Summit2008/Notes/Identity Transcript

--- Log opened Wed Jul 30 23:53:10 2008
Mitchell: Plan to spend 10-15 min on question of Mozilla Identity
Mitchell: Look at stuff on flip charts, get an idea of where they fit,
          how do they fit
Mitchell: ... discuss proposed goals
Mitchell: I went through this tree. Didn't get any horrendous feedback
          saying it's wrong

Mitchell: Things coming up lately, couple things that need to be represented
          that aren't
Mitchell: One, community
Mitchell: It flows through everything we do. In one sense it's implicit
          in that, in one sense it's missing.
Mitchell: So how do we represent the idea of community in that?
Mitchell: Do we consider it integral in every cell that we don't need to
          call it out, or does it need to be called out

Mitchell: Second thing is that the values from Manifesto aren't expressed
          in that diagram
Mitchell: I'm not sure where they'd show up or how
Mitchell: If they're roots, or if public benefit root picks them up
Mitchell: But they are part of how we think about ourselves
Mitchell: e.g. is privacy a root, since it's something we value

David Ascher: One thing about community that's interesting is everybody
              uses the word to mean the different things
David: I never use it in the singular
David: People belong to Mozilla community, but also other communities.
       E.g. qa community, l10n community
David: In these people know each other intimately
David: Not like Mozilla community of 1/2 mill
David: Community is interesting, but also a loaded term
fantasai: maybe think of it as veins that run through the tree?
Zak: ....
Zak: When ppl talk about community, they're talking about peers
Zak: people who are working on the same project, even remotely
Zak: How many people think of users as part of community?
some raised hands

Mitchell: .. goals and improving interaction is connection between different
          parts of Mozilla
Mitchell: support working w/qa
e.g

David: One that's challenging about scale of Mozilla at this point
David: I don't think humans are evolved to work with this many people
David: Hard to be in contact with thousands of people
David: Our brains are not wired for that
David: .. healthy relationships at scale
David: So not everybody needs to know everybody else

Atul: Question around who to trust around world of the Internet
Atul: A lot of users coming to Internet know noting about it
Atul: Interesting discussions about security. Users tend to assume that
      anywhere on the Internet is dangerous
Atul: In reality, I only visit a subset of the Internet that I consider to be safe
Atul: I will only choose to share my personal info with a small amount of that
Atul: Goes into things like kind of software you download
Atul: Firefox is a gateway to everything you put on your computer to some extent.
Atul: How do you trust
Atul: How do you know who/what to trust on the Internet.
Atul: There's no real sense of identity built on the Internet.
Atul: One thing I think about is doing something, something social. Social
      network so that my parents could say I trust my son, things that he
      does...
Mitchell: You're talking about a more abstract concept of community
Mitchell: A community of trust. A layer that is really different ...
Mitchell: I can't figure out livechat
(...?)
Mitchell: Interesting set of identity, hard to represent as communities
          get more abstract

Zak: If we had this biological model of what we are.
Zak: Community is what we create, but also what we need.
Zak: Same thing with values in manifest.
Zak: Like we're trying to create the environment that we need
Zak: create what's in the manifesto
Zak: It's kinda like plants. They slowly changed the earth to be what they
     want it to be.

Nicolas: It might be useful to separate community out into a noun and a verb
Nicolas: The tree, you can almost put a title that says "The Mozilla Community"

Nicolas: One of the roots of the community, one of the shared practices,
         is about a community approach.
Nicolas: About less hierarchical, about creating communities
Nicolas: Community is a practice that Mozilla encourages.
Nicolas: I think the practice of doing community is something, and the
         end result is the Mozilla Community

Gandalf: There's a term for that, a participatory approach.
Gandalf: You can look at hierarchical org or participatory org
Gandalf: We're definitely a participatory org. Empowering participating
         approach
Gandalf: I would stake community as a noun
Gandalf: And participation as a verb
Gandalf: It's hard enough to define ...
Gandalf: Like David said, we have trouble remembering this many people
Gandalf: You're in one hundred communities of two hundred million people
Gandalf: you're in community of 200,000,000 ppl using FF

David: I look at this picture and I completely understand it from my position,
       I know how pieces fit together
David: I look back to several years ago to when I was a community member
David: with a different day job
David: and trying to figure where I fit there, is a little interesting
David: I think the roots are why I cared about Mozilla before I was really
       involved
David: but other parts are not so relevant
David: ....
David: consumer products which are very focused on some smaller set of people
David: If you're not close into Mozilla, which part of Mozilla are relevant
       to you are fuzzy and hard

Mitchell: So I'd take from that naming the whole thing The Mozilla Community
          isn't quite right
Mitchell: This leads me to think .. don't really have a clear vision of
          how this fits into community
Mitchell: .. find it useful, but don't know how to merge it into that.
Mitchell: either don't know how to visualize it in there, or maybe it's
          something else
Gerv: Is there a correlation between the tree and the concentric circles
      of community?
Gerv: E.g. ppl who are deeply involved, check into cvs, are an inner circle.
      people who use our code are an outer circle
Gerv: The further out you go, the less the values in the roots are deeply held
?: It seems like there does need to be a place somewhere there.
?: Mozilla communities- you don't need to fit into and participate in all
   the branches to be part of it
?: I like the idea that we could label the whole metaphor community
Guillermo: It's difficult to draw the concentric cirlces in the same image
Guillermo: Maybe the tree rings
Mitchell: I'm inclined to take these ideas back and see if we can merge them
Mitchell: Or if we should keep them separate for awhile

bsmedberg: I don't think the community belongs on that tree
bsmedberg: I think shared goals or shared something define the community
bsmedberg: but if you come up with the shared whatever we are, the community
           flows from that
bsmedberg: saying that we are a community without having the shared goals
           is backwards to me

Tiffney: I think we're going with this metaphor you can look as community
         as ecosystem
Tiffney: You can't dissect the ecosystem from that picture
summary of her comments: Community as ecosystem

Zak: I can't figure out what other community from history we're like?
Zak: There's no form to fill out, no creed. Maybe that's why we're confused
     as to what we are
Gerv: The reason that's been possible is the zero-incremental cost of
      copying softare
Gerv: 20 years ago nobody could reach 200 mill people with useful stuff

Mitchell: the other thing that came up a lot is values
Mitchell: Manifesto values, that don't overtly show up in that
Mitchell: We could try to distill a few of them, and make them roots or
          branches or something
Mitchell: One term I want to use, although it's overloaded, is user sovereignty
Mitchell: Any thoughts?
David: You could just point to manifest, or say manifesto values
David: Manifesto describes a lot of values
David: ... I hate to use the word morals
David: there are some sort of moral underpinnings that drive ...

fantasai: So what I'm seeing here is that the values in the roots are how
          we operate, and the values in the manifesto are things we value
          and want to create

Mark: ....
Mark: Thinking about where to put the values. We haven't used the leaves
      at all. There's unused real estate in the leaves
Gerv: The tree starts small and grows more
Gerv: So maybe the values are suspended in the air, what we're aiming up

Eric: Talking about community, and ecosystem. A forest of trees would
      represent our user base or community
Eric: Maybe show that our interest is civic benefit of the forest

Blizzard(?): If you're very far from trees they look very different from up
             close
Blizzard(?): Something to think about
Zak: Also some people see trees as lumber
Zach(?): I feel the values belong at the roots, and maybe those attributes
         of Mozilla are something that belong as clouds
Zach(?): Raining down and enriching the growth of the tree
fantasai: I don't think that matches, the roots really anchor this
          project/community

Mitchell: One thing that's different about Mozilla is our focus on producing
          a product rather than being an advocacy organization

Gandalf: I was thinking about what zak said, part of us considers users
         part of community or community itself, and others don't
Gandalf: It would be a good idea to claim that the community is made up
         of people who consider themselves part of community
Gandalf: So ppl who use product and consider themselves part of community
         are, and those who don't aren't
Gandalf: It's a very open community
Gandalf: anyone can decide to participate
Mitchell: So you'd have a user base that was important to our effectiveness,
          but you wouldn't consider part of the community
simon: ...
simon: every little bit that you do, besides downloading thu/ff and
       installing it
simon: things you do like telling your friend, this solftware is great you
       should use it
simon: or publishing a holiday calendar for sunbird
simon: that makes you part of the community, whether you consider yourself
       part of the community or not
Mitchell: We have a difference of opinion of whether we consider the user
          base part of the community or not
Mitchell: we should be clear that it's different from other communities

?: Going back to Zak's point, .. distinguishes use from other kinds of
   nonprofits. Every effective nonprofit chooses a strategy.
?: E.g. EFF chose lawsuits as it's approach.
Brian: We do have advocacy around a certain set of positions
Brian: Our strategy is around a free product
Brian: Because everyone would be tied to MS if there wasn't an alternative.
Brian: We get user power from 1.0 launch onwards
Brian: The balls in our court to define that. How much are users a group
       that we want to involve?

Mitchell: So we have some question of whether roots are roots or values
          are roots
Mitchell: Any other thoughts on this?
Mtichell: there was use real estate of leaves

??: I don't know where values go on the tree
??: ... people are here not because they care about making good products,
    but also they care about advancing values through these products.
??: the values are our goal
??: it's absolutely central, and the purpose of the products is to achieve
    that
Mitchell: So I think values is the trunk.
Mitchell: It currently says human interaction with internet
Mitchell: but it's a certain type of interaction that we're dealing with

Asa: We talk about values. We're not just advancing them, we're inventing them.
Asa: We're inventing values for a new world on the net. It didn't used
     to have this value landscape.
Asa: Tricky, because we're both advancing them and creating them
Asa: both in terms of defining them, but also in creating them through
     products that advance those values
Asa: I feel like our products are the embodiment of our values.
Asa: We invented the values, then invented products to make them real

Asa: It really is the bark that's over the whole tree
Asa: Same way that community and participation are
Asa: We aren't participation because it's useful, but because we believe
     it's integral to the web
Asa: For those two in particular, I'm opposed to making it an appendage
Asa: They feel more like circulatory system.

Zach: Where does innovation fit into this? We have this shared bias towards
      innovation, show me the code.
???: The roots feel like methods
Mitchell: This would be a question, maybe it's historical
Mitchell: My sense is that those methods are deep enough to be a sense of
          identity
Mitchell: I think if you ask the people here, if you could create something
          that doesn't have that, wouldn't identify as Mozilla

Gerv: So we can pull this tree metaphor every which way.
Gerv: leaving aside the tree.
Gerv: Things come out of your values via your methods to produce results
Gerv: I don't think the participatory web is a result
Gerv: It's a means to an end which is whatever the people participating
      get out of it
Gerv: If that were true, perhaps the roots are the values, the trunk are
      the things that are the things in the trunk
Gerv: and what we make are the fruits
Gerv: Maybe we need to step back away from the tree and think how they
      fit together, then put them back on the tree
Guillermo: Maybe the values could be the ... the liquid inside the tree.
           The sap.

Mitchell: So 2 proposals for changing tree
Mitchell: question of how we work
Mitchell: We're not going to use public benefit, shared asset, to get to
          the web would we still feel like Mozilla

Mark: Theres a guy who put out a book called Two Bits, where he looked as
      open source movement
Mark: He says that what's different from other social movements
mark: Is that the values and the practices are embedded in each other
mark: not just advocating values
Mark: You kinda have to keep them, they're together
Mark: they're in the roots is right

Mitchell: Want to talk a bit about goals
Look through bunch of stuff on goals
Mitchell: Weren't a lot of comments saying this is a terrible goal, take
          it off
Mitchell: where we've got so far
Mitchell: Firefox should continue, momentum, agreement there
Mitchell: Not much comments on Mobile saying no. Most comments are why not
          already and here's how to do it

Mitchell: Two things are data and information
Mitchell: potentially most divisive
Mitchell: Mozilla and open Internet has another large set of ideas
Mitchell: Just want to call out what came out from open Internet
Mitchell: then talk about data
Mitchell: For Mozilla as open Internet and Mozilla as community
Mitchell: Some education and evangelism function, both internally and
          externally

Mitchell: Internal ones captured best as
Mitchell: There's some way that Mozilla communities grow. Some ways that
          knowledge is implicit, but we don't make it explicit
Mitchell: Example, small l10n team. How do you grow that team?
Mitchell: We've done it tons of time, but there's no set of steps
Mitchell: So there's no understood way to do it
Mitchell: we do it well, but it's very ad-hoc
Mitchell: e.g. I found my way in, but I don't know how I did it, and I
          don't know how to help someone else
Mitchell: Very strong interest in figuring out how to be clear on what
          entry paths work, what are experiences are and how to use them.
Mitchell: We know a lot of things
Mitchell: about scale, l10n, upgrades, etc.
Mitchell: What's path for Mozilla to spread that knowledge to those who
          want it?
mitchell: reluctant to have too long list of goals, but that seems like
          something that should show up more explicitly

Mitchell: Other thing ins emphasis on content. encourage open content
          creation on the Internet
Mitchell: I'd put them as a center piece of the open web or open Internet
Mitchell: Tools we should think about and think hard how to do them.
Mitchell: Anything else missing?

David: I like part about teaching the knowledge and skills that Mozilla
       has earned to outside
David: Flip side is we only get to open Internet by collaborating with others
David: one thing I try to figure out is how do we effectively learn from
       others, not just tell them this is what works?
Mitchell: so learning to collaborate and inward-bound learning

Gerv: On content creation piece
Gerv: Mark made a good point about content creation
Gerv: The project we are is composed of seamonkey, effectively
Gerv: How do you create content for the web has changed a lot since days
      of NS4
Gerv: Nowadays ppl wanting to put thoughts on web, just get a blog.
Gerv: People that do more than that do ajax-based interactive websites
Gerv: In one sense the content creation part is done.
Gerv: blogs, cms, wiki
Gerv: Or we're not done.
Gerv: Do we make tools for putting content on the web?

Mitchell: Looks like Travel is taking over here
????: Last comments on where it goes and how to continue discussion?
Mitchell: What are good ways to continue this conversation? Clearly not
          my blog?
Mitchell: I'm the leader for this particular set of discussions.
Mitchell: if nothing else send it to me
Zak: Wiki?
simon: .. blog
Gerv: good thing about newsgroup is that it's newsgroup, mailing list,
      google group, rrs
Mitchell: Will send mail to summit alias
Mitchell: I do have a blog, do send comments :)

ctalbert: I was at OSCON last week
ctalbert: One session from Intel was talking about three challenges on Internet
ctalbert: And one challenge was data.
ctalbert: and how Intel can help you integrate data on the net
ctalbert: that made my skin crawl
Mitchell: the ... is not privacy for each person
Mitchell: My ability to protect my data when I want to, that's Foundation step
Mitchell: Problem is most of you, most of us, will trade personal data for
          convenience and features
Mitchell: We're all making those trades
Mitchell And the conceptual issue is that most consumers want some data
         to be shared.
MtichelL: and different people make different trades for how much data
          for how much free stuff
Mitchell: A lot of consumers want things very different
Mitchell: Of course you can keep data private and not share.
Mitchell: But when you want websites to use data for some things, that's hard
Blizzard: One thing I learned with project I did was vast difference in
          expectations of privacy
Blizzard: experience from all over spectrum
blizzard: there's no common language. People don't even know how to think
          about it
blizzard: we need to define that language, give them a way to talk about it
blizzard: seems that education function has to be the first step
blizzard: esp outside our space where we've thought about it
blizzard: coming up with framework would be important
Mitchell: Another set of posts lacking comments...

Zak: I think Tiffney really nailed it when she called it an ecosystem.
Zak: our ecosystem is thriving 
Zak: we care about our values, most people using firefox don't know and
     don't care
Zak: the more we provide value, the more we get a chance to explain to them
      about privacy
zak: our product is our vehicle for our values

Mitchell: Advocating privacy and building a product that that allows it
          is different
Mitchell: there's an advocacy piece
Mitchell: but I'm interested in building a product that actually protects
          privacy
Asa: We can't convince the world that it matters, but we can build a product
     that  does it, that has features that allows people to manage their data
     in a way that protects it
....
Meeting usurped by Lilly