Posts

Mark Surman has published another blog post about why hybrid organizations matter. I agree with pretty much all of what Mark wrote, and don’t have much to add in general. However I did want to comment specifically on the issue of hybrid organizations “staying true to their public benefit mission,” where Mark writes: This is actually a huge challenge for both traditional non-profits (grantmaker demands trigger mission drift) and social enterprises (can become more about the market than the mission). And it’s somewhere I think hybrids built on the idea of mass participation and peer production have a special advantage. They not only have boards and leaders committed to the mission, but they also have huge communities actively involved in interpreting the mission every day by helping to make something. The aggregate decisions of people who contribute to Firefox, or Wikipedia, or Kiva help shape what these things are in very real ways, which is in turn likely to make sure things stay more or less on mission. This isn’t to say peer production is democracy. Usually, meritocracy is the rule. Still, having a massive number of stakeholders involved in building things helps hybrid orgs stay public benefit focused. ...

One of the blogs I subscribe to is Ribbonfarm by Venkatesh Rao. I came across it as a result of a standing search I have for items related to Clayton Christensen and disruptive innovation, and kept reading it because Rao does interesting in-depth posts on various topics of interest to me. His most recent one is on the “discovery of money,” where he asks Do we need to elevate the notion of money from the level of cultural construct, where we created our problems, to the level of universal fundamental, where we might be able to solve them? ...

For this week’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call we’ll be talking about our efforts to expand and revision the education.mozilla.org (EDMO) web site. The discussion will be led by James Boston, our new Mozilla Education intern. For some background on what James will be doing this summer, please see his blog post.

I don’t normally do restaurant reviews, but I thought I’d do a quick one for the Coal Fire Pizza in Ellicott City, since it just opened and I was among the first crowd of folks who ate there. (For other reactions see the post at Howchow.) Basically it’s a nice “upscale casual” place with good pizza and other tasty offerings. It’s a tad expensive if you order a lot (over $70 for three people in our case, without any alcoholic drinks included), but I’d definitely go back. ...

Mark Surman just posted on the topic of “hybrid organizations,” which he defines as organizations characterized by a “mix of social mission, disruptive market strategies and web-like scale and collaboration.” However Mark doesn’t really explain what’s truly “disruptive” about the strategies of hybrid organizations, stating simply that such organizations “use products, services and consumer choice to promote the ideas and move the issues that they believe in.” While Mark is using the phrase “disruptive strategy” somewhat vaguely, I think using it more precisely would have strengthened his argument. Disruptive strategies (or, alternately, “disruptive innovations”) in the sense used by Clayton Christensen and others involve providing goods or services at significantly lower cost to existing users and/or enabling new sets of uses or users for those good and services, and doing so in an economically sustainable way. Thus, for example, although a traditional nonprofit hospital may be a “social enterprise” by strict definition, in practice its business model and cost structure are typically similar to those of traditional for-profit hospitals. A traditional free clinic may provide a service at significantly lower cost to its patients, but its operations are not economically sustainable in the absence of subsidies; its strategy is thus not truly disruptive. ...

I’ve written and published a new proposed high-level strategy for Mozilla-related accessibility efforts. Note that this is not a detailed roadmap for future work, and not a firm commitment to fund or perform such work. Rather it is intended to provide a context within within which we can make overall decisions about where we should concentrate funding and effort. This is especially important because our resources are very much finite, and we will need to make decisions about what we should do and what we should leave undone or leave to others to do. ...

For this week’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call I’ll be talking about various systems for doing online presentations and related activities (e.g., screen sharing, attendee chat, audio and video broadcast, and so on), including Dimdim, WebEx, GoToMeeting, ePresence, MegaMeeting.com, and OpenMeetings; feel free to also share your experiences with these and other systems. I’ll be doing the presentation itself using one such system, Dimdim; click on “Join Meeting,” and enter the meeting room as “hecker” and the ID as “mozillaeducation.” However please use the standard Mozilla Education teleconference system for the call itself. ...

For this week’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call we have a presentation from Pascal Finette on the online course being done for the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge. The online portion of the course is being done using WebEx, and Pascal will (among other things) talk about their experiences using WebEx for online presentations and communication. We’re looking at Dimdim as a (partially) open source alternative to WebEx, and are using Pascal’s presentation as an opportunity to do a live test of Dimdim. We’d like to get as many attendees involved as we can, in order to do a proper test, so please attend this call if you can! ...

For those of you participating (or interested in participating) in our weekly Mozilla Education teleconference calls, here’s what to expect the next few weeks: First, for this week’s call Philipp Schmidt will be talking about the Open|Web|Content|Education course he’s helping us organize, and that we’ll be officially announcing this week. Next week (March 23) we’ll have Pascal Finette talking to us about the online course Mozilla Labs is putting on as part of the first Design Challenge. We’re still looking for a suitable topic and presenter for the March 30 call; please let me and Dave Humphrey know if you have suggestions. Finally, on April 6 we’ll skip the weekly Mozilla call and instead participate in the first of the teachingopensource.org teleconference calls, for anyone interested in the general topic of teaching open source practices. Hope you can join us!

Are you an undergraduate or graduate student who loves Mozilla and wants to help us teach the world about it? I’m happy to announce that we’re now accepting applications for a summer student internship with the Mozilla Foundation, in support of our new Mozilla Education program; for more information on the internship please see the detailed description. (Note: If you’ve already emailed us about your interest in this, we’ll be in touch if we need further information about it. But if you want to email us again feel free to do so. . . .) ...