NetSquared conference

Chris Hofmann and I have been attending the NetSquared conference for the past two days, listening to a lot of interesting social enterprises that have voted by the NetSquared community to have the greatest potential to leverage the social web to create social change.

Please take a look at the conference. We’re here because the Mozilla Foundation attended last year and was asked this year to support in some way. Frank at the Foundation was able to give a small contribution to help fund the conference. And, the organizers asked if two participants from Mozilla might be able to help evaluate the projects. I participated in this track and Chris Hofmann contributed as an expert evaluator in yesterday’s track on a tech-innovation feedback session.

In many ways, Mozilla might be considered a leading social enterprise. Our mission is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet. Being at this conference and learning about the technology needs of people in the developing world makes me see just how big an impact our software can have. For instance, Chris Double’s blog post about proving the concept of off-line capabilities in Firefox could have a huge impact for those people in the developing world who may not be able to pay for or rely on a consistent internet connectivity. Great work Chris and everyone else!

Mozilla grant to PCF

When Mozilla distributes grants to individuals and other organizations, we are looking at leveraged ways to support our community. If you’ve read this blog, the message may be getting a bit monotonous, but it has really been one of the core ways we are thinking about how to make our distributions. For every proposal we receive and then review, we try to ask how any level of support we give will amplify impact to the community.

Using this methodology, we have been able to provide resources to both individuals and projects whose efforts represent what we’re hoping to support. For example, we gave a grant to Creative Commons last quarter because CC is an organization that very much pursues the same ideas and principles set forth in Mozilla’s mission and the Mozilla Manifesto. (Just to restate it, the Mozilla mission is to provide choice and innovation on the Internet.)

In our last board meeting, it was decided that Mozilla would give a $100,000 grant to the Participatory Culture Foundation, the makers of the Democracy Player. PCF, like CC, aligns well with Mozilla and its manifesto. Additionally, PCF has projects that are built partly on Mozilla’s technology.

More on Democracy Player…it is soon to be named Miro and it is a cool desktop application that’s sort of a mashup of a video player, an RSS reader, an FTP & torrent client, and a channel guide — the experience is that video is regularly delivered to your desktop. They also make a server and have built a ton of great docs to help you get started as a video publisher on the web. Please check it out.

Some might wonder how we came upon this opportunity. Mozilla decided to give support to PCF after the Moz board was approached by them and was asked for some level of meaningful support. John Lilly sits on the board of PCF, so he was able to represent the request, but willingly removed himself from the voting process. The Mozilla Board agreed to support them for the following reasons:

1. Their mission to ensure the continued rise of open source & open standards aligns with the Mozilla mission to encourage choice & innovation on the web.
2. They’re building something that can have influence on the way users browse web content, rich media, and desktop UI — and it’s based on Mozilla technology.
3. PCF is another example of that leverage we are looking for…they don’t have any venture backing, they’re running on a very lean budget, and they continue to seek creative resources to make a big difference in the way their users access content on the Web.

Mozilla is excited to support ideas like this. We are looking for those volunteer contributors and interesting experiments that align with our mission and manifesto. If you have any suggestions, please contact us. You can start by emailing me and we’ll find out the next best steps together.

Students Projects: A good example of leverage

Student volunteers bring so much to Mozilla, whether by contributing to the code base, participating in our Campus Reps program through Facebook, or working on special projects for our community or for our marketing team.

I’ve had two great experiences with student teams in the recent past:

JT, Asa and I met with a team of students from Stanford’s GEM program who have done some research on internet users in Brazil & India. They are helping us understand a lot about the country context and how Mozilla might help empower more community members in those regions. Speaking of empowered, the students are also excited because they are providing us with highly useful analysis to help prepare our team as we reach out to our community.

The second experience was with a team of MBA students from Berkeley. The students were taking the Information and Technology Based Marketing class, and looked at our survey program from last summer that we created to understand why people were using Firefox, how they learned about it, and what kept people using it. The team found a lot of interesting new ideas for Mozilla to consider including how to make the surveys more simple, who to target to get better data, what types of responses to offer to allow for statistical testing, and how to avoid leading questions that greatly impact people’s answers. It was great work by the students.

If anyone is interested in learning more about what these students are doing, email me. Happy to share. Also, it would be good to learn about other examples if you have them. Finally, if you’re a student and want to contribute, email me.

p.s. Totally unrelated but I went camping in Arizona last weekend and hiked through Tonto Natural Bridge. Pretty awesome.