This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending July 11, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the blogs published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Legal issues Gerv worked on a variety of licensing issues involving software to be used in the context of the Mozilla project. Grants and related expenditures Gerv contacted the various people involved in Google Summer of Code projects related to Mozilla in order to get current status reports. The Mozilla Foundation is funding a new project by Eitan Isaacson to do comparison testing of accessibility support for Firefox and other browsers. CAs and related issues I gave preliminary approval for two requests from GlobalSign (bugs 406794 and406796) and started the second (and last) public comment period. Public communication David posted version 1.0 of the Mozilla brochure, and worked to get copies printed for OSCON. David took part in a discussion on the Mozilla governance list about where policy documents should live and how they should be maintained. Conferences Zak continued working on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON and related activities, including drafting the schedule and helping to orient the event coaches and participants. Other Gerv continued a discussion on how to to gather ISP configuration data for Thunderbird autoconfig, and created a Google Spreadsheet with proposed data to collect. Gerv attended the party for the presentation of the Firefox Guinness world record certificate, where he can be seen trying to peer over Tristan’s left shoulder. Upcoming events and activities David, Gerv, and Zak will be attending OSCON (July 21-25 in Portland OR) and the Firefox Summit (July 29-31 in Whistler BC). I will be attending the Firefox Summit but not OSCON.

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending July 4, 2008. My apologies for the delay in posting this. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on that week; for more information about others’ activities please see the blogs published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Mozilla Foundation future I did two posts related to the ongoing conversation about future Mozilla and Mozilla Foundation strategy. Grants and related expenditures Peter Jaros completed work on his Camino scriptability project (a 2007 grant); for more information see bugs 390072 (preliminary support), 385989 (windows and tabs), and 390846 (bookmarks). I received and started reviewing two new accessibility-related grant applications. CAs and related issues I started the first public comment period for EV-related requests from GlobalSign. Public communication David continued work on updating www.mozilla.org. Conferences Zak continued work on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON. Other Gerv continued work on projects from last week, including tracking Google Summer of Code work for Mozilla-related projects, updating the public suffix list, working toward the proposed Bugzilla reorganization, reviewing a new proposal for site security policies, posting a proposal for replacing the Despot system, and various other things. Upcoming events and activities David, Gerv, and Zak will be attending OSCON (July 21-25 in Portland OR) and the Firefox Summit (July 29-31 in Whistler BC). I will be attending the Firefox Summit but not OSCON.

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 27, 2008. My apologies for the delay in posting this. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on that week; for more information about others’ activities please see the status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Mozilla Foundation future Lots of people started posting on the topic of what the Mozilla Foundation should be doing in the future, including blog posts from David Eaves, Mark Surman (including a followup), Glyn Moody, and Mozilla’s own David Ascher and Mitchell Baker. There’s also lots of good stuff in the comments to the posts. CAs and related issues I gave final approval for Entrust’s request to enable the Entrust Root Certification Authority for EV (bug 416544) and filed bug 442561 against PSM to have the change made. Public communication David continued work on updating www.mozilla.org. David continued work on the Mozilla brochure project. Conferences Brian Behlendorf (Mozilla Foundation board member) spoke at the Personal Democracy Forum conference. I also attended, and did a related blog post. Zak continued work on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON. Other Gerv worked on a number of projects, including tracking Google Summer of Code work for Mozilla-related projects, updating the public suffix list, working toward the proposed Bugzilla reorganization, reviewing a new proposal for site security policies, posting a collection of “party favors” for Mozilla/Firefox parties, and various other things. David was on vacation that week. Upcoming events and activities David, Gerv, and Zak will be attending OSCON (July 21-25 in Portland OR) and the Firefox Summit (July 29-31 in Whistler BC). I will be attending the Firefox Summit but not OSCON.

In my last post I referred to the “Mozilla DNA,” a term I picked up from Mitchell and used in the course of discussing what role(s) the Mozilla Foundation might take on in future. However I’m not sure Mitchell (or anyone else for that matter) has ever precisely defined what the Mozilla DNA actually consists of, so before going on I thought I’d write down my own personal opinions on the matter. ...

Recently Mitchell posted her thoughts on how the Mozilla Foundation might go about expanding the scope of its activities, in response to posts from various other people. Mark Surman’s post in particular is interesting in its proposal for how the Mozilla Foundation might adopt a broader and more participatory approach to defining its future scope and role; to some degree his proposal contrasts with Mitchell’s thoughts about “building concentric circles” starting with the current focus on software development, where “[the] next circle out would be pretty closely related to this, the next circle a little less so,” and so on. ...

Today and tomorrow I’ll be at the Personal Democracy Forum 2008 conference, of which the Mozilla Foundation is a sponsor. PdF 2008 deals with what has been variously known as “open source politics” or “politics 2.0”—essentially the application of web 2.0 concepts to the area of political campaigning and (to a lesser extent) governance. Brian Behlendorf, one of the members of the Mozilla Foundation board of directors, will be speaking at the conference (as part of a session on “redefining leadership in a networked age”). ...

As I implied in my previous post, I don’t want to simply repeat all the great comments about Firefox 3 that everyone else is posting; better to read them in the original and not get them second-hand from me. But then I thought: instead of rehashing others’ posts, perhaps I can rehash my own? I’m quite fond of the theories of innovation created and popularized by Clayton Christensen, including his concept of “disruptive” innovations versus “sustaining” innovations, and have written a number of posts discussing those theories in the context of Mozilla and Firefox. What better occasion than the launch of Firefox 3 to write yet another? ...

Anyone reading this blog is almost certainly aware that Firefox 3 is going to be released tomorrow, so I won’t spend any time telling you how great it is, and how you should download it the first day it’s available. I’ve traditionally been a late adopter of new browser releases, and started using Firefox 3 on a daily basis only with the beta 5 release. I’ve very much enjoyed the new features (especially the performance improvements), have encountered very few problems, and had to make only two non-trivial changes to get it to work to my liking. (For anyone who cares, these were hacking the GTDinbox extension to make it compatible with RC1 and beyond, and setting the browser.identity.ssl_domain_display parameter to display the domain name for non-EV SSL/TLS sites.) ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 13, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures I updated the list of Mozilla Foundations grants and related expenditures for 2007 to include all items approved in 2007. Gary Bishop of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill published information on the atool project, a follow-on project to an earlier Mozilla Foundation-funded project to enable people with physical disabilities to do keyboard input using commodity webcam hardware. Legal issues Gerv published the new Mozilla committer’s agreement and related information on the www.mozilla.org site. CAs and related issues Kathleen Wilson updated the pending CA request list to reflect current information received from CAs; she’s still waiting on information from several CAs. Public communication David participated in a planning meeting on www.mozilla.org changes. David also had a call with the evangelism team about community content ideas for www.mozilla.org. Conferences Zak continued work on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON. Other Gerv continued work on a project to calculate what percentage of the world’s Internet users have a localized version of Firefox available in their native language. Upcoming events and activities The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY). Brian Behlendorf will be speaking there, and I’m also planning to attend. David, Gerv, and Zak will be attending OSCON (July 21-25 in Portland OR) and the Firefox Summit (July 29-31 in Whistler BC). I will be attending the Firefox Summit but not OSCON.

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 6, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Alexander Surkov completed the intermediate milestone on his Mozilla Foundation-funded project to develop automated tests and regression fixes in the Mozilla accessibility module; so far he’s fixed 16 outstanding bugs (relating to crashes, regressions, and new features), as well as kept the accessibility API documentation up to date and worked on several other accessibility-related tasks. Proceedings, slides, and an attendee list have now been published for the Foundations of Open Media Software 2008 workshop, for which the Mozilla Foundation was a sponsor. Legal issues I approved a new privacy policy for mozilla.org sites and David Boswell posted it to www.mozilla.org. (Note that this is a separate policy from the privacy policy for mozilla.com sites, although it is based on that policy.) CAs and related issues Gerv proposed some ideas as to how we might address the Debian weak key problem in a Mozilla context. Kathleen Wilson is waiting on responses from CAs to close out her information-gathering work on their requests. I worked with her to identify a set of new requests to look at, including those for Trustis (bug 324126), Microsec Ltd (bug 370505), S-TRUST (bug 370627), and TC TrustCenter (bug 378882). I put Entrust’s request to enable the Entrust Root Certification Authority for EV (bug 416544) into the first public comment period. Public communication David Boswell continued work on a new www.mozilla.org design brief. David worked to help produce a new draft of the proposed Mozilla brochure and get model release forms signed for people whose photos appear in the brochure. Conferences Zak Greant continued work on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON. Other Gerv Markham worked on a project to calculate what percentage of the world’s Internet users have a localized version of Firefox available in their native language. Gerv also worked on a project to compile a definitive domain suffix list, e.g., suffixes like “co.uk” that do not themselves refer to web sites (unlike, e.g., “co.org”); this list could be useful in contexts like handling of cookies, bookmarks, etc. Upcoming events and activities The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY). Brian Behlendorf will be speaking there, and I’m also planning to attend. David, Gerv, and Zak will be attending OSCON (July 21-25 in Portland OR) and the Firefox Summit (July 29-31 in Whistler BC). I will be attending the Firefox Summit but not OSCON.