Mozilla

We invite you to help turn the open Web into a rich learning environment and explore new possibilities for using Firefox add-ons to support learning online, by participating in the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of its digital media and learning initiative. We’re looking for designers, educators and software developers who want to turn their innovative ideas about learning online into working prototypes in the form of Firefox add-ons. We’ll help you refine your designs and teach you how to create Firefox add-ons using Jetpack and other Mozilla technologies. Participants creating the best prototpes will be invited to the Jetpack for Learning Design Camp and the SXSW Interactive conference in March 2010. ...

Atul Varma of Mozilla Labs has a great post up, “Kids and the Open Web” where he advocates having the Mozilla Drumbeat initiative explicitly include some messaging around the value of an open web for children: What if promotional materials for the Open Web focused on how it makes lives better for children who are budding hackers? Lots of adults aren’t tech savvy, but they know that their kids are, and if we can prove that the Open Web is better for their kids, and that they can make their kids’ lives better by choosing a standards-compliant browser, maybe they will. ...

In the few remaining minutes before Firefox 3.5 storms its way around the world, I wanted to highlight two Firefox-related accessibility projects that are just getting under way, courtesy of special funding from the Mozilla Corporation. Both projects address key goals in the proposed Mozilla accessibility strategy. The first is a project by the Paciello Group to continue work they’ve previously been doing under Mozilla Foundation funding to make the Firebug developer tool more accessible, with a particular focus on the Firebug releases intended for use with Firefox 3.5. This work is complementary with related Firebug work by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (funded by the Mozilla Foundation), with the overall goal being to integrate accessibility for web applications into the standard tools used by web developers (i.e., Firebug), as opposed to having accessibility testing confined to special accessibility-focused tools used by only a small subset of developers. ...

My apologies for not passing this on earlier: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain, is organizing a three-month course on Mozilla technologies in cooperation with the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Europe. The course is almost completely on-line, but it includes a one-week face-to-face “sprint” session in Madrid in July; students are welcome to apply for financial help with travel costs for the Madrid portion of the course. The course is open to international students and will be taught in English. You can find further information—including a course outline, important dates, FAQ, and a forum—at mozilla.libresoft.es. The deadline for applications has been extended to June 20, so get your applications in soon!

For today’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call at 11 am EDT / 8 am PDT / 1500 UTC we’ll be talking about a proposed multi-disciplinary multi-school “meta-project” to move the Processing programming language to the open web. (Processing is currently Java-based, though there is a JavaScript port in progress). I’ll also be glad to answer any questions people might have about the SoftHum workshop that I attended last week and blogged about.

I was at Drexel University in Philadelphia last Thursday and Friday participating in the SoftHum Workshop on Involving Students in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Projects (to use its official name). I was there representing Mozilla, and in particular to talk about our Mozilla Education initiative; I was one of the folks invited to provide the open source project perspective, along with Greg Dekoenigsberg of Red Hat and the Fedora Project and Darius Jazayeri of the OpenMRS project. ...

Mary Colvig mentioned this on the Monday Mozilla call, and I wanted to follow up with more information. Briefly, the Mozilla Foundation is one of the sponsors of the Personal Democracy Forum conference to be held June 29-30 in New York City. To quote from the conference blurb: More than 1,000 top opinion makers, political practitioners, technologists and journalists will come together to network, exchange ideas, and explore how technology and the Internet are changing politics, democracy, and society. ...

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. ...

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.

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. ...