• “Replaneting” some blog posts

    May 28th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    I hope you don’t mind for just verbing the word “planet”…

    but, I forgot to tag my last three blog posts so that they showed up on planet.  I think the new Word Press interface overwhelmed me, leaving me a bit clumsy.

    Here are the links with quick descriptions:

    I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon learning the ins-and-outs of the interface.  (It’s not that hard, Seth, comeon!!)

  • A day at the N2Y3 Conference

    May 27th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    A few of us headed over to Cisco today to attend the annual Net Squared conference sponsored by Tech Soup.  I’ve blogged about Mozilla’s involvement with the Net Squared confernce a couple months back. Today, we got to see a number of very interesting projects that are using web technology to provide deeper insight into the social issues affecting communities around the globe.

    Some of the projects I met:

    • Maplight.org – brings together campaign contributions and how legislators vote, providing an unprecedented window into the connections between money and politics.
    • reframe it.com – a web browser plug in that creates a space for comments in the right hand margin beside any web page.
    • OpenCongress – brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, comments, and more to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.
    • HealthyCity.org – improves the ability of low-income, underserved children, adolescents, and their families to access services and advocate for critical resources in their communities.
    • The Genocide Intervention Network – empowers individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide.

    All of the organizations participating can be found here.

    I also ran into Nick Reville and Holmes Wilson of the Miro Project.  Remember Miro and the Participatory Culture Foundaiton?  Mozilla helped them out with a grant last year.  These guys have brought Miro a long way, but could still use some help.  I offered to Nick to try to help with some fundraising and scaling challenges.  If you want to help out, please let me know.

    In my opinion, getting “off-campus” and going to conferences like these is worthwhile for a lot of reasons.  For one, it’s always great to meet people who are doing really high-impact work like the organizations listed above.  And, in almost every case, these organizations have or are hoping to use Mozilla to created addons for their constituents that relate directly to their work.

    Finally, going to a conference like this reinforces that hybrid organizations like Mozilla (and by “hybrid”, I mean that we have the a non-profit parent Mozilla Foundation and a for-profit subsidiary Corporation) are faced with a lot of non-traditional challenges.  Somewhere down the line, a few of us at Mozilla are hoping to do something meaningful in order to get to the bottom of a few of these core challenges.  We’d like to examine how Mozilla can take what it has learned about scaling and help other organizations do the same.  Perhaps a scaling/marketing challenge?  We’re just starting with the idea, but more to follow in the coming weeks.

  • More on “Powered by Mozilla”

    April 30th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 4 comments »

    A series of blog posts has been written about how we might start to apply the idea of “Powered by Mozilla”.  I’ve read posts by Slater, Tiffney, DougT, and David Boswell.   These posts all came just before or after a nice lunch time conversation we had about what the term “Powered by Mozilla” actually represents.  If a project used the term, what exactly did that mean?  Lots of thoughts emerged, but I came away thinking that we should start by defining some easy cases where we would feel comfortable with a project using this phrase.

    Building on that idea about a week ago, I invited Harvey (Mozilla’s internal legal counsel) and a few others to sit with me and Asa, where we would draw the code stack on a white board and literally start circling the aspects of that code that would have to be included if we were to encourage someone to say they were powered by Mozilla.  The drawing looked something like this:

    code-stack-2.png

    Luckily, Brendan then walked in the room and the conversation got even more focused.   One point that was mentioned was that any “Powered by Mozilla” app should be, at least, Interenet-enabled and should align pretty well with Mozilla’s mission/vision. Brendan and Asa really helped drive the discussion of the code and what has to be involved to define an applicaiton.

    So, I began to think about ways that we could tell if the app was Internet-enabled.  I brought up the point that maybe an application powered by Mozilla has to clearly state that it uses the Gecko user agent.  That’s not too hard to tell, thanks to cool applications like this that Asa forwarded to me from Henrik Gemal’s blog.  With this service, you can see what user agent your browser (or Internet-enabled app) is using.  Wouldn’t this be a fairly easy way to determine some good cases? This particular discussion is ongoing and I am sure more posts will surface, but I do think this is one interesting and fairly straight-forward way to find applications that could make the claim they are powered by Mozilla.

  • Learning from Interviewing

    March 14th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    Recently, I’ve been interviewing candidates for a community/marketing role that will work directly with the Mozilla community in Europe. It’s been a really interesting process that I think is worth discussing.

    The biggest challenge that I have had when interviewing these candidates is trying to find out how the potential hire will interact with our community and fit into Mozilla.

    I remember my first few months working with the Mozilla community (I still feel so new!), trying to figure out just how it operated and what were “the rules”. I had a lot of ideas, but was really, really tentative because I didn’t want to be a disruptive force with bad ideas. So, I proceeded with caution.

    I’ve been trying to tap into candidates’ understanding of Mozilla and how they’ll move forward when hired. What are their ideas? And, how do they plan to pull off those ideas? What do these candidates know about the Mozilla community? What tools are necessary for success? Finally, how do they plan to empower others to feel like leaders?

    The questions are so open ended, I’ve realized I’m more exploring ideas, rather than looking for a perfect answer. But, I’ve learned some good things.

    ...on empowerment: Candidates I’ve interviewed have said some interesting things on how to empower others – like having really transparent and open communication, but making sure to follow-up. People who are empowered will probably look for some sort of endorsement of their ideas, even if they are charging forward with something on their own. Providing meaningful and timely responses to others who feel empowered is really important. Complete agree! And, I don’t think I could ever stop trying to become better at this.

    …on tools needed for success: Talking about tools can get dangerously high-level and the conversation can become loaded with jargon. But, in this process we’ve uncovered some pretty common-sense things. Most everyone has said that setting up environments for community interaction and dialog is critical. Blogs, forums, mailing lists, events… Luckily, I think we’re doing this, too. I came away asking, “How can I do this better?”

    …on marketing and the community: I heard a few times that any organization that wants to “build community” needs to genuinely want that. Anyone that comes to the community in hope to really just market a product will probably fail because the community will quickly see through it. That was a great point I heard. In my experience, I really believe that the Mozilla community drives this project and any effort we make toward marketing is really only done if the community wants it.

    The big take away for me in this process is that interviewing for some of these “softer” roles is tricky. I think I am really trying to gauge if the person “gets Mozilla”. I say that pretty carefully because it makes it sound like Mozilla is some private club that is hard to understand. It’s not really too hard to understand. Maybe it’s more appropriate for me to say that I am really looking for an organizational/person/job fit.

    And, if you’re a candidate and reading this, well, I haven’t shown all my cards. I’ve saved some tough questions for you when we chat.

  • Net Squared Mashup Challenge

    February 29th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 5 comments »

    Last year, Chris Hofmann and I participated in Net Squared’s annual conference as judges of a challenge that awarded various social enterprises leveraging technology and the Web to create social change.  Frank Hecker from Mozilla Foundation also supported the conference by providing some funding.  You might remember that Miro (who was at that time changing their name from The Democracy Player) participated in the conference and was one of three finalists who took home an award.  (Mozilla Corp also granted $100,000 to Miro through the Participatory Culture Foundation to support Miro.)

    It’s that time of year again and NetSquared approached me with new ideas for the upcoming conference, specifically describing a “mashup challenge”. The NetSquared Mashup Challenge will bring together a unique mix of people from the public and private sectors to develop and release mashups designed to provide deeper insight into the social issues affecting communities around the globe. The challenge is managed through a process that emphasizes community engagement, participation, and collaboration.  NetSquared asked me to think about organizations who might participate.  They also asked if any developers had interest in working with the organizations that are already enrolled in the challenge.   I offered to blog about it, so if you’re interested just let me know and I can connect you with NetSquared.  Nominated projects can be found here.  Finally, if you know an organization who should participate and you’d like to work on the mashup with them, send me a note and we can make it happen.

    Last year’s challenge brought together 21 organizations and supplied a variety of resources, including a share of the $100,000 Innovation Fund to help those organizations move their social web projects forward.  It was a good experience and I’m looking forward to helping again.

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