Shuttleworth colleagues to see whether a similar process might be worthwhile in South Africa.

Scaffolding + support + investment = MoFo?

The Next Million Mozillians post has sparked some interesting ideas: browser plug-ins that make the whole of the web equally about consumption and contribution; simpler community-powered translation for open content and collaboration; helping people like educators who can weave open knowledge into the core of their work. It has also generated some good questions. What do we mean by the open web? And which bits of it is Mozilla Foundation best situated to drive? I'll loop back with an in-depth synthesis of all the comments and posts (keep 'em coming) in a couple of weeks when I am back from Italy.

In the mean time, I want to riff off Frank Hecker's question about how to engage and brainstorm with the Next Million Mozillians. Frank asked:

Why not send the (FF3 Download) pledgees a message and ask them what they'd like to see Mozilla do (if anything) other than shipping Firefox and other products? [snip] If even 1-2% of people responded to such an appeal with useful suggestions, that would still amount to thousands of people providing their personal thoughts, and possibly hundreds of people who were willing to contribute their time in some form as volunteers.

While sending an e-mail to all the Firefox 3 downloaders may not be the right way to engage (I recall a promise not to send follow up mail), it feels like Frank is headed in the right direction. Mozilla has touch points with millions of people on a regular basis. When it makes contact, I could embed simple, discreet opportunities for these people to contribute either opinions or time.

Of course, if it did this, Mozilla could end up with a new problem: too many ideas on the table plus the expectation that it will do something with them all. Getting around this problem -- or, better, turning this problem into an opportunity -- seems like one of the key design challenges for a more broadly focused Mozilla Foundation. How do you enable and encourage large numbers of open web ideas but only dig deep on the ones that fit with the Mozilla DNA?

The answer may be some combo of scaffolding + support + investment that comes in at different stages in the evolution of an idea. Possibly something like this (click here for PDF):

The specific ideas, tools and nomenclature (prizes, wikis, etc) don't matter as much as the levels (scaffolding, support, investment). Scaffolding lets 1000s of people with 1000s of ideas play with ways to improve the open web, but with little or no direct involvement from Mozilla. Mentoring, publicity, travel funds, matching grants and other kinds of in-direct support help the good ideas grow, but with Mozilla only playing a minor role, lending its advice, connections and tiny pots of highly leveraged resources (e.g. travel funds for project meetings). More significant investment and hands on follow through happens only where there are ideas that fit well with Mozilla's DNA, help grow the open web and have the potential to scale wildly.

On the product side, Mozilla already plays across a spectrum like this. Firefox represents a huge investment of time, energy and committment. It is built on large scale community processes that require rigour and hard work. However, Mozilla is also a key player in a bigger ecosystem made up of thousands of people and organizations building tools for the open web that come in all shapes, sizes and levels of ambition. Mozilla -- amongs others -- is a part of the scaffolding that makes this ecosystem possible.

A practical question: could and should Mozilla apply this combo of rigourous, large scale open source thinking plus catalytic ecosystem scaffolding to it moves more broadly into 'ideas that drive the open web' -- open software, videos, data, science, business models, whatever? While my gut says 'yes', I don't quite know what the boundaries are (anything that meets the 'Mozilla DNA test'?) or how it would work exactly (e.g. prizes or grants or something else?).

Which is of course why I wanted to post before taking off for two weeks. I want to know what other people think. Is this a useful way for the Mozilla Foundation to think about its engagement with the Next Million Mozillians? If so, what questions need to be answered first? Are there some places (emerging market countries?) or topics (participation? education? politics 2.0?) that offer better places to start than others?Could the Mozilla Manifesto, further articulated and evolved, provide some of the conceptual scaffolding needed to spark and focus people? I wonder.

Learning from open access

Yesterday, Melissa Hagemann, Eve Gray and I led a workshop called Opening Scholarship at Elpub 2008. Our aim was to dig into a very specific question: what lessons can those of us working on open education learn from the open access to research movement. As the room was filled with experienced open access folks (that's the theme of the conference), it seemed like a good place to ask this.

It turned out we were right. There was three hours of fun and intense conversation about both open access and education. At the end, we brainstormed key takeaways with the group:

1. Use the 'public access argument'. If public dollars are paying for educational materials, the public should be able to use (and evolve) them freely.
2. Build coalitions. Bringing researchers, universities and taxpayer rights advocates together under the Alliance for Taxpayer Access banner was critical to the open access NIH victory.
3. Be strategic about where to focus early open education efforts, looking for areas like vocational training where traditional publishers are weak.
4. Engage business and think about business models early on. Open access has worked in part because progressive publishers are involved and because there isn't just one business model.
5. Be patient and explain what you are on about consistently. It's only after years of calm explanations and experimentation that bigger publishers have come to open access.
6. Invest in early test cases that show what is possible. Do research. Develop metrics. Write up the best cases.
7. Build a network of champions and evangelists who can talk about these early successes. And make sure to start building leadership in emerging economies early on.

On top off all this, there was also a good deal of reflection on the fact that open education is a different kettle of fish from open access to research. It's not just about getting stuff out there, it's about making it remixable and improvable by communities of teachers. And, by extension, it's also about changing how we teach and learn, and putting students much more in the educational drivers seat.

As one participant said at the end of workshop. "Open education could be much more disruptive than open access was. It could be revolutionary." Yup, I think so.

Shuttleworth open licensing policy now online

A few months back, I posted a draft How We Work article on the Shuttleworth Foundation's open licensing strategy. The basic idea is that we want everything we do and fund to be under an open license. As my article says, this hasn't always worked as we haven't had a clear policy on the matter. Good news: now we do.

Andrew Rens and Karen Gabriels have polished off our Open Resources Statement of Principle. It says things like:

All Agreements entered into by the Foundation which include the creation of resources shall ensure that the resources are open resources, and shall record how the Intellectual Property in the resources is owned and licensed.

and

Resources are open resources when they are available for revision, translation, improvement and sharing under open licences, open standards and in open formats, free of technical protection measures.

This will now flow into an update of our standard grant and consulting contracts, and generally guide us as we go forward. Great work, Andrew and Karen!

With the release of this policy, we've also finalized and polished my article on the topic of open licensing. It's up on the Foundation site in both HTML and PDF.

Agile philanthropy: how our fellowships work

Last month, we sat down to have another How We Work conversation at Shuttleworth Foundation. Under the microscope this time: our Fellowships Program. We're all pretty happy with this program. So, the aim was to reflect on why it seems to be working ... and to find ways to tweak and improve it.

The fellowships idea has a simple genesis: the desire to work with people on the front edge of issues like open education, knowledge and telecom in a way that is at once agile and high impact. Projects and grants sometimes work for this. However, they just as often create a situation where the Foundation is talking to the right people (smart, connected and engaged on the issues that matter to us) in the wrong way (long project negotiations trying to fit round pegs into square holes). The fellowships emerged about 18 months ago so we have a way to make bets not just on projects but also on people. 

We currently have four fellows. Andrew Rens working on access to knowledge and intellectual property. Steve Song on open telecom. Steve Vosloo on communications and analysis (aka 'how education needs to work differently in the 21st century'). And myself with the dual hat of open philanthropy and open education. With the exception of myself, all the fellows work in our Cape Town office alongside the people who manage our grant making and in-house projects.

When Helen, Jason and the four of us fellows reflected on the program last month, some of the things we said were ...

1. The 'make bets on smart people' works for us.

The fellowships are based on the 'make bets on smart people and let them run' model. This approach has bought the Foundation two things: agility (we can move quickly on ideas and issues) and intellectual momentum (I can't think of a better term ... but basically we are moving as a group on the issues that matter to us). Also, we've created a brainstormy hothouse in the office, with ideas bouncing about constantly. This not only has the fellows fueling each other but also feeds projects like Siyavula and Kusasa and the organization as a whole.

2. We're starting to get traction on issues that matter ...

While it's still early days, we're starting to get traction on specific work led by the fellows. Steve Song has gathered people around the beautifully disruptive idea of the village telco. Andrew has helped South Africa drive the openness agenda in the OOXML / ISO discussions. Steve Vosloo is helping to shape the conversation on mother tongue instruction, which is a critical issue in the future of South African education. I helped a group of open education pioneers birth the Cape Town Declaration. These are small scale results, for sure. But are concrete and, more importantly, they represent the kind of things we want to see happening in the world. 

3. ... but follow through is sometimes tough.

On the flip side, we haven't always had perfect follow through on this early traction. If I just look at the Cape Town Declaration, we could have done more to quickly seize the momentum we built with the Declaration launch in January. This could have been fixed in part by me blogging, engaging and pushing more post launch. The fellowships are all about this kind of 'just roll up your sleeves' action. However, our not perfect Cape Town follow through is also related to the fact that we've tried to organize some of our next step activities using grants (watch soon for Open Education News) ... which is a slower way to get things rolling. We need to think about how we elegantly combine grants and fellowship energy in the future. We have an opportunity to move further faster combining these things, but we aren't there yet.

4. Getting the word out is even tougher.

We've also had a tough time sharing and communicating the ideas emerging from the fellows. All of the fellows are blogging, some in high profile places. This is good. There is a blog aggregator. Which is also helpful, although it's not clear who follows it. What's needed now is a better web site that pushes people to this material more aggressively. MOre importantly, we need a better strategy for getting people engaged: more thoughtful links between our e-mail newsletter and our most compelling posts; blogging about other people's work, especially the Foundation's partners; getting other bloggers to link to what we're writing. Small, simple stuff. We need to do it.

5. Paper, podiums and parties are great ... but needs discipline.

The tongue-in-cheek mandate for the fellows program is 'papers, podiums and parties'. Papers = writing and blogging to push thought leadership. Podiums = speaking and evangelizing. Parties = running events and building networks. Tongue-in-cheek or not, this trio actually serves well as a way to check whether we're working on the right things. A quick reflection at the meeting showed that most of us are doing well in one or two areas, but not necessarily in all. Eg. Steve Vosloo's work on mother tongue has a great paper and he's spoken on podiums ... but we need to follow through with some sort of symposium on the topic (a party). We need to be a bit more disciplined about tracking what we are doing in these areas and filling in the gaps.

The bullets above are a gut reflection on the meeting MP3 and my notes, which I just went over last week. I will write a more formal How We Work article on fellowships sometime in July. If you have questions or would like me to dig deeper on any particular points, please post comments here.

The Next Million Mozillians

Last week, David Eaves blogged about the potential for Mozilla to energize -- and maybe even lead -- a mass movement for the open web. My response: hear! hear! More thinking, experimenting, conversing, inventing, definitionizing, evangelizing, politicking, standard-making and party-throwing in the name of the open web is very much needed. And Mozilla is certainly well situated to stir this pot.

What would it take to stir the pot? Probably a re-imagined and re-invigorated Mozilla Foundation. 

Currently, the Foundation acts as steward for Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Messaging, which are owned by the Foundation but run with their own leadership and resources (I like this model). It supports a handful of other Mozilla software projects. And it gives out a small number of grants related to open source and web accessibility. All of these things contribute to the open web, some (stewarding Firefox!) in a massive way. The Foundation should keep doing these things.

Yet, there is still space for the Foundation to be thinking bigger. Looking for the next risky, audacious, disruptive ideas that will make the open web more useful and more fun. Strengthening not only the technical building blocks of the open web (software and standards), but also the social ones (community and business models)? And, getting ordinary people excited about the open web and why it matters? Which is where this idea of a movement comes in.

If Mozilla stepped into the movement building game, it would clearly have a head start: 170 million people who use Firefox and a killer track record building community.

However, there is also a critical piece missing: the ability to help large numbers (millions?) of people make the shift from being a consumer to being contributor. Not contributors to Mozilla Project code. Or even to documentation or marketing. Rather, imagine 170 million contributors to the project of making the open web stronger, better understood and more resilient. This would be very cool movement indeed.

This week's Downlod Firefox campaign demonstrated that, at least on the company side, Mozilla has the horsepower and respect to galvanize large numbers of people. Over 8 million people downloaded Firefox 3 in a day. In some ways more impressively, 1.6 million pledged to do so in advance. These pledgers care about Mozilla, and want to chip in to making the web more open. This problem is, beyond downloading, there is very little for ordinary, not-so-techie folks to chip in on. 

Mozilla Foundation could change this. It could invite people en masse to help define what we mean by the open web (really, we need to work on this). It could encourage them make videos, mashup pictures and write blog postings that explain the importance of the open web to my grandmother (or my kids). And, over time, it could give people -- geek and non-geek alike -- the scaffolding and encouragement they need to invent new pieces of the open web that have not yet been imagined. Pieces that use openness and participation to make the web better for work / music / life / love / play / the-stuff-that-matters. Imagined this way, the Foundation has the chance to create the next million actively contributing Mozillians. I think it should take that chance.

Which isn't to suggest that Mozilla should drop its driven focus on great, community-built tech products. Not at all. Firefox and other Mozilla products are critical to keeping the web open. However, one can imagine the Foundation as movement yin to the Corporation's awesome product yang. Parts of a whole.

As somebody whose job at Shuttleworth is to make the world better using open source tactics, thinking through this version of the Mozilla Foundation fascinates me. I've shared this fascination with a few Mozillians, asking: if the Foundation were in the movement building business, what would it look like? Where are the geek (and not just Firefox) and non-geek (and not just marketing) sweet spots for the next million contributors? I have to admit, I don't know myself. I have vague hunches (above) and a desire to dig deeper. I'm hoping the Mozillians I am talking to have ideas to share. And maybe you do to. If so, I'd love to hear them. I promise to post again to pull together any good ideas that emerge.

Yin-ing and yang-ing open everything

Writing up Open Everything Toronto debrief notes, I realized that striking the right yin-yang between impressive and surprising examples of 'open' will be one of the most critical factors for future events.

Open now has it's fair share of large scale success. Linux. Apache. Wikipedia. 70 million CC photos on Flickr. While increasingly commonplace and obvious, these examples are unquestionably impressive. They show that open works.

On the flip side, we are seeing values and tactics commonly associated with open source trickle out into all sorts of new places. Embroidery. Tinkering. Office space. Teaching. Salad. These examples are surprising, and intriguing. They show that open is spreading.

Many people came to Open Everything expecting to talk about one or the other of these things. Our aim was to give them was a mashup of both. We succeeded most in the speedgeek sessions. At two ends of the impressive vs. surprising spectrum:

Creative Commons 101 - Speedgeek from Myles Braithwaite on Vimeo.

Marcus Bornfreund gave a super compelling but very basic talk on how Creative Commons licensing works. Surprising? Not really. However, Creative Commons is an impressive, established part of the open world we are building. It illustrates some basic principles (remixing) and tactics (hacking the law rather than waiting to rewrite it), ideas that were new to many people at the Toronto event.

Unconferencing public policy from Myles Braithwaite on Vimeo.

Mark Kuznicki talked about 'unconferencing public policy'. Mark and his fellow Metronauts are basically applying the BarCamp model to get people involved in redesigning the Greater Toronto Area's transportation network. Impressive? Yes, but still small scale. Surprising? Absolutely, and also pushing the envelope. With the Mentronauts TransitCamps, we see open culture and tactics stretching not only beyond digital goods into real world processes (this is BarCamp's claim to fame) ... but also beyond tech into public policy.

The thing is: the impressive examples on their own can be boring. Most of us have heard them all before. The surprising examples alone are intriguing, but unproven and sometimes even trivial in the global scheme of things. Yet, when you look at large scale examples like Wikipedia side-by-side with the huge diversity of emerging experiments, open everything comes to life. Something huge and multidimensional is going on here. A playful yin yang dance between impressive and surprising helps to explain this. It makes it real, and understandable.

The Toronto dance wasn't perfect. The speedgeek was good, but we could have used more of the 'surprising' in other parts of the event. It was a bit too tech. Having called the question, I don think this will be hard to improve on in future events. Of course, new examples on the surprising side are always welcome. If you've got 'em, post 'em.

Open edu-thing

With Open Everything Toronto a week behind us, blog reflections, notes and photos are starting to trickle online. One of the highlights so far: Amanda Yilmaz's write up of the Seneca Open Source Course session.

David Humphrey and his colleagues at Seneca run a number of courses that throw computer studies students into the deep end of communities like Mozilla, Open Office and Fedora. They don't work on theoretical code. They work on the real thing with real open source contributors. From the notes ....

The biggest point of this Mozilla course is to show students the skills they need to get into a large open source community. This is not quite as chaotic as you may think. It starts with a look at the tools you need to work in an open open source community. This includes some technical skills, like how to develop for Mozilla and communicate using IRC. But it's also about how to work within this big, distributed meritocracy, how to function within this environment.

With help from interviewers Nora Young, Tonya Surman and Michele Perras, Dave provided an under the hood look at how these courses work ... and what students learn from working inside an open source community.

The practical benefits of Seneca open source course model are pretty clear. Students learn the soft skills needed to work on large scale open source projects, and distributed projects in general . They also get to contribute to a real product that ships to tens of millions of people (one of Dave's students wrote the animated PNG module for Firefox 3). Mozilla, Open Office, et al get a small cadre of well briefed and mentored young programmers to work on small tasks that no one else in the community is picking up. It's a nice bargain all around.

However, the most interesting bit was Dave's riff on how these courses turn assumptions about teaching and learning totally on their head:

The key to teaching this course is being willing to humble oneself. Mostly, I teach things I don't understand. I need to go in there and show my students that I am willing to try things, fail and learn from others. I need to show them how to be lost, how to drift, how to get back on your feet. This is the experience they need to work in open source. And it's an experience that I can't give them through the 'professor as expert' model.

and

Seneca can do this, whereas a school like Stanford can't. This is because we are a pragmatic community college. Professors like me don't need to focus on journal papers or use IEEE curriculum. We can focus on teaching and learning.

What Dave and his colleagues have created is not just a nice co-op program. It is a radical and disruptive educational innovation. Using open source community and collaboration as a springboard, the Seneca model takes the teacher off the dais and throws him into the peer learning pit with his students. It also emphasizes experience (what did you learn from having your code ignored or rejected by the module owner?) over achievement (please hand in your coding assignment!). These are not things that most higher ed institutions value, or even tolerate. Yet, they are central to the way we learn and work in the 21st century.

For me, this is the big picture potential of the Seneca model: infecting higher education with open source ways of working and learning. Certainly, this is already happening across the open education movement. However, few people in open education have connected their day-to-day teaching into the rough and tumble world of a large scale open source software project. If we want to invent more open, participatory ways of teaching and learning, I suspect this sort of connection is worth a great deal.

Open everything. Right here. Right now.

Today, Toronto kicks off Open Everything: a global series of six (or more?) events about the art, science and spirit of open. We've got 60 amazing people registered who come from computer programming, community development and everywhere in between. It's gonna rock.

If you are wondering what we're going to talk about, check out the Open Everything Toronto wiki or the list of speedgeeks. Also, you may be interested in my hastily compiled welcome notes:

Welcome. It is amazing to be in a room with 60 people willing to take an afternoon off to talk about the art, science and spirit of open. Really, this is something I could have only dreamed of a year ago. What's even better is that this is the first of six Open Everythings. Similar conversations are already planned for Berlin, Cape Town, London, Singapore and Cortes Island in Bristish Columbia. We are onto something very big and very important.

Let's start our conversation with a couple of questions. How many people here use Linux? How many have heard of Linux? How many have heard of Wikipedia? In the end, almost everyone. Linux and Wikipedia exemplify what we are hear to talk about today: the idea of openness. And, along with it, principles like transparency, participation, creativity, remixability, community.

The fact that these two very different things – an operating system and an encyclopedia – both embody these principles is not an accident. In the early 1980s, Richard Stallman and others started talking about something called 'free software'. Stallman wrote a definition that outlines four principles: the right to run, study, distribute and improve any piece of free software.

Famously these principles inspired projects like Linux and Wikipedia. They have also helped shape the open source software movement and, really, the Internet as a whole. But what isn't so famous is huge explosion of other endeavors built on open principles like these.

A few months ago, I looked on Google and Wikipedia for places where people were using the concept of 'open'. In 30 minutes I found about 15 examples. Obviously, some of these examples used 'open' was being well before the idea migrated from software: open systems; open societies; open standards; open space meetings. There are also fields that are taking their inspiration much more directly from things like Linux and Wikipedia: open education; open content; open innovation; open policy making; open design; open media; open philanthropy. And, then, there were a few surprises: open ethics; open religion; open fitness.

Some of this is fluff and fashion, of course. However, there are increasing examples of people very seriously and effectively applying open source thinking – intentionally and unintentionally – beyond software and encyclopedias. Here are three examples: The Open Architecture Network, an online community that shares building designs with the aim of creating low cost, innovative housing solutions for the world's poor. The MIT Open Courseware initiative and the Shuttleworth Foundation's own Siyavula project, which are using open source techniques to develop and share learning materials. And BarCamp, which is like an open source conference model for techies, making it easy for people to design events on the fly and for the model to be replicated in different cities around the world. You will hear about many more examples as a part of today's Open Everything event.

I asked someone why they wanted to come to open everything. The response: “I don't know, but I am violently intrigued.” That's a nice way of putting it. There is no question that the explosive growth of open source thinking is violently intriguing. So much so that I can't stop thinking about it.

However, I think we are ready for more than just intrigue. While still revelling in the playfulness of open, it's also time to admit that this is serious business. It is serious business that is genuinely (and quietly) reconfiguring economics, knowledge and power everywhere on the planet.

When I first started thinking and writing about this stuff less than 10 years ago, both Linux and Wikipedia were fringe phenomena. They were just for geeks. Now, Linux – a piece of software created by a loosely coordinated group of people spread around the world and working for single company – is edging into the mainstream. It not only powers a huge percentage of the computers that run the Internet, but it also serves a simple, low clutter operating system for mass market, low cost laptops now being introduced by companies Asus and HP. Even more clearly a mass success, Wikipedia is now in more than 250 languages with 2.3 million articles in English alone. This huge public asset was produced with money or the market. It was produced almost completely by volunteers driven by passion ... and a healthy dose of ego. The crazy open ideas of 10 years ago are the mainstream of today.

More important for today's conversation: we are not only seeing a growth in the number of areas where people are applying open source thinking, but we are also seeing some of these new experiments gain real traction. My favourite example is what open has done to photography. On Flickr alone, there are now almost 70 million photos under a Creative Commons license. Much of this is just pictures of my kids (literally, my kids). However, it also includes a ton of useful stuff that people can use for presentations, mash up into new media products or just put up on their wall. In terms of Education, MIT has not only put all it's curriculum up online, but that curriculum is being widely used and event adapted. OOPS in Taiwan is actively translating large quantities of MIT Open Courseware into Chinese. And, in meatspace, BarCamp, an intentionally amateurish and self organizing idea, has spread to every part of the world, from Azerbaijan to Malaysia to Slovakia. I looked at the BarCamp wiki today, and there are camp-like events already planned in over 90 cities for the second half of 2008. Just like Linux and Wikipedia, these Open Everythings are going mainstream.

As someone who thinks this is a good thing, I have two big questions: How will we know an Open Everything when we see one? and How can we do this better?

It's easy to pull out things like the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition to test if a piece of software is open. However, we can't just apply the same tests to a piece of architecture, or curriculum or public policy. We can't just say am I free to 'run' this law or this building. We need a set of principles broadly define the essence of open, and that we can apply much more broadly to the world. Having thought about it a bit, my guess is that the essence of open probably includes things like transparency, participation and remixability. But there are probably more and better words needed here.

Similarly, the best practices of running an open source community are becoming increasingly clear and well documented. Modular ownership. Good infrastructure for reporting bugs and submitting patches. Open and constant communication. All of these things are essential. And, only some of them work well when you port them over to areas of endeavour like education. From the business process perspective, we need to start asking what are some of the core techniques that work across different domains and what things are specific. We also need to look at ways to cross pollinate. My guess is that people skilled at facilitating open public policy process and open events have just as much to teach to open source communities as the other way around.

For me, these are two critical things to be thinking about: the essence and practice of open. We need to look for examples, identify patterns and share our approaches. As we go, we need to wikify, videotape and blog about what we're concluding. And, literally or figuratively, we probably need to write a book that explains the essence of open.

Our job here today – and my invitation to all of you – is to do exactly this: to help write the book on open everything. My promise and the promise of the people running other Open Everythings is to collect, share and steward the ideas that come up in these conversations. We want to take these ideas somewhere useful and inspiring, to loop back to you and to keep you involved. As a part of the bargain, your job is simple: think hard about Open Everything for the next few hours, and make some new friends while you are doing it.

We've got an amazing squad of bloggers and documenters for the event. Watch their progress on the Toronto wiki and on Flickr. I will also post highlights (plus a hypertexted version of the above) tomorrow. Should be fun. Spread the word.

Practising my open philanthropy rap

During my recent trip to Cape Town, the Foundation held a 'messaging meeting'. This is basically a communications group therapy session. Everyone has two or three minutes to deliver a pitch on their work and projects. After watching a video playback of each pitch, the group offers constructive criticism.

If you want to hear my current open philanthropy rap (or just want to see me make a fool of myself) take a look at this video from the meeting:



The 'get better at your pitch' benefits of this exercise are obvious ... and doing a session like this every few months is worthwhile for this reason alone.

However, there was a bigger and somewhat surprising benefit: team building. People learned about each other's projects in a way that they would never have time for during the normally flurry of a workday. They also had a chance to provide informal, rapid-fire input on both the positioning and substance of the work we are doing as a Foundation. And, fueled by the nervous gawkiness of any public speaking rehearsal, all of this was rolled up inside a good dose of humour and love. It was quite amazing. I hope I get to do it again.

Building a hothouse

Last week, I had a rare 45 mins with Mark Shuttleworth. He asked: what do you think the Foundation has achieved in the last year? I answered that it had 'stabilized and grown strong'. Which is true. After a few rocky years, the Foundation is now in a position to actually pursue big ideas like free textbooks and learning analytical skills p2p-style in a serious way. Yet, I knew my answer wasn't quite right. The Foundation hasn't just stabilized, its, well, this sounds silly, but ...

... it's turned into a hothouse of ideas, invention and activism. The hothouse image came up as we were brainstorming new metaphors for the theory of change. At first, I wrote this one off. But, reflecting on two weeks at the Foundation's Cape Town office, the hothouse image has stuck with me. It feels like that is exactly what we have built.

Amidst the clatter of the open plan office, sparky ideas constantly bounce off the walls. Over the course of just a few hours the other day: Andrew and Sam were debating the merits (or lack thereof) of the OLPC / Microsoft deal. Steve(2) and I were comparing South Africa's mother tongue education policies with the last 30 years of French immersion in Canada; and all of us were trying to figure out why the Lego mashup of Eddie Izzard's Death Star Canteen is so good (which is actually very important if the projects you're building hinge on contribution and creativity). The Foundation has truly become fertile ground for the exchange and evolution of ideas.

Of course, fertilizer on its own is just crap. Thankfully, the Foundation also has some promising seeds in the ground. Mark's Siyavula free textbook project has not borne fruit yet, but it's definitely taken root. He is now grappling with concrete issues like setting up an online repository, putting 1000s pages of existing content online and recruiting community leaders and volunteers to make this content better. Sam is at a similar spot with Kusasa, working through the practicalities of testing grade four peer-to-peer learning content in seven schools. And, new seeds like Steve(1)'s Village Telco are also going into the ground. Much is growing, and it is real.

What's most hot-house-y – and what you really only feel in the office – is the the ideas and the action really feeding each other. The fellows don't just write papers. The people running concrete projects don't just project manage. They dance together. Just think: Mark (creating free textbooks) is sitting across the room from Andrew (the intellectual property fellow) as he works on a competition bureau complaint related to educational publishing. The natural thing that happens is that they help each other. This is what is going on all the time, in subtle but quite powerful ways.

The bad news: you can't really see this from outside, which is not very hot-house-y. Fixing this is critical. We want people to take inspiration from (or take issue with) what we are doing. We also want them to contribute to (or simply rip off) what we are doing, even before our work has fully borne fruit. This won't happen until people can pick up and even join into the office vibe from outside. As a simple first step, we've agreed to compile all the existing Foundation blogs as the main feature on the front page a of our site. Much more is in the works.

Next time someone asks me what we've done in the last year, I'll have a better answer: we've built a hothouse. A very good one. True, it's only produced a few tiny victories so far (the Cape Town Declaration and South Africa's vote against OOXML at the ISO). But, after a week in Cape Town, I am quite hopeful that it's about to produce a great deal more.

PS. While I love the hothouse metaphor, I am still not completely convinced we should use it for the updated theory of change. Comments on this highly encouraged.

The world is flat (rate)

Today was CopyCamp2 in Toronto: a conversation about art, copyright and the Internet. Lots of fun examples of remix art. More Linux stickers and Internet savvy artists than last year. And a few boring culture bureaucrats playing broken records. Not a bad cocktail, all told.

The strange highlight was a session by Paul Hoffert, ex-hippie musician, Berkman fellow and founder of a new company called Noank. Their web site says:

Noank's mission is to license and distribute digital content globally while fairly compensating content owners, using the most efficient, sustainable, and effective business and technology systems. Noank's motto is "limitless legal content flow."

The idea is simple: blanket content subscriptions charged by ISPs for all the content you can eat. Users just grab content P2P-style the way they do now. Content creators get a slice of the subscription revenue based on the popularity of their materials.

What's interesting is not the idea on its own (it's not new), but the fact that Noank may actually make it happen, and at scale. They have a contract to offer their service to 25 million Chinese students in partnership with the ISP that serves all universities in China . Each student pays $20/year for all the online textbooks, movies and video they want. And, Noank has already signed up 40% of the content providers they've targeted, including all of the Chinese ones and a bunch of global majors.

More interesting is that fact that Noank will split revenue with anyone who owns content and signs a contract with them, even if they've already open sourced it. A case in point is MIT Open Courseware, which is in huge demand in some Chinese universities. MIT could put its lecture videos on the Noank P2P network and then claim a piece of the action, even though the material is available under CC free on the web. If it works, this both helps with both international bandwidth issues and allows those who produce open content to bring in money.

Is there are catch? Yes, of course. Noank uses super invasive client software to track the popularity of materials. Each use of each textbook, movie or video is recorded at the file system level on your computer. There is a piece in the client that anonymizes all this info before it is transmitted back to Noank. That may reassure you. It may not.

A final note: Noank's decision to start in China -- and to go to Russia next -- is worth paying attention to. As Paul stated in his talk, these are places with copyright cultures very different from those in the west. And, they are such big consumers ands creators of content that they will eventually influence how new business models and copyright play out globally. Noank figures such places make good terrain to hammer out their ideas. They are quite right. It will be interesting to see where (and if) this goes: good, bad and / or ugly.