We discussed at the first Ubiquity planning meeting that we need to come up with and implement a security model for the next release, so I thought I’d write down a few thoughts I’ve been having about it. I don’t consider myself a security expert by any stretch of the imagination, though, so any suggestions or corrections are more than welcome. Firstly, as noted in the meeting notes, the notion of a security model being discussed here is separate from, but supporting of, the kind of social “web of trust” based model that I’ve written about before. ... Read more

This weekend I represented Mozilla at the >play Expo at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Green Festival. This was the first time I’d ever represented Mozilla at a public event, so it was quite a learning experience. It was also fun trying to get an idea of what an individual was interested in and connecting it with something relevant about Mozilla. The >play Expo ... Read more

Yesterday we had our first public Ubiquity planning meeting. What made this meeting particularly interesting for me was the fact that we were trying something a little different from most standard Mozilla project meetings I’ve attended. Generally, project meetings consist of one group of people who are in the same room together and can communicate very efficiently while all the folks calling-in can barely hear them, dramatically increasing their barrier to participation. ... Read more

Last night we held a really fun Labs Night at Mozilla’s Building K in Mountain View, California. The Thunderbird team was here for their work week, some folks from Seedcamp dropped in, and Dion and Ben of the Ajaxian and the new Mozilla Developer Tools Lab were all here, which made for a night of innovative presentations that got lots of interesting conversations started. The evening started out with Jono presenting a quick overview of all the currently active Labs projects while wearing a large sombrero. ... Read more

One of the really interesting things about the social-network-oriented website for the Obama campaign, my.barackobama.com, was the fact that it was essentially an online nexus that connected people who were interested in political and social change. And as Henry Jenkins mentioned in February, what Obama has created over the past year has not been a campaign, but a movement that would have lived on even if he’d lost the election. ... Read more

The newly-launched change.gov has a section for citizens to share their vision for what America can be, and where President-Elect Obama should lead America. I decided to post this to their form: While reading Robert Kuttner's Obama's Challenge several weeks ago, I was fascinated by his description of Denmark's Flexicurity program, which seemed to both help the interests of free-market capitalism while simultaneously offering security to its country's citizens. Rather than subsidizing failing industries, their government appears to give corporations as much free reign as they want to fire/lay-off employees, move workforces overseas, and so forth; they then offer a wealth of social services for people to recover from job loss through retraining. ... Read more

Farhad Manjoo recently wrote an article on Slate promoting the notion of online businesses like Facebook charging people for services. It’s an interesting business argument, but I wanted to address this situation from a more social perspective. There’s some notable differences that emerge when I compare my two favorite web-based businesses, Google and Amazon. I feel very comfortable in my relationship with Amazon, largely because I understand how they help me and how I help them: I give them money, they give me goods or services. ... Read more

Nothing reminds me how much I despise American politics as the presidential debates. Due to the context surrounding them—that is, the election—the candidates have an enormous incentive to focus on tactics directed at lowering the public’s regard of an opponent while improving one’s own standing, often through the use of misleading statistics and avoiding candid answers to questions. And as a result, rather than helping me understand the issues, the bickering between the two candidates usually results in an incoherence that leaves me utterly confused about the issues and saddened about our politicians’ ability to arrive at any kind of consensus. ... Read more

This year’s Presidential election has me more passionate about politics than I’ve ever been. In part, this is because Obama’s campaign is more like a social movement than a political campaign: as Henry Jenkins explains in Obama and the “We” Generation, part of the reason that Obama’s message resonates so much with me and others in my generation is because of how participatory it is. His campaign isn’t about making him president and then having him magically repair our nation; it’s about working together, with his help, to make our country a better place. ... Read more

When I talk to my friends and family about Mozilla, I notice that they all have different perceptions of what Mozilla is. Looking at Mozilla’s Wikipedia entry doesn’t shed much light on things either, as it’s largely a glorified disambiguation page that attempts to clarify the word’s many different meanings over time. This essay is about what that word means to me. It isn’t meant to be definitive, but it should contribute to the ongoing discussion of Mozilla’s identity. ... Read more