Innovation-challenges

The Mozilla Foundation is increasingly relying upon Open Innovation Challenges to drive much of its programming and activity. A fair amount of descriptive copy - from presentations to 1-pagers to full-out proposals - has been written about our approach to the model. This purpose of this page is to collect the various descriptions for re-purposing in other communication materials.

One-Pager

Tackling the Unknown

Open Innovation Challenges gather the best and brightest to identify promising ideas and move them from concept to prototype to implementation. The model draws upon themes and methodologies similar to design-based research, especially in translating theories of complex systems to practical problems within a given, specified, challenging, and collaborative learning environment. Challenges are a formal framework designed and used by Mozilla to tackle problem sets whose solution is unknown. While subject to variation, the basic structure consists of four phases:

Qualification. Participants are chosen from among the community of practitioners based upon the degree to which their work has the potential to produce tangible impact – defined as measurable progress towards the organizing challenge statements – and to ensure a diversity of background and opinion.

Peer-based learning and exchange. The participants are brought together to share their ideas within a structured workshop. The format is designed to purposefully do away with conference norms such as PowerPoint presentations and a division between speaker and audience. Participants are guided to keep an open mind and a focus on ideas that can be implemented easily and immediately, with the goal of establishing short-term feedback loops.

Iterative development and application. Immediately following (and often during) the workshop, participants are asked to form self-selected groups and begin work on new tools, systems, models, and other projects that tackle the challenge statements. Resources are committed to projects that begin to show promise. Projects are awarded increasingly larger degrees of support through iterative funding rounds. Continued support is contingent upon results. Projects that stall or do not produce the desired outcomes are removed from the innovation framework. Participants assigned to those projects are encouraged to join forces with those initiatives still underway.

Narrowing and launch. Project iteration and funding rounds continue until there are a handful of projects with demonstrable results and progress towards the challenge statements. These projects are formalized as initiatives of the partner organizations and work begins to scale the projects’ impact across the target sector.

The Open Innovation Challenge model is the central tool Mozilla uses to innovate new technology. Challenges have informed user interface designs for Firefox Sync; created data visualizations for bug tracking and testing; and laid the groundwork for integrating contact management into Firefox. Additionally, Mozilla is using an Open Innovation Challenge in partnership with the Knight Foundation to drive the development of new technology to shape the future of digital journalism. Open Innovation Challenges capture the benefits of open-ended conversation – the generativity that comes from the freedom to propose radical ideas, many points of view, diverse perspectives, crowdsourced insight, and accidental encounter – while driving to tangible progress by applying a strict definition of success: the elimination and surmounting of clearly defined challenge statements.

Language on Specific Aspects

Participation & Engagement

• Geeks alone cannot keep the web open for the long haul. We also need teachers, artists, lawyers, journalists and everyone else who works and plays online to get involved. This is why we’ve started Mozilla Drumbeat: a nascent effort to engage ‘the people formerly known as users’ in the process of innovating and shaping the future of the web.

• At the same time, it is not journalists alone who will reinvent journalism. There is also a need to engage radical and entrepreneurial technologists who want to build new tools and techniques around the core civic values of journalism. The ideas that will reinvigorate news will, at least in part, flow from the technology and culture of the open web.

• We are not just searching for promising "programmer-journalists" and "media hackers," we are looking to promote and grow the field beyond the choir. We are looking for the "outliers" – those web programmers, mobile application developers, user interface designers, artists, and thinkers – that will bring completely new and innovative thinking to the news industry. We are also looking for those journalists who are trying to push the boundaries of the medium and are experimenting with new ideas through technology.

Structure & Flow

• A face-to-face prototype-building event that brings together 20 - 40 individuals for a multi-day work sprint with outside experts to bring their concepts to life.

• The process is designed to cast a very wide net for participants at the beginning and then slowly narrow down the field to a very small group of dynamic and talented individuals that are offered a fellowship. At each step that we are proposing – a design challenge, an online course, a face-to-face prototype-building event – participants would be competing by demonstrating their ability to bring innovative thinking and practical development skills to the challenges of tomorrow's news ecosystem, and the open web.

• Mozilla: Designs the program and works with Knight to engage the partners. Produces, promotes, and manages the design challenges, the online courses, and facilitates the face-to-face prototype-building event. Recommends fellows. Monitors the fellowships and facilitates a peer network.

• Online competition: Submissions are invited to address a particular design challenge, e.g.: "re-think and re-design 21st century journalism and online news using the open web". Like previous Mozilla design challenges, participation is easy: participants simply submit a visual brainstorm -- literally a digital napkin sketch -- for how they would re-invent the online news experience using open-web technologies. The actual design challenges would be developed in cooperation with the participating news organizations. The competition would be promoted by Mozilla, the Knight Foundation community, and participating news organizations to reach a broad audience. For a period of four weeks, design-challenge participants would be encouraged to promote their submission. Submissions could be discussed and improved with feedback from other design-challenge participants or the broader "news innovation" community. At the end of the four-week call for submissions, the winning ideas would be selected. The incentive: recognition from judges and peers, and the opportunity to attend a four-week, hands-on, course with high-profile instructors and guest lecturers to develop the idea further.

• Online course / Learning Lab: online courses that would draw on expert teachers from both the Knight Foundation and Mozilla communities, e.g: Stamen Design (News Challenge winner) delivering a course on news visualization or John Resig (Mozilla staff) on developing web-native applications using Javascript. Building on the napkin sketches from the design challenge, the courses would use a project-based learning approach and would help participants to come up with rapid, iterative mock-ups, specifications, and proof-of-concepts that would become their portfolio of work from the course. The courses would be open to programmers, web developers, tech-savvy journalists and others who want to learn how to use open web technology to enrich the world of news. Each week of the four-week course would be lead by a different instructor and would focus on a different skill set and set of learning objectives. Instructors would also bring in relevant guest speakers to introduce different perspectives and provide real-world examples. The course would be split 50/50 between leader-led instruction and hands-on lab time, and -- using the Mozilla-supported Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU) platform -- would provide participants with an immersive online learning experience, including live video streams, forums, and real-time chat. Throughout the course, a specific focus would be put on the open-source technologies that have already been produced as a result of Knight Foundation funding to date, e.g.: OpenBlock, VillageSoup, Value-added news / hNews open standard, People Pods, and other projects developed by Knight-funded initiatives. Participants would be directed to build on existing solutions vs. reinventing the wheel, and encouraged to contribute back to the original project. The incentive: Recognition and an invitation to join other selected participants at five-day face-to-face prototype building event.

Impacts & Outcomes

• An increased culture of agile innovation in newsrooms, which would be demonstrated via “copy cat” innovation at other news organization that is inspired by the work of the participants.

• Open-web technology and culture taking root inside news organizations. This would be demonstrated by future newsroom innovations that are built on open-web technology, for example: using HTML5 vs. Flash for interactive stories, developing mobile experiences that aren't iPhone specific, or using “open video” to mash-up video and news content in real time.

• Raised level of public conversation about open-web technology and journalism.

• The course material, projects, and fellowship outcomes would be documented, shared, and released under an open-source license to the journalism community.

Risks

• A risk is that too few participants are engaged at the beginning of the challenge, which could result in a small pool of potential fellows at the end and a lack of any truly new ideas. This is a risk that Mozilla is experienced in addressing from previous design challenges. To mitigate the risk, Mozilla will:
  • Leverage the awareness-raising power of the Mozilla community to get the word out far-and-wide.
  • Allow enough time to do outreach to a broad range of communities, including those that are typically underserved by the media.