This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the weeks ending May 25 and June 1, 2007.
Projects for the week
Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did these past two weeks:
Grants and related activities. I approved a Mozilla Foundation donation to the NetSquared Technology Innovation Fund; for more on NetSquared see Seth Bindernagel’s post. Henri Sivonen posted his final masters thesis describing his Mozilla Foundation-funded project to produce a prototype HTML conformance checker; the thesis and the conformance checker code are well worth checking out if you have an interest in this topic. The Foundation is now funding some follow-on work by Henri to produce an HTML5 parser for Java. I also approved matching funding from the Mozilla Foundation for a project sponsored by the Camino project to improve the scriptability of Camino.
Next action(s): Finish up with stuff left over from the Summer of Code submissions. Do a blog post summarizing our accessibility-related efforts, as well as a brief meeting report on CSUN and G3ICT.
IP/legal issues. I worked on some internal legal matters.
Next action(s): Work more to get the contributors agreement moved forward.
Other. I was in Boston on June 1 to attend the Internet & Society Conference 2007 and meet some folks from the Berkman Center (with whom we’re planning an event for later this year). Among the sessions I attended, perhaps the most interesting to me was that by Chris Mackie of the Mellon Foundation. The Mellon Foundation mainly funds projects related to the arts and humanities, and as an offshoot of that now has a program funding research in information technologies of interest to educational institutions, including development of open source software. In particular, Mellon funded creation of the Zotero extension to Firefox, a tool for people doing academic research online.
See also the blogs by Gerv and Zak for their own status reports.
Upcoming activities
- I’ll in Mountain View on June 12 and 13 at Mozilla HQ.
- I’ll be in Atlanta on July 2 to speak at the annual meeting of the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science.
- I’m considering attending at least part of OSCON 2007 July 23–27.
- I’ll tentatively be in Boston on July 30–31.
Random notes
On the flights up to Boston and back I read David Weinberger’s new book Everything is Miscellaneous. If I have time later I’ll post a brief review. However in the meantime I noted in the online errata that he wasn’t able to track down the exact source of a quote from Ted Nelson (”Everything is deeply intertwingled”). As it happens, I have a copy of Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines that apparently contains the original quote. (Strictly speaking I have what purports to be a copy of the sixth printing of the first edition, although it may actually be the second edition instead.) I picked up this book for $7 sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s; it’s now out of print, and used copies are selling on Amazon for $150–200. Sometimes I guess it’s a good thing to have lived a while!