commonspace

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.