I’m happy to pass on the news that NV Access has now received financial support from Microsoft sufficient to allow Mick Curran (the original developer of NVDA) to also work full-time on NVDA. From my point of view this is a significant development for both NV Access itself, which has taken another step towards sustaining itself and the NVDA project for the long term, and for blind users of Windows.

Users of both OS X and Linux-based systems have available very capable screen readers as part of the base operating system, VoiceOver and Orca respectively. With NVDA Windows users also have a no-cost alternative to expensive proprietary screen readers (albeit one not bundled into the OS itself). This supports the general goal of providing a base level of no-cost high-quality assistive technology in all PCs and PC-like devices. (Accessibility for mobile phones and other mobile devices is another story, and one for another day.)

This grant also highlights an important aspect of the Mozilla Foundation’s grant program: I think we are best seen as providing the equivalent of “seed funding” for worthy organizations and individuals. For example, a number of the people we’ve funded for (relatively small) accessibility and other grants have gone on to full-time employment in their respective fields. In this case Microsoft’s funding of NVDA can be seen as a validation of our original “investment” in NV Access and the NVDA project. I hope to see other Mozilla-funded organizations graduate to the next level as well. (In this respect, see Gen Kanai’s post highlighting some favorable publicity for Project:Possibility and its founder Chris Leung.)

Steve Lee - 2008-12-19 12:35

> This grant also highlights an important aspect of the Mozilla Foundation’s grant program: I think we are best seen as providing the equivalent of “seed funding” Frank, I agree that this has been such an important aspect of the grant programme and a realisation of the Mozilla Manifesto. More I think your funding has been critical in raising awareness and growing the ecosystem in other less tangible ways, not least due to the community around MoCo accessibility. Personally I am grateful as the seed funding you provided enabled me to give up my day job and concentrate on Open Accessibility. As a freelancer I have been involved in many projects and activities that I would not otherwise have been able to (like Maavis, straight-street, Dkey, Project:Possibility and even oatsoft.). While Jambu may not yet be as polished as we would like, the ideas, lessons, and contacts made have enabled me to contribute to the wider community in many ways. I hope to figure out how best to include Jambu in this wider picture. So a big “thank you” from someone else who has been able to contribute as a result of your grants. Next looks like being an exciting one for Open Accessibility, in no small part due to ground preparation work you have done. A merry Christmas to you and all at MoFo and MoCo.

Online education evolves to be user-driven, not vendor-driven

By definition disruptive innovations allow users to do things they could previously not do, or could do only at great expense and/or effort. But while disruptive innovations make users’ lives easier, they typically make vendors’ lives harder, at least initially, because creating truly disruptive products can be difficult and expensive. (For example, think of all the industrial design, usability engineering, software development, and other work that Apple put into creating the iPhone and its simplified user experience for running mobile applications and using the web from a handheld device.)

The first products that embody disruptive innovations thus tend to have a high degree of internal integration and a relatively closed architecture (again, consider the iPhone). However over time the state of the art advances to the point where vendors can create comparable products using modular components communicating through standardized interfaces. (Christensen’s favorite example here is Microsoft Windows vs. Linux distributions; in the mobile space would-be contenders include Android and Limo.) This move to modularity also allows disruption in the “commercial system,” i.e., “the context within which a firm establishes its cost structure and operating processes and works with its suppliers and channel partners to respond profitably to customers’ common needs” (Disrupting Class, p.124).

In particular, Christensen and his co-authors believe that the first-generation commercial system for online education is too tied to the current commercial system for education in general, and shares its orientation to expensive “one size fits all” solutions. They predict an eventual move to a new commercial system organized as a “facilitated user network,” in which users exchange with each other as opposed to being supplied by traditional vendors, with one or more third parties facilitating that exchange (as, for example, YouTube facilitates the exchange of video content):

[In] the first phase of disruption of the instructional system the software will likely be complicated and expensive to build. . . . Within a few more years, however, two factors that were absent in stage 1 that are critical to the emergence of stage 2 will have fallen into place. The first will be platforms that facilitate the generation of user-created content. The second will be the emergence of a user network. . . . The tools of the software platform will make it so simple to develop online learning products that students will be able to build products that help them teach other students. Parents will be able to assemble tools to tutor their children. And teachers will be able to create tools to help the different types of learners in their classroom. . . . User networks . . . will be the business models of distribution. This will allow parents, teachers, and students to offer these teaching tools to other parents, teachers, and students. (p.134)

So: modular interoperable standards-based products, user-created content, and user networks within which such content gets created and freely distributed. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like something Mozilla knows something about.

Tasks for the Mozillas

Let’s assume that education will indeed involve in the direction of user networks producing user-generated and -distributed content for customized online education. Let’s further suppose the continued growth of a movement to ensure that this and other educational content is freely available for others to use and adapt. This certainly sounds like a movement that is in line with the goals of the Mozilla Manifesto (which notes, among other things, that “the Internet is . . . a key component in education”), and a trend we might like to encourage. How we might do so in a manner consistent with the Mozilla DNA? I think the answer varies based on the particular Mozilla entity in question (what I call “the Mozillas” within the overall Mozilla project).

The task of the Mozilla Corporation I think would be mainly to continue on the path it’s currently on. Any modular standards-based “personal learning environment” or “open learning network” is likely to be based on web technologies, and the goal is to have Firefox be the very best way there is to bring the web to end users. There are some particular areas that might be relevant to an educational context, though not necessarily limited to that context.

For example, the Mobile Firefox effort will help bring the full power of Firefox to future low-end “4P computing” systems that might be deployed for primary and secondary education, and initiatives to support open audio and video formats would assist in efforts to provide rich learning experiences whose delivery doesn’t depend on proprietary technologies. There might also be some supplemental work that might be called for; for example, robust out-of-the-box support for MathML and other specialized markup languages is clearly more important for the educational market than for the general consumer market to which Firefox is pitched.

Mozilla Messaging is a somewhat different case, and perhaps a more interesting one in terms of how a focus on education (which, again, would not be the sole focus) might help shape a future strategy. As I see it, one problem with Thunderbird is that its user base is often conceived of in negative terms: they’re people who don’t like webmail and don’t want to use Outlook. I think Thunderbird and related technologies need a real constituency, a group of people for whom the product is designed to fit their special and distinct needs, and who respond to that focus with enthusiasm. That constituency might be found within the traditional enterprise market, but I confess I’m concerned about Mozilla Messaging trying to re-fight the “groupware wars” that Netscape lost a decade ago.

Might Mozilla Messaging be able to find its constituency, or at least a significant part of it, within the educational market? Educational institutions are certainly more open to standards-based open source products than your typical enterprise. Also, to the extent that Mozilla Messaging is about not just email but about the broader market for collaboration and communication tools, the education market certainly has a lot of models for collaboration and communication—one to many instruction, one-to-one tutoring, small group collaboration, synchronous vs. asynchronous, text vs. video vs. audio, and so on. So perhaps this might be a fruitful question for Mozilla Messaging to explore: What types of collaboration and communication products would be needed to support advanced online learning environments, and could Mozilla technologies be instrumental in creating such products?

Next comes what might be called the “missing Mozilla.” As Gerv Markham recently noted, with minor exceptions (e.g., the HTML editor in SeaMonkey) the Mozilla project has for the most part left to others the task of creating tools for web content creation and application development. Is this an area we should look at re-entering over the coming years? In the educational context, consider what sort of rich content might go into a simple “Physics 101” online course: mathematical equations, static and dynamic graphs, interactive simulations of experiments, perhaps some archival video, and so on. It would be a shame if people created, distributed, and collaborated on lots of great open education courses like this, but they turned out to be a collection of glorified Flash or Silverlight apps. Should Mozilla do something about this and, if so, how might it best be done? This is a question that extends beyond the context of education, and I think one that needs to be discussed.

Finally we come to the Mozilla Foundation. What role if any might it play in an educational context? The Mozilla Foundation could certainly endorse and perhaps help shape a particular vision for education along the lines discussed above, and could lend moral, financial, and other support to other groups working on the front lines to make it happen. (By coincidence the proposed new executive director for the Mozilla Foundation has relevant experience in this area.) It could also encourage the Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla Messaging, and others within the overall Mozilla project to make Mozilla-based technologies and products the preferred ways by which next-generation customized online education is experienced by end users; where there are gaps in capabilities, the Foundation could provide some funding and other support to help fill those gaps (as we did with accessibility, for example). Finally, the Foundation could go further and pick a particular subproblem within the broad educational space and seek to play a leading role in addressing it.

Most notably, the Mozilla Foundation has a clear interest in (and has already financially supported) the work at Seneca College to bring open source development methodologies into the classroom. The Foundation could continue and expand upon that work, including working with Seneca to promote the adoption of similar Mozilla-related curricula at other like-minded institutions and the creation of Mozilla-related materials suitable for self-education. Beyond focusing just on Mozilla, the Mozilla Foundation could also work with others to change the entire manner in which the next generation of software developers is educated. This could include teaching software development in a more comprehensive and interdisciplinary manner in which topics like QA and release engineering, project organization and governance, user experience, marketing and evangelism, copyright and other legal issues, and others assume equal importance to traditional computer science and programming language instruction. It could also include expanding the range of contexts within which software development is taught—not just in formal academic institutions but also within informal “learning collectives” associated with open source projects or other groups of people with common interests and objectives.

Ten years until the revolution?

If Christensen and his co-authors are correct, in about ten years time we could very well reach a tipping point in which the educational system in the US and elsewhere will rapidly transition from the traditional instructor-in-the-classroom model to a model based on customized online education provided on standards-based platforms and supported by a network of teachers, students, and others collaboratively creating, distributing, and recombining rich collections of instructional materials. Today we stand at a point in online education comparable to the late 1970s and early 1980s with respect to personal computers or the late 1980s and early 1990s with respect to the Internet and the web: We can envision the promise of what might come, and have early examples of that promise to learn from and build on. But we do not know exactly how the story will play out, who its heroes (and villains) will be, and whether it will have a happy or sad ending for those of us who value openness, freedom, and grassroots participation. We may have an opportunity to help shape how that story unfolds. Should Mozilla grasp that opportunity? That’s the question I’m putting forth for discussion.

datilcowman - 2008-07-25 03:40

well written, really ten years to revolution, I think not. Think home schoolers, education is already changing rapidly, and as such, the traditional system no longer applies to the growing number of home school students, or to the number of college courses taken on line. Fifty years ago, I would have really liked the change. Mozilla should continue with the fine work in progress, including looking forward to all opportunities.

Steve Lee - 2008-07-25 07:39

Frank, that’s a very interesting post and It’s great to think Mozilla will play a more direct role in education (above being the best thing to use with Moodle :-)). We’ve been working on these issues at schoolforge.org.uk and hope it is less than 10 years. One import disruptive is Ian Lynch’s INGOTS courses which are now QCA approved. Another positive influence is those educators who are to embracing the possibilities that WEB 2.0 enables in their students learning (e,g http://fullmeasure.co.uk/comingofage.htm). Progress seems slow but does seem to happening and we can hope we are rapidly approaching that tipping point. I’ve passed this onto the schoolforge.org.uk mailing list where I guess it will be met with much head nodding.

Steve Lee - 2008-07-25 07:57

I forgot to mention that Fureture Lab http://www.futurelab.org.uk/ are a source of interesting ideas and discussion.

Ian Lynch - 2008-07-25 08:41

Just to clarify as probably outside England, QCA will not mean much. QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) is the government regulator of all school exams in the UK. If you want to change the curriculum you need courses that lead to government recognised qualifications. This then gives confidence in other countries too. Awarding Bodies are accredited by QCA and we are further endorsed by the Sector Skills Council for ICT and Telecoms, e-skills. Small and new but applying principles of disruption we already have 20,000 certificates awarded for knowledge of Open Systems and basic skills in ICT with exponential growth and unsolicited interest from all over the world. Our main problem is simply capacity to expand to mee the demand.

hecker - 2008-07-25 10:49

@datilcowman: By “I think not” do you mean the revolution is closer to now, or further out? I certainly don’t think it’s here now, at least not in the US. “Revolution” to me implies changes significant enough to impact public consciousness in a major way, as for example the introduction of the IBM PC did for the PC industry, or the Netscape IPO for the web. Also, regarding Mozilla continuing the “fine work in progress”, this thought experiment doesn’t imply any significant change in the work of Mozilla, just doing a bit more in support of initiatives already in progress (e.g., Foundation funding of open source education efforts).

hecker - 2008-07-25 10:52

@Steve: Note that this is a personal thought experiment only; it is most decidedly not a commitment or even a prediction that “Mozilla will play a more direct role in education”.

commonspace - 2008-07-25 18:44

Prototyping the open ed revolution… Frank Hecker has a series of posts up today on ‘Mozilla and the Future of Education’. It’s a bit of a thought experiment to imagine what Mozilla might do if it dipped it’s toe further into the education pond. The line I like most is:…

skierpage (info@skierpage.com) - 2008-07-27 02:03

Agree. I think some of the OLPC deployments are using Moodle. As I understand it, they’re now struggling with the disconnect between organizing courses in the browser, then children have to run an external program to do the coursework. One answer is to do everything in the browser. With rich JavaScript+canvas animation and physics engines, Web-based apps like docs.google.com, and offline storage, next-gen browser engines like Mozilla (as used in OLPC’s Browse activity) have the technology to make this happen, and I assume it will. E.g. I looked for a better world atlas than the CIA’s (!) PDF maps and found research prototypes of interactive maps made with SVG and JavaScript, but nothing shipping. Mozilla should encourage and promote such Web standards-based innovation. OLPC’s Sugar environment still has the edge in “sharing activities” without depending on a central server, but I hope Mozilla Messaging + extensions can incorporate the underlying technologies of jabber servers, presence detection, Telepathy, etc. to foster collaborative work and communication. For adults as well as kids! So, I agree.

hecker - 2008-07-27 19:45

@skierpage: As an XO owner/user I understand your point. I think the folks developing Sugar, eToys, etc., are doing great work, but I sometimes wonder if they’re betting against the web - not necessarily a good strategy.

Michael Horn - 2008-07-28 13:09

Frank - This is a fascinating post.

Michael Horn - 2008-07-28 13:11

Frank, this is a fascinating 2-part post – thank you. You make some great points in here, and I loved the connection to Mozilla (as an avid-user of what the community creates myself). Dr. Christensen and I have cofounded a non-profit think tank, Innosight Institute (www.innosightinstitute.org) to continue research on this work and to promote the ideas and so forth. Please let me know if we can be helpful. It sounds like there might be some synergies with the Mozilla Foundation.

hecker - 2008-07-28 15:56

@Michael Horn: Thanks for stopping by and commenting! I’ve been a big fan of Christensen’s ideas for many year, and am familiar with the Innosight Institute, though I’ve never looked into its work in detail. Thanks for reminding me to do this.

David Bolter - 2008-08-05 18:45

Frank, I’m not sure when, or how, but having read this post (in two parts) I realize I need to stick you in a room with my boss Jutta Treviranus. Will you travel schedule bring you to Toronto anytime soon?

Prototyping the open ed revolution « commonspace - 2008-08-29 21:38

[…] Hecker has a series of posts up today on ‘Mozilla and the Future of Education’. It’s a bit of a thought […]

Learning 2.0黃頁 » Mozilla and the future of education - 2008-09-30 01:06

[…] /2008/07/25/mozilla-and-the-future-of-education-part-2/ Filed under: Uncategorized | You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. […]

Lately there have been a flurry of posts and associated comments discussing possible future activities that the Mozilla Foundation (and by extension the Mozilla project) might undertake in support of its overall mission and the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto. This post is an experiment in thinking about an area the Mozilla Foundation (and Mozilla in general) might consider getting involved in, one possibility out of the many that have been discussed in the various posts referenced, and one of a number of themes that might inspire particular elements of an overall strategy. As usual, these are my personal opinions only.

Educating a constituency for the open web

The particular focus of this post is education, and in particular online education. Why education? Not (just) because it’s a big important issue—there are lots of important issues in the world, and education is only one of them. There are also many nonprofit organizations, private sector entrepreneurs, and government agencies working on a host of education-related initiatives. Why should Mozilla get involved as well?

The answer is that education is evolving (or could easily evolve) in ways that are potentially very compatible with the goals of Mozilla, and there are ways in which we could get involved in education-related initiatives that are consistent with the Mozilla DNA. In effect we have an opportunity to help build a constituency for the open web and the general principles of the Mozilla Manifesto, not through traditional advocacy efforts but by helping to educate (and, in doing so, create) a new generation of web users and participants for whom such principles are second nature.

The disruptive potential of customized online education

Many people project and advocate for a future dominated by openness, a world of participation, decentralized and virtual organizations, and individual empowerment—in essence taking the principles and practices of the free software and open source movements and applying them to all aspects of society. Education is no exception, and thus there is an “open education” movement as well. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration is a good summary of the goals of the movement, not least because it addresses not just open access to educational content (e.g., as provided by the MIT OpenCourseWare project), apparently the primary initial focus of most open education proponents, but also the broader range of open and collaborative technologies that might be applied in an educational context. This is wonderful work, with lots of exciting projects under way.

However I think we also need some guidance on how, where, and when open education initiatives might be most successful, guidance that will enable us to decide how, where, and when it might make sense for Mozilla to get involved in them. My preferred framework for thinking about these sort of questions is the theory of disruptive innovation created and popularized by Clayton Christensen. Coincidentally, Christensen and his co-authors have recently provided an analysis of how disruptive innovation might occur in the context of education, in the book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns.

Before going on, I’ll note that (having read all of Christensen’s books) I don’t think Disrupting Class is his finest work. It is very US-centric, relies a bit overmuch on ideas such as Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences that are unproven at best, and takes some major detours, particularly after chapter 5. I recommend just reading the first five chapters, and supplementing it with Christensen’s discussion of post-secondary professional education in chapter 5 of Seeing What’s Next. (Or you can just read the condensed version of Christensen’s and his co-authors’ thesis in the article “How Do We Transform Our Schools.”)

Nevertheless I think the core of the book is sound in applying Christensen’s theories to the topic of primary and secondary education. The key points of the book are as follows:

The problem with primary and secondary education is not lack of innovation per se, rather it’s that the primary innovation attempted is sustaining innovation within the existing system. It is primarily directed at incremental improvements in test scores and related measures important to politicians and their constituents, and occurs within a “commercial system” (including not only school systems but also textbook publishers and other creators of educational material) that is geared to providing a monolithic standardized “one size fits all” product

Disruptive innovation within the educational system will occur only at the margins, where there are needs to be filled and problems to be solved that (for whatever reason) are not being addressed by the existing system. Examples include providing a wide variety of advanced courses within school districts that cannot afford to offer such courses in the traditional way, serving student populations scattered across wide geographic areas, and serving home-schoolers and others who have opted out of the conventional educational system.

This disruptive innovation will take the form of customized instruction that is enabled by computer and networking technology but also incorporates a significant human element (for example, distance learning classes that include teacher-led instructional sessions, computer-based drill and practice, student-teacher interaction via email, student collaborative projects, and so on). Over time suppliers of customized online educational offerings will better learn what works and what doesn’t, and will use the experience gained in relatively marginal markets to develop new skills that will eventually allow them to move into more mainstream markets. (Incumbents typically don’t develop these skills because their dominance of existing markets leads them to ignore marginal and less profitable opportunities in new markets; thus Christensen refers to new market entrants as wielding the “sword of asymmetric skills” and the “shield of asymmetric motivation.”)

As a result, customized online education will show slow but steady growth in the coming years. Since it’s starting from a very small base, its overall market share will remain relatively insignificant for the next few years. However eventually the effects of continued compounded growth will cause customized online education offerings to become widespread and even dominant. Based on the data available Christensen and his co-authors estimate that although online education offerings account for only 1% of courses at present, they could grow to 25% of all courses by 2014, 50% by 2019, and 80% by 2024. (Note that they include in this total both fully online courses and courses that have a significant online component.)

A role for Mozilla?

This is all very interesting, but how does this relate to the goals of Mozilla, and to promoting the open web? The answer lies in Christensen’s ideas regarding how the commercial system around online education will evolve, based on experiences with disruptive innovations in other industries. More on that topic in part 2.

Ian Lynch - 2008-07-25 08:29

“Disruptive innovation within the educational system will occur only at the margins” Not necessarily. In the UK the exam system is a 1.5 billion dollar industry. We have a plan based on Christensen’s principles and applied to that industry starting with qualifications in Open Systems and functional skills in ICT. It can be scaled to any subject and has the potential to globalise school qualifications. If we are successful, that will not be a marginal effect because qualifications have always driven the mainstream despite what education purists will say.

hecker - 2008-07-25 11:00

@Ian Lynch: As I noted, Disrupting Class is weak on trends outside the US, and I am not familiar enough with the field to make up that lack. Thanks for the info. I agree with the point about qualifications. Where the end result is more important than the means by which it is achieved, opportunity exists to innovate with respect to the means. (This is a theme in chapter 5 of Seeing What’s Next, where Christensen discusses for-profit adult professional education.)

Prototyping the open ed revolution « commonspace - 2008-08-29 20:21

[…] the open ed revolution Posted by msurman under Uncategorized   Frank Hecker has a series of posts up today on ‘Mozilla and the Future of Education’. It’s a bit of a thought […]

Learning 2.0黃頁 » Mozilla and the future of education - 2008-09-30 01:05

[…] /2008/07/25/mozilla-and-the-future-of-education-part-1/ […]

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.

• Future of the Foundation
  • Mitchell Baker announced that Mark Surman is being considered for the Foundation executive director position.
  • David posted a blog entry with ideas about how the Foundation might support the Mozilla community.
• Legal issues
  • Gerv called for people to sign committer’s agreements at the Firefox Summit.
• Grants and related expenditures
  • The Mozilla Foundation is sponsoring the 2009 Foundations of Open Media Software workshop.
  • Wellington Fernando de Macedo has made further progress on his Foundation-funded server-sent DOM events project; see bug 338583 for more information.
• CAs and related issues
  • I gave final approval for two requests from GlobalSign (bugs 406794 and 406796) and filed bug 446407 against NSS and bug 446409 against PSM for the actual code changes.
  • I started the first public comment period for requests from Comodo (for a new ECC root, bug 421946), Deutsche Telekom/T-Systems (bug 378882), and Wells Fargo (bug 428390).
  • I worked with Kathleen Wilson to select the next group of CAs for which to process requests and do information gathering.
• Public communication
  • David arranged for printing copies of the Mozilla brochure for OSCON, and started work on a brochure page for www.mozilla.org.
  • David prepared for a session on the www.mozilla.org site at the upcoming Firefox Summit.
  • David updated the About page on www.mozilla.org to keep it in sync with the last round of changes to the text of the Mozilla brochure.
• 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 met with various people about proposed Site Security Policy implementations.

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, and then will be on vacation for most of the following week.

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.

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.

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.

By analogy with biology, the Mozilla DNA is what makes Mozilla unique, differentiates the project and its various embodiments (the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla Messaging, and so on) from other initiatives, and equips it to potentially take on various tasks (more or less successfully, as the case may be). This DNA includes (among other things) the type of project Mozilla has been and is, the types of activities it has traditionally engaged in, the types of people (i.e., in terms of skills, motivations, values, etc.) that have traditionally engaged in those activities, and the mechanisms by which the people and activities have been coordinated.

More specifically, I think the following are key elements of Mozilla DNA:

• an emphasis on doing things as opposed to (just) talking about them (“implementation” vs. “advocacy”)
• a focus on individual users and on creating products and related services that touch those users directly, as opposed to providing infrastructure (“plumbing”) for use by others to create those products and services
• a reliance on decentralized collaborative development within a meritocratic structure, with lots of opportunities for people to progress from casual users to core contributors to both technical and non-technical activities
• a commitment to openness and the public good (as embodied in the Mozilla Manifesto), including adherence to the general principles underlying open source and free software licensing
• the employment of a mixture of noncommercial and commercial strategies and organizational structures, accompanied by a surrounding ecosystem of both noncommercial and commercial ventures
• an ambition to operate on a worldwide basis and touch the lives of hundreds of millions of people
• a reliance on organic growth fueled primarily by grass-roots adoption by individual users
• the vision and resources to operate on a long time horizon (10 years or longer)

In my opinion any potential new activities for the Mozilla Foundation and the project as a whole must be consistent with as many of these elements as possible, and many candidate activities can be rejected due to their mismatch with Mozilla DNA. For those activities that are a match, some might represent straightforward extensions of current activities (e.g., developing more software products), while others might be new and different kinds of activities that can leverage existing project capabilities (e.g., supporting participatory development of non-software content).

I’ll come to the question of the match between potential Mozilla activities and Mozilla DNA in a future post. In the meantime I welcome any additions or correction to the above list.

yaPlanetReader (yaPlanetReader@example.com) - 2008-07-02 05:10

At a tangent, the Mozilla Manifesto needs to be declared final sometime. It’s been live in its 0.9 form since at least April 07. Having a static statement of core principles effectively marked incomplete and subject to change lessens the impact rather.

Flenser (flenser.tyrathect@gmail.com) - 2008-07-02 11:55

“subject to change” is a strength, not a weakness, that’s what makes the US constitution is such a great document.

I think what we’re trying to do here is analogous to creating a product roadmap and a product plan for the next release, in essence defining what “Mozilla Foundation 2.0” should look like. As with a product plan, one approach is to look at existing “product features” of the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla generally and see how they could be incrementally improved and extended; I read Mitchell’s “concentric circles” idea as an example of this.

Another approach is analogous to product planning based on user feedback, market research, and so on: do lots of brainstorming (the more brains the better) on what overall goals people might want the Mozilla Foundation to help facilitate, evaluate the various goals to see how they fit with the Foundation’s and Mozilla’s nature and resources, and then decide which to pursue. These approaches are not mutually exclusive of course: new product releases typically incorporate a mix of enhanced features and completely new features.

As I see it, with his “scaffolding + support + investment” idea Mark is proposing a particular type of participatory approach to defining how to create an open web, with the Mozilla Foundation encouraging the generation and collection of new ideas and providing a platform for people to do this (the “scaffolding” phase), working with others to filter the entire set of ideas down to a suitable subset (the “support” phase), and then proceeding to implementation for a smaller subset (the “investment” phase). I think this general approach is worth looking at, with the actual details (how do we encourage people to contribute ideas? should we set up a wiki for collection of ideas? should we give people grants to flesh out ideas?) up for discussion.

Of course in practice user feedback can be of limited value. When planning a new product release many of the ideas submitted by users are either quite limited in scope (“fix this bug”) or are too vague or broad to be useful (“make it work better”). However I still think seeking broader input is useful: We can gauge the popularity of ideas already proposed, see if there are fairly obvious possibilities previously overlooked for some reason, determine broad themes in terms of what people are looking for, and quite possibly get some genuinely useful and interesting new ideas. Since encouraging participation is one of Mozilla’s core values, having a more participatory process for planning the future of the Mozilla Foundation makes eminent sense.

A key challenge in doing this successfully will be qualifying proposed ideas to see which might be most suitable. I think we should judge proposals on at least two criteria:

• How and to what extent will they advance the cause of an open participatory web?
• How consistent are they with the “Mozilla DNA.”

Using the second criterion requires that we have a reasonable consensus on what the “Mozilla DNA” actually is. I’ll write more on this topic in my next post.

Promoting Innovation « davidwboswell - 2008-07-01 16:52

[…] next and have also been thinking about what else the Foundation could be doing. It looks like other people are thinking about the same thing […]

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.

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.

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 weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant.

• Grants and related expenditures
  • The Mozilla Foundation made a small grant to support the G3ict accessibility initiative. Among other things, G3ict has published a book, The Accessibility Imperative, discussing implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in an IT context. (I have a few copies of this book available for those who want one; please send me an email if you’re interested.)
• Legal issues
  • Gerv Markham published an update to the Mozilla Foundation license policy, but held off on publishing the new Mozilla committer’s agreement pending a final decision on administrative arrangements for processing the signed forms.
• CAs and related issues
  • Gerv worked with others to determine how the Debian weak key problem might affect CAs and SSL-enabled web sites.
  • Kathleen Wilson worked on gathering information relating to requests from GlobalSign (bugs 406796 and 406796), secomtrust (bug 394419), Comodo (bug 421946), Wells Fargo (bug 428390), Verizon/CyberTrust (bugs 430694, 430698, and 430700), and TC TrustCenter (bug 436467).
  • I communicated with various CAs regarding their planned applications for inclusion of roots in Mozilla, and posted a draft checklist for information needed for evaluating CA requests.
• Public communication
  • David Boswell worked with Samuel Sidler on a www.mozilla.org design brief and archiving plan and posted to www.mozilla.org new featured Mozilla-based applications for June (Google AdWords Editor and Zimbra Desktop).
  • David posted a draft copy of a proposed Mozilla brochure for public review.
• Conferences
  • Zak Greant did a keynote presentation at eLiberatica, and worked on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON.

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.

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
  • Eitan Isaacson completed his Mozilla Foundation-funded work to improve the Orca open source screen reader for Linux. Thanks go to Eitan for all his work on this!
  • The Mozilla Foundation is funding Ben Millard for an accessibility-related project to study how authors use HTML in practice, compare this with the semantics and accessibilty-related features in HTML5, identify any gaps, and help develop realistic ways to fill them.
  • The Mozilla Foundation is funding Wellington Fernando de Macedo to help implement in the Mozilla code base server-sent DOM events functionality as specified in HTML5. This is a project originally proposed for the Google Summer of Code; we thought it was a project worth supporting but didn’t have enough SoC slots to include it as part of that program.
• CAs and related issues
  • As I previously announced in the m.d.t.crypto newsgroup, Kathleen Wilson will be assisting me with the task of gathering information about Certificate Authorities that apply for inclusion of their root certificates into Mozilla. I’ve assigned a number of CA-related bugs to Kathleen, with a priority on getting EV-related requests processed.
  • I updated the pending and included lists to reflect changes in Firefox 3 RC1.
• Conferences
  • Zak prepared for his keynote at eLiberatica and for the FOSSCoach event at OSCON.

Upcoming events and activities

• Zak will be doing a keynote at the eLiberatica 2008 conference (May 30-31, 2008, in Bucharest).
• 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.

Schorsch (Schorsch@invalid.com) - 2008-05-29 06:57

Well - it looks as if the T-Systems CA ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378882 ) pass this train? I’ve to wait until FF4.7, am I right?

hecker - 2008-05-29 12:25

We are currently looking at the T-Systems application; there’s a chance it and others may be approved in time for Firefox 3.0.1.

Ben ‘Cerbera’ Millard - 2008-05-30 01:04

Hi Frank, I’m the Ben Millard in the second bullet from the “Grants and related expenditures” list. I’ve blogged about my grant being approved by you: http://projectcerbera.com/blog/2008/05#day29 For anyone interested, my grant proposal is online here: http://projectcerbera.com/web/study/html5-research (Preview would be nice. Is HTML allowed? I assumed it wasn’t.)

hecker - 2008-05-30 03:21

Ben, WordPress has always seemed to me a bit lacking with respect to its comment facility. I’m hosting this blog on wordpress.com, and looking at the admin interface I can’t see any way to enable preview or HTML.

jwalden - 2008-05-31 16:04

There was some previous work on server-sent events in bug 338583, in case you weren’t aware of it. Definitely pretty abandoned at this point, but it may still be useful as a starting point.

hecker - 2008-06-02 15:22

jwalden: An explicit goal of the proposal is to build on the work in bug 338583.

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
  • Eitan Isaacson published an update on his Mozilla Foundation-funded work to improve the Orca open source screen reader for Linux.
  • The Perl Foundation received a $200,000 donation to support Perl 6 development. Among other things, this donation will be used for continuation of Patrick Michaud’s Perl 6 work, for which the Mozilla Foundation made a $10,000 seed grant.
• Legal issues
  • We got final legal signoff for the proposed new Mozilla committer’s agreement; Gerv is now working to get an official copy of this agreement and related information posted to www.mozilla.org.
• CAs and related issues
  • I found someone to help clear the backlog of CA requests.
• Public communications and related issues
  • David continued work on the www.mozilla.org site.
• Conferences
  • We have more blog posts from the Mozilla accessibility team’s attendance of SightCity 2008, including one from Steve Lee and an almost minute-by-minute account by Ben Millard.
  • Zak prepared for upcoming conference appearances.

Upcoming events and activities

• Zak will be doing a keynote at the eLiberatica 2008 conference (May 30-31, 2008, in Bucharest).
• The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY), which I’m planning to attend if possible.

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 weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant.

• Grants and related expenditures
  • With support from people who’ve designated donations for Bugzilla, the Mozilla Foundation is funding a new project to be undertaken by Everything Solved, Inc. As a major Bugzilla contributor and customization expert, Everything Solved will survey large corporations and organizations already using Bugzilla in order to determine what the most desired enhancements and changes are. This will help guide the Bugzilla project for future development, and will also begin a standardized and organized list of feature ideas from the most visible users of Bugzilla.
• Legal issues
  • We got a final round of legal review for the proposed new Mozilla committer’s agreement.
• CAs and related issues
  • I held discussions with various parties about how to resolve issues with disabling email trust for certificates issued by DigiNotar.
• Public communications and related issues
  • David participated in a planning meeting for www.mozilla.org changes and worked on related issues; for more information see his recent blog post.
• Conferences
  • Various members of the Mozilla accessibility team attended SightCity 2008, with sponsorship by the Mozilla Foundation; Marco Zehe wrote a blog post with more details.
  • Zak prepared for upcoming conference appearances already scheduled, and proposed some new conferences for our consideration.

Upcoming events and activities

• Zak will be doing a keynote at the eLiberatica 2008 conference (May 30-31, 2008, in Bucharest).
• The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY), which I’m planning to attend if possible.

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 approved funding for a new Bugzilla-related project; more details last next week. Thanks to all who donated to the Mozilla Foundation in support of Bugzilla!
• CAs and related issues
  • I gave final approval to the request from DigiNotar to add a new root and enable it for EV; for more information see bug 369357.
• Public communications and related issues
  • David checked in changes to the Community pages on www.mozilla.org (bugs 271655, 370222, and 426600).
  • David updated the Mozilla-Based Applications page and added Featured Apps for May (Joost and Second Life).
  • David and I participated in activities related to the Powered by Mozilla program.
• Other
  • Gerv worked on Summer of Code and other activities.
  • Zak worked on various conference-related activities.

Upcoming events and activities

• The Mozilla accessibility team will be attending and staffing a Mozilla booth at the SightCity conference (May 7-9 in Frankfurt), with sponsorship by the Mozilla Foundation.
• I will not be able to attend the Berkman@10 conference (May 15-16 in Boston); if any Boston-area Mozilla people are interested in attending, please contact me.
• Zak will be doing a keynote at the eLiberatica 2008 conference (May 30-31, 2008, in Bucharest).
• The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY), which I’m planning to attend if possible.

LpSolit - 2008-05-05 23:19

“I approved funding for a new Bugzilla-related project; more details last week.” Last week? Or next week?

hecker - 2008-05-06 00:03

Sorry, no time machine required! I corrected this to read “next week”.

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 weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant.

• Grants and related expenditures
  • I worked on one grant approved but not yet finalized, and another larger accessibility-related grant not yet approved.
• CAs and related issues
  • I gave preliminary approval to the request from DigiNotar to add a new root and enable it for EV; for more information see bug 369357.
• Public communications and related issues
  • David and I participated in activities related to the Powered by Mozilla program.
  • David made some additional changes to drafts of new Community pages for www.mozilla.org.
• Conferences
  • The Mozilla Foundation was a sponsor of the W4A conference, more formally known as the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (April 21-22 in Beijing).
  • Zak spoke at the Leadership by (Open) Innovation in the Telecom, IT and Media Industries conference (April 24 in Munich).
  • Steve Lee attended and spoke briefly at the Accessibility 2.0 conference (April 25 in London) on behalf of the Mozilla Foundation, and posted a conference report.

Upcoming events and activities

• The Mozilla accessibility team will be attending and staffing a Mozilla booth at the SightCity conference (May 7-9 in Frankfurt, Germany), with sponsorship by the Mozilla Foundation.
• I will not be able to attend the Berkman@10 conference (May 15-16 in Boston MA); if any Boston-area Mozilla people are interested in attending, please contact me.
• Zak will be doing a keynote at the eLiberatica 2008 conference (May 30-31, 2008, in Bucharest, Romania).
• The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY), which I’m planning to attend if possible.

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
  • The Mozilla Foundation will be funding Alexander Surkov to continue his work with the Mozilla accessibility code, and in particular to develop test cases and create fixes where necessary for the Gecko 1.9 accessibility infrastructure.
• CAs and related issues
  • I gave preliminary approval to the request from Network Solutions to add a new root and enable it for EV.
  • I also worked on the request from DigiNotar to add a new root and enable it for EV.
• Public communications and related issues
  • David participated in activities related to the Powered by Mozilla program.
• Conferences
  • The Mozilla accessibility team will be attending and staffing a Mozilla booth at the SightCity conference May 7-9 in Frankfurt.
  • The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference June 23-24 in New York NY.

Upcoming events and activities

• I’m planning to attend the Berkman@10 conference (May 15-16 in Boston MA) and the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY) if possible.
• Zak will be speaking at the Leadership by (Open) Innovation in the Telecom, IT and Media Industries conference (April 24 in Munich), and other events later in 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
  • The Mozilla Foundation will be sponsoring some Mozilla accessibility developers to attend the SightCity conference and meet with Marco Zehe and Aaron Leventhal.
  • Mozdev published its 2007 annual report.
• CAs and related issues
  • I corresponded with some people who can potentially help with processing CA applications, and set up some calls to discuss next steps.
• Public communications and related issues
  • David did more work on revising the www.mozilla.org site, including updating the “About” page.
• Conferences
  • Zak attended the Go Open 2008 conference in Oslo, Norway, and spoke to a number of people about Mozilla-related issues.

Upcoming events and activities

• I’m planning to attend the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA and the Personal Democracy Forum conference June 23-24 in New York NY if possible.
• Zak will be speaking at the Leadership by (Open) Innovation in the Telecom, IT and Media Industries conference April 24 in Munich, and other events later in 2008.

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 weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant.

• Grants and related expenditures
  • The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the NetSquared 2008 conference.
• CAs and related issues
  • I gave final approval to the application from Comodo to add a new EV root and EV-enable three existing roots; for more information see bugs 401587, 426568, 426572, and 426575.
  • I also tried to address general questions about the Mozilla CA policy and how it should be applied
• Public communications and related issues
  • David did more work on revising the www.mozilla.org site, including updating the featured applications page and participating in a planning meeting for proposed site changes.
• Conferences
  • Zak worked on a proposal to hold a session at OSCON on coaching open source developers and other FOSS community members.

Upcoming events and activities

• I’m planning to attend the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA and the Personal Democracy Forum conference June 23-24 in New York NY if possible.
• Zak will be speaking at the Leadership by (Open) Innovation in the Telecom, IT and Media Industries conference April 24 in Munich, and other events later in 2008.

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 weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant.

• Grants and related expenditures
  • Eitan Isaacson completed the intermediate milestone for his Orca contracted Braille project.
• CAs and related issues
  • I worked on the applications from Comodo and KISA.
  • I also tried to address general questions about the Mozilla CA policy and how it should be applied
• Public communications and related issues
  • David did more work on revising the www.mozilla.org site, including helping with a 10th anniversary page and a proposed new About page.

Upcoming events and activities

• I’m planning to attend the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA and the Personal Democracy Forum conference June 23-24 in New York NY if possible.
• Zak will be speaking at the Leadership by (Open) Innovation in the Telecom, IT and Media Industries conference April 24 in Munich, and other events later in 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 got paperwork done for another new grant, to be announced later.
• CAs and related issues
  • I gave final approval to the applications from GeoTrust (bug 407168) and thawte (bug 407163) and filed bugs against NSS/PSM for the changes.
• Public communications and related issues
  • David worked on various items related to the Mozilla 10th anniversary celebrations.

Upcoming events and activities

• I’m planning to attend the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1, 2008 in Silver Spring MD, and (if possible) the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA.
• I’ll be out for a few days the week of April 7 to handle a family medical issue.
• Zak will be speaking at the Go Open conference April 8 and 9, 2008, in Oslo, the Leadership by (Open) Innovation in the Telecom, IT and Media Industries conference April 24 in Munich, and other events later in 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 worked on new grants (recently approved); no public announcements yet
• CAs and related issues
  • I gave final approval to the request from VeriSign to add a new EV root (bug 402947).
  • I gave preliminary approval to the application from Comodo to mark three existing roots for EV use (bug 401587).
• Public communication
  • David continued work on www.mozilla.org changes and the proposed new Mozilla T-shirt, as well as other internal (for now) projects.
• Conferences and events
  • Zak did a keynote presentation at the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14.
  • I attended the CSUN conference for one day and worked at the Mozilla booth. Thanks go to David for helping to get stuff shipped to CSUN, and to all the people who did booth duty at CSUN: Mick Curran, Joanie Diggs, Eitan Isaacson, Steve Lee, Chris Leung, Jamie Teh, and (last not least) Marco Zehe.

Upcoming events and activities

• I’m planning to attend the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1, 2008 in Silver Spring MD, and (if possible) the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA.
• Zak will be speaking at the Go Open conference April 8 and 9, 2008, in Oslo, the Leadership by (Open) Innovation in the Telecom, IT and Media Industries conference April 24 in Munich, and other events later in 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
  • Seneca College announced a $100,000 grant from the Mozilla Foundation to support Seneca’s ongoing work with the Mozilla project and its creation of a curriculum for educating Mozilla and open source developers.
  • The GNOME Foundation announced that the Mozilla Foundation will be joining the GNOME Foundation advisory board.
• CAs and related issues
  • I gave preliminary approval to the applications from GeoTrust and thawte to add new EV-capable roots (bugs 407168 and 407163 respectively).
  • I also worked on EV-related applications from Comodo and VeriSign.
• Public communication
  • David continued work on various www.mozilla.org-related tasks.
  • David also posted a proposed new Mozilla T-shirt design.
• Conferences and events
  • Zak published a number of blog posts from his attendance at SCALE; see the latest post for links.
  • I continued work on arrangements for CSUN.

Upcoming events and activities

• I’m planning to attend the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1, 2008 in Silver Spring MD, and (if possible) the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA.
• Zak will be speaking at various open source events in 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
  • The GNOME Foundation announced the GNOME outreach program for accessibility, which the Mozilla Foundation helped fund.
• CAs and related issues
  • I gave preliminary approval to the application from VeriSign to add a new EV-capable root (bug 402947).
  • I also worked on EV-related applications from Comodo (bug 401587), GeoTrust (bug 407168), and thawte (bug 407163).
• Public communication
  • David continued work on various www.mozilla.org-related tasks.
• Conferences and events
  • Zak spoke at a number of Norwegian universities February 25-27 on open source and Mozilla-related topics.
  • Gerv attended FOSDEM.
  • I continued work on arrangements for CSUN.
• Other
  • Gerv worked on a script to assist with the proposed Bugzilla product/component reorganization.

Upcoming events and activities

• I’m planning to be in Mountain View on March 12 and at the CSUN conference on March 13 in Los Angeles CA. I’m also planning to attend the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1, 2008 in Silver Spring MD, and (if possible) the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA.
• Zak will be speaking at the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14, and other events later in 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.

• CAs and related issues
  • I gave final approval to requests from Go Daddy (bugs 403437 and 418958), QuoVadis (bugs 403665 and 418701), and Trustwave (bugs 409837, 409838, 409840, 418907, 418910, and 418902) to have their roots EV-enabled (or new EV-capable roots added, the case of Trustwave).
  • I also did work on the application from VeriSign (bug 402947).
• Donations
  • David did a blog post on the status of the Mozilla Foundation’s directed giving program.
• Public communication
  • David worked on various www.mozilla.org-related tasks.
• Conferences and events
  • I worked on arrangements for CSUN.

Upcoming events and activities

• I’m planning to be in Mountain View on March 12 and at the CSUN conference on March 13 in Los Angeles CA. I’m also planning to attend the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1, 2008 in Silver Spring MD, and (if possible) the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA.
• Zak will be speaking at a number of Norwegian universities February 25-27 on open source and Mozilla-related topics, at the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14, and other events later in 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
  • Still waiting on formal grant announcements. (Yes, I know, this is getting old.)
• CAs and related issues
  • I worked on CA applications from Cisco, S-TRUST, and WISeKey.
  • I gave final approval for Digicert to have its root enabled for EV (bugs 403644 and 416827).
• Conferences and events
  • Zak Greant spoke at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10.
  • I worked on arrangements for CSUN and (with Marco Zehe) for SightCity.

Upcoming trips and events

• I’ll be attending (at least part of) the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD, and (if possible) the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA.
• Zak will be speaking at the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008.

A reminder: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year.

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
  • The board approved another significant accessibility-related grant; details to come.
• CAs and related issues
  • I worked on CA applications from GlobalSign, Go Daddy, Digicert, SECOM Trust, S-TRUST, and WISeKey.
  • I gave prelimary approval for Go Daddy to have its roots enabled for EV (bug 403437)
  • I gave final approval today for Digicert to have its root enabled for EV (bugs 403644 and 416827)
• Public communications
  • Among other things, David participated in a www.mozilla.org planning meeting and helped create a plan for www.mozilla.org changes
• Conferences and events
  • Zak worked on preparations for several upcoming events in which the Mozilla Foundation might participate.

Upcoming trips and events

• I’ll be attending (at least part of) the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD, and the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA.
• Zak will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10 in Los Angeles, the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008.

A reminder: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year.

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.

• CAs and related issues
  • I worked on CA applications from GlobalSign, Digicert, SECOM Trust, and S-TRUST.
• Public communications
  • Among other things, David worked on improvements to www.mozilla.org, including updating the Projects page with two new Featured Mozilla-Based Applications, submitting a patch to replace the Products section with Projects (bug 325485), and coordinating with fantasai concerning the About page content (bug 231131 and bug 414439).
• Conferences and events
  • Zak worked on preparations for several upcoming events in which the Mozilla Foundation might participate, including OSCON.

Upcoming trips and events

• I’ll be attending (at least part of) the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD, and the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA.
• Zak will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10 in Los Angeles, the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008.

A reminder: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year.

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.

• CAs and related issues
  • I reviewed the applications from QuoVadis, Digicert, and Trustwave, tentatively approved them, and started the public comment periods prior to final approval. For more information see bugs 403665, 403644, and 409837/409838/409840 respectively.
• Public communications
  • David Boswell participated in a planning meeting for improvements to www.mozilla.org.
• Other
  • David is now in California and will be working out of the Mozilla office in Mountain View (once he gets settled).

Upcoming trips and events

• I’ll be attending (at least part of) the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, and the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD.
• Zak will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10 in Los Angeles, the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008.

A reminder: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year.

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’m happy to announce a major new grant from the Mozilla Foundation to NV Access to support development of the NVDA open source screen reader for Windows; the NVDA developers blog has all the details.
  • Scott Haeger completed the final milestone on his Foundation-funded project to improve rich document browsing in the Orca screen reader for Linux. For more information see the GNOME wiki pages for Firefox 3.0 ARIA widget support in Orca, Firefox 3.0 Live Region support in Orca, and integrating the Collection interface into Orca.
  • Codethink Ltd completed its Foundation-funded study on the feasibility of migrating the AT-SPI accessibility API to use D-Bus.
  • I got a grant agreement in place for another major new grant to be announced later.
• CAs and related issues
  • I reviewed the applications from KISA and WISeKey, tentatively approved them, and started the two-week public comment periods prior to final approval. For more information see bugs 335197 and 371362 respectively.
• Other
  • Gerv is recovering well from his recent surgery.
  • David moved out to California (not without some excitement).
  • I completed my migration to Google Apps, as discussed in my last status report. (However I’ve postponed my blog migration for a week or two until I have more spare time.)

Upcoming trips and events

• I’ll be attending (at least part of) the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, and the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD.
• Zak will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10 in Los Angeles, the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008.

A reminder: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year.

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 worked on more paperwork for new Foundation grants (to be announced).
  • Steve Lee published a report on his Foundation-funded Jambu on-screen keyboard project.
  • I got grant agreements in place for two new grants (to be announced later), finished a grant agreement for one more, and received proposals for more grants.
• CAs and related issues
  • I started going through the EV-related CA applications to see which were most ready for approval.
• Public communications
  • David Boswell worked on more changes to www.mozilla.org, including changes to the Timeline and Projects pages and a new Mozilla-Based Applications page.
• Other
  • I was out part of the week on family business, and also lost some time dealing with system problems affecting email.

Upcoming trips and events

• David Boswell will be moving out to California Real Soon Now.
• I’ll be attending at least part of the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, and the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD.
• Zak will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10 in Los Angeles, the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008.

Random notes

Due to intermittent but annoying problems, I’m about to make two major changes to my current system setup. First, several months ago I started using Gmail as my preferred mail interface, using address aliases and mail forwarding to avoid having to change my canonical email address, and running my old IMAP server configuration in parallel. I’ve now decided to stop trying to run my own mail server, and as of this week I’m switching to Google Apps to provide email and other services for my hecker.org domain. All of my existing email addresses will continue to work, so this should be a transparent switch unless something goes wrong.

Second, I’m also getting tired of maintaining my own blogging infrastructure using custom software. In the near future I’ll be retiring my old blog and starting a new blog on wordpress.com. Unfortunately I can’t make this switch transparent; I’ll be using a new domain (blog.hecker.org) and new feed URLs. More on this in my next report, which will hopefully be the last report using the old system. However note that I’ll continue to keep my previous blog around for historical purposes, and will do my utmost to ensure that all current URLs will continue to link to the proper content.

A final note: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year.

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 got grant agreements in place for two new grants (to be announced later), finished a grant agreement for one more, and received proposals for more grants.
• Licensing and legal
  • I worked with Gerv on a plan to make progress on the proposed replacement for the CVS contributor form, with Gerv contributing drafts of related documents.
• CAs and related issues
  • I approved the application for inclusion from TÜRKTRUST and filed bug 410821 to have the TÜRKTRUST certificates added to NSS.
• Public communications
  • David worked on more proposed changes to www.mozilla.org.
• Other
  • Zak coordinated proposed Mozilla Foundation participation in various 2008 conferences and other events.

Upcoming trips and events

• I’ll be attending the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD.
• Zak will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10 in Los Angeles, the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008.

A final note: Although 2007 has ended, we’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year.

Projects for the week

Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on in the last three weeks; 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
  • A number of significant grant proposals were approved in December; I’ll make public announcements on these soon and will update the 2007 grants report to reflect all 2007 activities.
  • Eitan Isaacson completed work on a Mozilla Foundation-funded project to improve performance of the Orca open source screen reader; for more information see GNOME bugs 446277, 495077, 502924, and 491756, as well as Marco Zehe’s report on the overall improvements to Orca performance with Firefox 3. Eitan is now working on a new Foundation-funded project to enhance the Braille output of Orca, including adding support for contracted Braille.
• Licensing and legal
  • I looked over the proposed replacement for the CVS contributor form to determine what’s needed to complete the project.
• CAs and related issues
  • I went over the application for inclusion from TÜRKTRUST and all the public comments prior to making a final decision on approval.
• Web sites
  • David Boswell worked more on proposed changes to www.mozilla.org.
• Other
  • Gerv had surgery and is now back home recovering.
  • Zak worked on Mozilla Foundation participation in various upcoming events.

Upcoming trips and events

• I’m planning to attend the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1, 2008 in Silver Spring MD.

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
  • Ariel Rios completed his Foundation-funded project to add the Accessibility::Collection interface to the AT-SPI accessibility API for GNOME; for more information see GNOME bug 326516.
  • Patrick Michaud produced a progress report on the Perl 6 work jointly funded by the Mozilla Foundation and the Perl Foundation.
  • Zak and I worked on some new grant proposals.
• Licensing and legal
  • Gerv worked on revising and updating the Mozilla license policy, to bring the document in line with current practice.
• CAs and related issues
  • I approved the application for inclusion from SwissSign and filed bug 407396 to have the SwissSign CA certificates added to NSS.
• Web sites
  • David Boswell worked on various changes to www.mozilla.org, including a new Mozilla Foundation home page and a new “Featured Projects” page (bug 393447).
• Miscellaneous
  • We have a new #foundation IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org for anyone wishing to contact us real-time.

Upcoming trips and events

• I’m planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 (afternoon only) and 12.

A final note: We have just over two weeks left in 2007 for you to donate to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program and support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project.

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
  • Steve Lee provided a report on his participation in the RAatE conference. (Steve’s Jambu project has received funding from the Foundation.)
  • I received some new grant proposals for the board’s consideration.
• CAs and related issues
  • I worked on the applications for inclusion from SwissSign and TÜRKTRUST, as well as on the EV applications from VeriSign and QuoVadis.
  • I made updates to the pending list to reflect the current status of CA applications.
  • I created a wiki page to track recommended practices relating to CA applications.
• Web sites
  • David Boswell posted a proposed new Mozilla Foundation page mockup for comment.

Upcoming trips and events

• I’m planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 (afternoon only) and 12.

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 did a blog post describing Mozilla Foundation grants and related expenditures in 2007.
  • David Humphrey pointed us to a press article about Mozilla activities in Toronto and at Seneca College. (Seneca is a Mozilla Foundation grantee.)
• Donations
  • I did a blog post on the new Mozilla Foundation directed giving program.
  • David Boswell published a FAQ about donating to the Foundation and a new page describing Foundation activities, and coordinated updates to the main Mozilla Foundation donation page and the per-project donation pages for Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and Mozilla accessibility to people with disabilities.
• CAs and related issues
  • I worked on the applications for inclusion from SwissSign and TÜRKTRUST CAs, announced my intent to approve TÜRKTRUST’s inclusion, and started a two-week comment period on TÜRKTRUST’s application.
• Other
  • Gerv helped resolve some licensing-related issues.
  • Gerv provided detailed feedback on Alex Faaborg’s UI mockups.

Upcoming activities

• I’m planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 (afternoon only) and 12.

It works as follows: When you donate to the Mozilla Foundation, you now have the option of directing your donations to one of four selected projects (Bugzilla, SeaMonkey, Camino, and Mozilla accessibility for people with disabilities). (You can also choose to make a traditional unrestricted donation as well.) We’ll take note of your choice, and keep track of how much money has been designated for each project. We’ll then work with the people responsible for each project and come up with some worthy project-related initiatives for the Mozilla Foundation to fund using those designated donations.

(If for some reason we can’t identify suitable activities to fund for a project, if a project becomes inactive, or if it otherwise becomes ineligible to receive funds, then we’ll use the funds for other worthwhile Mozilla-related activities.)

As an extra incentive to help get the program started, the Mozilla Foundation will match 2-for-1 any donations you designate for these projects from now until the end of 2007, up to a maximum of $10,000 per project. For example, if you and others designate a total of $3,000 in donations for the Bugzilla project through December 31, 2007, the Foundation will add $6,000 to that, for a total of $9,000 designated for Bugzilla-related projects. If you and others designate $5,000 or more for Bugzilla during that time, we’ll add the maximum matching amount of $10,000 to whatever is designated for Bugzilla.

As noted in the Mozilla Foundation donations FAQ, we’re encouraging people to donate because we want to give people more ways to be involved in and engaged with the Mozilla project, and we want to give the various individual projects within the overall Mozilla project the chance to promote themselves and further grow their communities of supporters. We chose these particular four projects because they each had a long history of activity, an already active community of developers and users, and a number of possible initiatives that didn’t overlap with existing plans for Firefox and Thunderbird. We’re willing to consider additional projects in the future for which you could designate donations; please feel free to send us your suggestions. (However note that we plan to keep the number of possible designation choices relatively small, in order to maintain focus and keep the internal accounting simple.)

If you have any further questions about the directed giving program, please feel free to send us an email at donations (at) mozilla.org. If you’ve donated to the Mozilla Foundation before, we thank you for your past donation and encourage you to consider making a new donation designated for one of these projects. If you haven’t donated yet, please consider supporting one of these worthy initiatives.

P.S. Thanks go to David Boswell for his work in getting this program set up and launched.

Background

In my previous post I provided information important to understanding the Mozilla Foundation’s grant and grant-related activities. See the post for the full details; here’s a brief recap of the two most important points:

• There’s a difference between what we consider to be “grants” (made to US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations or non-US equivalents as part of a formal grant agreement) and “related expenditures” (contracts with individuals or organizations to perform certain work, or travel sponsorship of individuals). This post covers both categories.
• There’s a difference between the Mozilla Foundation’s activities and the “community program” (sometimes referred to as “community giving”) run by the Mozilla Corporation. This post covers only Foundation expenditures.

For more on the history behind the Mozilla Foundation’s grants and related activities, see my original blog post from July 2006.

Grants and related expenditures in 2007

Now to the details on items we funded in 2007 to date. We made the following expenditures that we consider to be grants as defined above, with grantees as noted:

• Support and maintenance of the mozdev.org site (Mozdev Community Organization, $30,000). This is a follow-up to a similar grant made in 2006; for more information on activities funded under this grant see Doug Warner’s blog.
• Development of Perl 6 and Parrot (The Perl Foundation, $10,000). For more information see the grant announcement.
• Implementation of accessibility features in the Dojo AJAX toolkit (University of Toronto Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, $70,000). For more information see David Bolter’s final report on this project.
• Research into enabling commodity webcams to be used as simple switch input devices (e.g., by tracking users’ head or hand movements), for example in conjunction with software like Jambu (University of North Carolina, $10,000). For more information see Gary Bishop’s blog post on CamKey.
• Enhancement of the NVDA open source screen reader for Windows to better support rich web documents accessed through Firefox (NV Access, approx. $90,000). For more information see the NVDA blog.
• Ongoing support of Creative Commons and its work to help build a “participatory web” by promoting creation and sharing of content (in conjunction with several other funders) (Creative Commons, $100,000). For more information see the Creative Commons press release.
• Mozilla-related educational activities (Seneca College, $100,000). For more information see the Seneca press release. For ongoing information about Seneca’s Mozilla-related activities, see David Humphrey’s blog, as well as my blog post discussing the strategic importance of what Seneca is doing.
• Support of GNOME accessibility and other GNOME activities (GNOME Foundation, $10,000). For more information see the GNOME Foundation announcement.
• Support of FSF activities related to coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS) (Free Software Foundation, $10,000).

(Note that some of our conference sponsorships were done as grants as well; however for simplicity I’ve included those with the other conference-related expenditures listed below.)

The next category covers software development and related activities, mostly through contracts with individuals:

• Produce a Java-based conforming HTML5 parser that implements error reporting as needed by the HTML5 conformance checker, and an HTML5 parser library for Java applications as a drop-in replacement for XML parsers (Henri Sivonen). For more information see the Validator.nu HTML parser project page.
• Enhance the OpenSSL cryptographic library and Apache mod_ssl SSL/TLS module to support sending of OCSP responses to Firefox and other web browsers as part of the SSL/TLS protocol exchange (Open Source Software Institute). For more information see the OpenSSL code changes and Apache bug 43822.
• Improve scriptability in Camino and provide a new way to extend the browser using AppleScript (Peter Jaros). (Note that this project was a proposed Summer of Code project that ended up being co-funded by the Mozilla Foundation and the Camino project instead.) For more information see the original proposal and the associated bugs.
• Implement the IAccessible2 accessibility API for Windows in Mozilla (Alexander Surkov). For more information see the IA2ToGecko page.
• Create a Firefox extension to simulate the appearance of web pages to someone with colorblindness (Jörg Dotzki). For more information see the colorblind simulator project page.
• Implement techniques for improved keyboard navigation to active elements on a web page (Leo Spalteholz). This was another proposed Summer of Code project for which we didn’t have a slot, and subsequently decided to fund ourselves.
• Complete implementation of the Accerciser interactive test tool for testing Firefox and other applications supporting the AT-SPI accessibility API on Linux and the GNOME desktop (Eitan Isaacson). For more information see the associated GNOME Journal article.
• Optimizing Firefox for pointer and switch access (Steve Lee). (Note that 2007 funding was a continuation of previous funding made in 2006.) This project addresses accessibility for people with physical dexterity or mobility problems (as opposed to much accessibility work, which relates to blind users); for more information see the Jambu project page.
• Enhance the Fire Vox screen reader extension for Firefox to support WAI ARIA widgets, and thus become the first assistive technology to fully support ARIA with Firefox (Charles Chen). For more information see the WIA AIRA live regions page on the Mozilla Developer Center site.
• Complete the implementation of the Collection interface for GNOME’s Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI) to provide performance and functionality improvements to support Firefox accessibility on Linux (Ariel Rios). For more information see GNOME bug 326516.
• Enhance the Orca open source screen reader for Linux to support Firefox, including the ability to navigate using web page elements and initial support for ARIA (landmarks only) (Scott Haeger). For more information see the dependency tree for GNOME bug 423348.
• Migrate Orca to use pyatspi, a new standard Python client library for the GNOME AT-SPI accessibility interface (Eitan Isaacson). For more information see Eitan Isaacson’s blog post.
• Implement various enhancements to Orca as used with Firefox, including performance enhancements and bug fixes (Eitan Isaacson). For more information see GNOME bugs 448848, 446277, and 491862, as well as the blog post referenced in the last item.
• Enhance Orca to improve the quality of Braille output to match those of proprietary screen readers (including support of contracted Braille, also known as Grade 2 Braille) (Eitan Isaacson).
• Evaluate the feasibility of porting the GNOME AT-SPI accessibility interface from ORBit to D-Bus, in order to ensure that the accessibility infrastructure used by Firefox on Linux is as up to date as possible (Codethink Ltd). For more information see the associated project page.

The final category comprises conferences and other events for which the Mozilla Foundation either provided sponsorship or paid travel and related costs for Mozilla contributors, or both:

• CSUN 2007. We had a Mozilla booth at this major accessibility conference in Los Angeles in March 2007, and sponsored travel costs for a number of attendees; for more information see the Mozilla CSUN 2007 wiki page and David Bolter’s “CSUNzilla” blog post.
• W4A workshop. We sponsored some attendees to this accessibility workshop in Banff in May 2007. We subsequently became an official sponsor of the 2008 W4A meeting as well.
• Internet as a Public Good Symposium. We co-sponsored this event in Boston July 30-31, along with Harvard University.
• Mozilla accessibility summit 2007. We sponsored a few people to attend this meeting of Mozilla accessibility developers in Boston in October 2007. (Note that the bulk of the support for this meeting came from the Mozilla Corporation.)
• SS12 accessibility code-a-thon. We were a sponsor of this event held November 17 and 18, 2007, at the University of Southern California, working in conjunction with Project:Possibility and Knowbility.
• Foundations of Open Media Software 2008. We’re a sponsor of this developer workshop to be held January 24 and 25, 2008, in Melbourne.
• Sponsorship of a 2008 event put on by the American Association of People with Disabilities.
• Sponsorship of three accessibility-related conferences and other events to be held in 2008 by Knowbility.

Summary

Between the three categories of expenditures above (grants, contracts for development, and conference and travel sponsorship) we’ve approved funding of approximately half a million dollars thus far in 2007 we approved funding of over $700K in 2007. Note that these are not final numbers, and may differ somewhat from the numbers actually reported for 2007 in our filings next year in 2008. (In particular, not all the money authorized has yet been spent, and may not be spent in 2007 because some contracts are still in progress and payments are contingent on additional milestones being completed.) Note that these numbers may differ somewhat from the numbers actually reported for 2007 in our filings, because not all the grants and related expenditures approved in 2007 were actually paid in 2007.

In general we’ve continued the trends started in 2006, including an emphasis on funding accessibility-related projects (which accounted for almost three quarters of all expenditures). It’s too early to tell how much we’ll spend in total in 2007 on grants and related expenditures, but we’ll quite possibly double the amount spent in 2006. (As noted above, I’ll update this report as appropriate.) In 2007 we more than doubled the amount spent in 2006. As we move into 2008 we’ll be funding projects in more areas as well.

prasant muduli - 2008-06-13 06:22

Gritting from NYDHEE We got your information from yahoo search ,we are the voluntary and non-profit organisation named NYDHEE(Network for Youth Development and Healthy Environment),Orissa,India. NYDHEE working in the field of Health ,Environment ,Education, Rehabilation and Women empowerment etc. We have seen in your website you funded to non profit organisation , we want to apply for grant support .If you give permission then we send the detailed project proposal to you. Hoping to receive from you soon. With kind regards Prasant Muduli Secretary NYDHEE

hecker - 2008-06-13 13:16

Prasant: Note that while the Mozilla Foundation does provide grants to nonprofit organizations, our primary focus is on the Internet and World Wide Web, with almost all of our grants going to organizations that are involved in the development of Internet/web technology. We think supporting causes like health, education, etc., is a good thing, but we leave that to other organizations working in those fields.

Supporting The Mozilla Community « davidwboswell - 2008-07-14 22:26

[…] Mozilla Foundation is already supporting the existing community by providing grants and collecting donations. Of all the things the Foundation could be doing, scaling these two […]

Joel (j.driver@austin.utexas.edu) - 2008-08-01 15:12

Frank, Where on the website could I find the grant application and the process? I appreciate your time and hope your having a good Friday. Joel

The Next Million Mozillians « commonspace - 2008-08-29 21:56

[…] It supports a handful of other Mozilla software projects. And it gives out a small number of grants related to open source and web accessibility. All of these things contribute to the open web, some […]

Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog » Blog Archive » Mozilla is Linux - 2008-09-17 20:10

[…] 2007 alone, the Mozilla Foundation gave grants to the Perl Foundation, Creative Commons, the GNOME foundation, and the FSF, among others. It […]

A few concrete things MoFo might do « commonspace - 2008-11-13 21:43

[…] all the blog postings from the last few weeks, David Boswell took the best kick at this can. Offer grants and collect donations (yes, and more strategically). Build bridges between people using Mozilla […]

Mitchell’s Blog » Blog Archive » Sustainability in Uncertain Times - 2008-11-19 17:41

[…] expanded its grant giving and funding program, providing approximately $700,000 in funds. Mozilla supported projects such as Mozdev Support, the NVDA open source screen reader for Windows, GNOME, and […]

wade klinkel (wadeklinkel@yahoo.com) - 2008-11-28 17:03

I’d like to learn more

wade klinkel (wadeklinkel@yahoo.com) - 2008-11-28 17:04

I’d like to learn more!

Oyunlar - 2009-01-03 22:46

I am proud to hear such organizations all the time. Trying to catch a few things nowadays. Once success with those will donate Mozilla asap.

Adan A. Askar (hwra_ngo@yahoo.com) - 2009-03-05 18:16

Gritting from HWRA We got your information from Mozilla Foundation grants (Learn about us), we are the voluntary and non-profit organization named HWRA (HARGEISA WOMEN’S RESCUE ASSOCIATION),Hargeisa, Somalia. HWRA working in the field of Health, Environment, Education, Rehabilitation and Women empowerment etc. We have seen in your website you funded to non-profit organizations, we want to apply for grant support. If you give permission then we send the detailed project proposal to you. Hoping to receive from you soon. With kind regards, Adan A. Askar Executive Director HWRA Local NGO

LEON CHARGER (WAANATAN@YAHOO.COM) - 2009-03-13 15:23

GREETINGS,I WORK,DONATE MY TIME TO THE CHIEF SEATTLE CLUB,HERE IN SEATTLE,WA.I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT GRANTS.WE ARE A 501(c)(3) ORGANIZATION.HELPING THE NATIVE AMERICAN COMM.PLEASE VIEW US ON THE WEB AT WWW.CHIEF SEATTLE CLUB.ORGI DI HOPE THAT WE WOULD BE ABLE TO GET A GRANT FROM YOUR ORG.THANK YOU NSO MUCH.OR PLEASE,FEEL FREE TO EMAIL ME WITH IMFORMATION AS TO WHOM TO WRITE GRANTS TO.THANK YOU SO MUCH,L.C

greg russel - 2009-05-06 20:42

Great information and usefull too. I need a grant and I need all the help I can get. I will be back soon as I have bookmarked your blog.

John MacNutt - 2009-07-16 13:10

Greetings from the UK Dear Frank Gemin-i.org is a UK registered educational charity specialising in developing innovative web-based solutions to empower, educate and inspire people across the world. Rafi.ki (www.rafi.ki) is our global online community of schools, an online space where classes can meet and collaborate on joint projects with partners across the world. It was launched just over 2 years ago and has grown incredibly quickly to 1400+ schools in some 109 countries. In its short lifespan it has also found critical acclaim winning awards and plaudits from teachers, educationalists and world statesmen. Like yourselves we believe in using the power of the internet to enrich people’s lives and are committed ensuring the internet is as accessible as possible to all. To that end Rafi.ki (which is entirely browser based with no software downloads) was deliberately designed for low bandwidth access for schools in the developing world and our next version, Version 3 will offer ultra-low bandwidth access and seamless mobile interfacing to provide access where IT access is poorest. It is the development of Version 3 which will require significant investment that we would like you to consider providing us with a grant to make this a reality. So here’s hoping to hear from you soon. With kindest regards John MacNutt Direct of Rafi.ki and Webtools

Dr Sharavan Yadav (sharavanyad@gmail.com) - 2009-07-24 13:25

It is true, health and education is so important. In my country it is so hard to get a grant. I am really looking for someone who are good in software development in order to combine technology with health

Kral Oyun - 2009-08-14 15:06

Mozilla community is growing really fasterthen ever. This is as its getting the support of pulic user behind.

billk (a1billk@yahoo.com) - 2009-09-06 15:42

what does mozilla sell? where does the money come from for you to provide grants and daily operating expenses.

hecker - 2009-09-06 16:23

“where does the money come from for you to provide grants and daily operating expenses” From sponsorship by Google and other sources, donations, Mozilla store, and investment income. See www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents for complete information on Mozilla Foundation finances.

DW Swauger - 2009-11-05 10:48

Kudos to your Efforts Mozilla Foundation! “The Fruits of Giving is its own Reward and Curse”

DR CG AMODT - St Cloud MN - 2009-12-21 15:26

THANK YOU - Your browser system has been great - I just upgraded to Firefox v 3.5 so we’ll see some improvements too, I hope. Just wanted to tell you T H A N K Y O U A L L ! Your product is soooooo much better than MSN…. Carl

joseph viso jr - 2010-01-07 00:35

we are looking for grants to help us gain exposure on the internet as well as provide accessibility products to those who need them.please let me know if you can help.

Safe as Milk » Blog Archive » Putting Oracle a11y in perspective - 2010-02-09 15:01

[…] to the GNOME Foundation, and supporting Orca is part of its accessibility roadmap. Mozilla has also funded work to port AT-SPI from Orbit to DBus, and other work on Orca and […]

Safe as Milk » Blog Archive » Putting Oracle a11y news in perspective - 2010-02-09 15:06

[…] to the GNOME Foundation, and supporting Orca is part of its accessibility roadmap. Mozilla has also funded work to port AT-SPI from Orbit to DBus, and other work on Orca and […]

Background

Before I get into the detailed list of projects and activities we funded, I wanted to provide a bit of background. First and foremost, we often use the term “grants” very loosely to cover all of the activities we fund. In actual fact our funding includes the following categories:

• grants made to other non-profit organizations that are exempt from taxation under IRC Section 501(c)(3), and to non-US nonprofit organizations that we consider equivalent to US-based 501(c)(3) organizations
• payments for software development and related activities made to independent individuals (i.e., people who aren’t otherwise associated with the Mozilla Foundation or Corporation)
• sponsorship to allow the above individuals and other contributors to travel to conferences and other meetings, along with sponsorship of conferences and meetings themselves

As noted in the 2006 financial FAQ, only items in the first category are true grants and reported as such; the other items are listed under “consulting fees,” “travel,” “conferences,” or other categories. However note that all these expenditures are over and above what it takes to keep the Foundation operating, i.e., they don’t include salaries and related expenses for myself, David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant, nor do they include other basic operational expenses (e.g., for accounting, auditing, etc.).

Second, our primary goal with grants and related expenditures is to support the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto, the overall mission of the Mozilla Foundation, and the work of the Mozilla project, while not duplicating efforts undertaken by the Mozilla Corporation or (in future) by the new MailCo entity. That means that on the one hand we aren’t going to be a funder of any and all charitable activities, and on the other hand we aren’t going to fund activities that the Mozilla Corporation (or MailCo) are already doing or are planning to do in the relatively short term.

One major area of activity for the Foundation has been supporting efforts to make the Web (and the Internet in general) more accessible to people with disabilities. This is an area that spans across the entire Mozilla project and also encompasses other areas outside the Mozilla project proper, in particular the problem of providing open source infrastructure, tools, and applications to support accessibility. For more on this topic and how it relates to the Foundation, see my comments on how accessibility relates to the Foundation’s mission and my more recent discussion of a Mozilla accessibility vision and strategy.

Finally, the Foundation’s grant and related activities are separate from the “community program” (sometimes referred to as “community giving”) run by the Mozilla Corporation, which is primarily directed at supporting dedicated volunteer Mozilla contributors.

For more on the history behind the Foundation’s grants and related activities, see my blog post from July 2006. I’ll come back to some of the thoughts in that post in my conclusion below.

Grants and related expenditures in 2006

Now to the details on items we funded in 2006. As already noted in the 2006 financial FAQ, we made two grants in 2006 that were reported as such (with grantees as noted):

• Support and maintenance of the mozdev.org site (Mozdev Community Organization). For more information on activities funded under this grant (and a subsequent follow-up grant earlier in 2007) see Doug Warner’s blog.
• Mozilla-related educational activities (Seneca College). For more information on activities funded under this grant, see David Humphrey’s blog.

The next category covers software development and related activities, mostly through contracts with individuals; however note that some of this funding went to nonprofit organizations, and because of the way the paperwork was handled the funding got lumped into this category:

• Mozilla accessibility on Mac OS X (Håkan Wara). This project addressed accessibility of Firefox and other Mozilla-based products on OS X; for more information see the Mac accessibility page on the Mozilla Developer Center site.
• AJAX test cases for WAI ARIA (Charles Chen). This project addressed the need for ways to test implementations in Firefox and other products of the WAI ARIA specification for accessibility of dynamic web applications; for more information see Charles Chen’s accessible AJAX page.
• XForms accessibility (Alexander Surkov). This project addressed accessibility for the Mozilla XForms extension; for more information see the XForms accessibility page on MDC.
• Optimizing Firefox for pointer and switch access (Steve Lee). This project addressed accessibility for people with physical dexterity or mobility problems (as opposed to much accessibility work, which relates to blind users); for more information see the Jambu project page.
• ChatZilla accessibility (Gijs Kruitbosch). Chat and IM clients pose some unique challenges to making them accessible, and doing so is important to enabling people with disabilities to more fully participate in Mozilla and other open source projects. For more information on this project see the ChatZilla accessibility meta bug.
• HTML5 conformance checker prototype (Henri Sivonen). This project addressed the need to have conformance checkers (also known as “validators”) for HTML5 and related specifications, to match the traditional HTML4 validators provided by the W3C and others; for more information see Henri Sivonen’s master’s thesis, as well as the current version of his conformance checker.
• DOM Inspector UI enhancements (Michael Gall). This was originally a proposed Summer of Code project, but we ran out of slots and decided to fund it directly. For more information see Michael Gall’s blog post on his DOM Inspector release.
• XUL accessibility guidelines and tool (WebAIM, an initiative of the Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University). For more information see WebAIM’s XUL accessibility page. (Note that the date on that page is incorrect; the work in question was done in 2006, not 2005.)
• Thunderbird accessibility (Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto). This project addressed various accessibility problems with Thunderbird; for more information see the Thunderbird accessibility tracking bug assigned to David Bolter of ATRC.
• Support of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects (OpenBSD). This was in response to OpenBSD’s financial difficulties; for more information see the associated OpenBSD Journal article.
• IETF representative (Open Source Applications Foundation). This helped OSAF and others support a representative to the IETF.
• Mozilla Digital Memory Bank (Center for History and New Media at George Mason University). This project aimed to provide oral, written, and other history for the Mozilla project; for more information see the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank site.

The final category comprises conferences and other events for which the Mozilla Foundation either provided sponsorship or paid travel and related costs for Mozilla contributors, or both:

• Fosdem 2006. We sponsored a meeting of Mozilla localization teams at this conference in Brussells in February 2006; for more information see the Fosdem 2006 aftermath page.
• CSUN 2006. We had a Mozilla booth at this major accessibility conference in Los Angeles in March 2006, and sponsored a number of attendees; for more information see my CSUN 2006 conference report.
• XTech 2006. We sponsored a number of attendees to this conference in Amsterdam in May 2006.
• W4A workshop. We sponsored some attendees to this accessibility workshop in Edinburgh in May 2006. Later in 2006 we became an official sponsor of the 2007 W4A meeting.
• Second California Web Accessibility Conference. We were one of the official sponsors of the CalWAC2 conference in Long Beach in September 2006.
• Mozilla accessibility summit 2006. We sponsored this meeting of Mozilla accessibility developers in Boston in October 2006.

Mozilla Foundation projects in 2007 and beyond

Once 2007 concludes I’ll produce a similar report to this for Mozilla Foundation grants and related expenditures this year. (I’ve already mentioned several of these in my weekly status reports.) However in general we’ve continued the trends started in 2006, including an emphasis on funding accessibility-related projects. It’s too early to tell how much we’ll spend in total, but I suspect we’ll easily double the amount spent in 2006. As we move into 2008 we’ll also be funding projects in more areas.

In general I think my initial thoughts from last year still apply: The Mozilla Foundation’s role (at least at present) is best thought of as providing “seed funding” for Mozilla and Mozilla-related projects and activities that are both important for the future and not being addressed fully by the Mozilla Corporation or others. Continuing the analogy, our “exit strategy” is to have those activities (or at least some aspects of them) be picked up by other organizations willing to contribute their own funding. (See, for example, the hiring of Tim Keenan by the Mozilla Corporation to supervise accessibility-related QA and testing, and the hiring of Charles Chen to do accessibility work at Google.)

The other constant is the importance of having people who can help us put together a funding program in particular areas, as Aaron Leventhal has done for Mozilla accessibility. To repeat what I wrote last year:

We’re looking for more people like Aaron to whom we can successfully delegate responsibility for suggesting and overseeing grants in their area(s) of expertise. If you’re one of those people I’m interested in hearing from you.

David M. Razler - 2009-06-07 19:04

Folks: Yes, I have a chip on my shoulder - specifically the death of the Penelope project after (as I recall, and said recollections are subject to error and I would appreciate correction of any errors in my memory) Qualcomm was making a grant to the Mozilla Foundation or a related 501(c)3, including code, licenses, employees (if they wished to move) and their salaries in order to save Eudora because the company could not support the program, but wished to see it developed. As we have seen, the program effectively died after one or two public releases, leaving out huge chunks of what made Eudora what it was - I’m not speaking of “look and feel”, but primary features like the Eudora sorting system, enabling to have each mailbox’s contents sorted into a hundred subcategories, and relay further messages if warranted by text. At this point, I would feel embarrassed asking for your past three 990s (the other five or six available from the IRS within a week or two)…I guess because in 25 years as a reporter, my biggest catches, and ‘a Pulitzer that got away’ because an editor spiked any thought of getting into an organization - The Boston Globe didn’t and walked away with one the next year) and I equate seeking a 990 with “looking for fraud” which I DO NOT HAVE ANY REASON to believe you committed. I’d rather just have a FRIENDLY conversation,(ABSOLUTELY not aimed at the kind of stuff I can no longer even do) - I wish I could do a positive piece on your manifesto, ability to “make money giving stuff away” that’s better than the commercial stuff, etc. building the kind of DoubleClick-free et.al. “cyberspace” (meant literally as Sterling meant it when he coined the phrase ’the place the phone call [or other communication] takes place.) that I hoped for, but, of course, will never exist. David M. Razler

hecker - 2009-06-08 14:00

Mr Razler: I’ve asked other people to follow up with you concerning the current state of the Penelope project. I’ll simply note that to my knowledge Qualcomm didn’t make any grants or transfers of money, employees, etc., to the Mozilla Foundation. Qualcomm simply decided to start an open source project using Mozilla code as the base, and we expressed support for it and let the project use some of our infrastructure (as we’ve done with other Mozilla-related projects).

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.

• Legal/IP issues
  • I’m still waiting on more feedback on the proposed corporate contributors agreement.

Upcoming activities

• I’ll attending the Seneca College Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS 2007) in Toronto on October 25 and 26 (although due to my flight schedule I’ll miss most of the talks on the 25th).

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.

• Legal/IP issues
  • I’ve been responding to queries sent to licensing@mozilla.org.
  • I’m still waiting on more feedback on the proposed corporate contributors agreement.
• Grants and related activities
  • Steve Lee posted a report on the current status of the Jambu project being funded by the Foundation.
• CAs and related issues
  • I’m taking over CA-related tasks from Gerv Markham, and am now the default assignee on CA-related bugs.
  • I filed bug 399214 to start work on updating the Mozilla CA Certificate Policy to address Extended Validation (EV) certificates. (See also the discussion in m.d.t.crypto.)
• Other
  • Zak Greant attended and represented the Foundation at the OpenMind 2007 and MindTrek 2007 conferences.
  • David Boswell attended the Legal Summit for Software Freedom.

Upcoming activities

• I’ll be in Washington DC Friday evening October 19 to attend a G3Ict event.
• I’ll attending the Seneca College Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS 2007) in Toronto on October 25 and 26 (although due to my flight schedule I’ll miss most of the talks on the 25th).

Random notes

Some of you may recall the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank project being run by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University; among other things they’ve published a series of interviews with various members of the Mozilla project. More recently the Firefox extension Zotero created by CHNM was included in the Firefox Campus Edition.

When the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank project was just starting I had the pleasure of meeting with a number of people at CHNM, including its founder and director, Roy Rosenzweig. I was therefore saddened to read this weekend in the Washington Post that Dr. Rosenzweig had died last Thursday. Please join me in expressing condolences to Dr. Rosenzweig’s family and the staff at CHNM.

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.

• Legal/IP issues
  • I’m still waiting on more feedback on the proposed corporate contributors agreement.

Upcoming activities

• I’ll be attending the Seneca College Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS 2007) in Toronto on October 25 and 26 (although due to my flight schedule I’ll miss most of the talks on the 25th).

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.

• Legal/IP issues
  • I’m still waiting on more feedback on the proposed corporate contributors agreement.
• Grants and related activities
  • Alexander Surkov completed the second milestone on his implementation in Mozilla of the IAccessible2 accessibility API for Windows (to be used by future versions of Firefox and Firefox-compatible screen readers on Windows). The IA2ToGecko project page has more information, including links to the relevant bugs.
  • Ariel Rios completed the second milestone on his project to implement a new Collection interface for the GNOME AT-SPI accessibility API (to be used by future versions of Firefox and Firefox-compatible screen readers on Linux). For more information (and to track progress) see GNOME bug 326516.
  • Steve Lee completed the final milestone for his project to create a prototype switch-activated on-screen keyboard for Firefox; he’ll be showing this at the Mozilla accessibility summit.
• Web sites
  • David continued work on getting old www.mozilla.org content archived.

Upcoming activities

• I’m considering attending the Mozilla accessibility summit on October 5 in Boston.
• I’m also considering attending one or both days of the Seneca College Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS 2007) in Toronto on October 25 and 26.

Note that the ideas expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Mozilla Foundation. It’s up to the Foundation board and to the new executive director to decide whether and how to implement this proposed strategy. Also note that my comments are primarily concerning the Mozilla Foundation; however the Mozilla Corporation has also taken some great steps to support accessibility (for example, hiring Tim Keenan to work full-time on accessibility QA and evangelism) and no doubt will do more in future.

Accessibility vision

The Mozilla Manifesto has as its second principle “The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.” “Accessible” has many meanings, but in this context we interpret it to mean “accessible to people with disabilities.” This may seem a significant narrowing of the principle, but in fact both “disability” and “accessibility” can be interpreted more broadly. As David Bolter of the University of Toronto Assistive Technology Resource Centre (a Mozilla Foundation grantee) points out, disabilities can simply be viewed as mismatches between particular individuals and their environment, including the software they use.

In this sense accessibility is simply an aspect of software usability in general, and thus extends beyond the stereotypical accessibility scenario (e.g., a blind person using a screen reader) to the more general problem of matching user interfaces to the abilities of the people using them. This significantly expands the population to which the promise of the Mozilla Manifesto applies: not just blind and low-vision users, not just people with physical mobility or dexterity problems, but also people with dyslexia and other learning disabilities, people with minimal literacy skills, and so on.

The proposed “accessibility vision” for Mozilla is thus to help make the Internet an accessible resource in the sense used above, and to do so in a way consistent with the other principles of the Manifesto, including those addressing the importance of open source software, innovation, interoperability, decentralized participation, and making it possible for individuals to shape their own experiences.

Accessibility strategy

The proposed Mozilla accessibility strategy encompasses the following three elements:

• making Firefox a showcase for how to address Internet accessibility issues
• building a thriving community of developers and other contributors interested in Firefox and Mozilla accessibility issues
• working with others to extend the Firefox and Mozilla accessibility success story across all major OS/desktop platforms, including in particular open source platforms

These elements can be further expanded as discussed below.

Firefox accessibility

Over the past few years Firefox has advanced considerably with regard to its accessibility, both through changes to Firefox itself and changes to assistive technology products like the Jaws and Window-Eyes screen readers. There are still a few remaining problems here and there, and we’ll continue to work with the screen reader vendors and others to resolve such issues as they arise.

However the overall goal is not just to play catch up to Internet Explorer in terms of accessibility and compatibility with existing AT products, but rather to leapfrog IE in terms of advanced accessibility functionality when and where possible. The proposed initiatives in enhancing Firefox accessibility are:

• Enhancement of Firefox to support the WAI ARIA set of standards for accessible rich Internet applications. These standards are key to removing the accessibility barriers posed by use of AJAX-based techniques for enabling dynamic web-based content and applications.
• Implementation of the IAccessible2 accessibility API. IAccessible2 is key to moving Windows-based assistive technnology (AT) products such as screen readers onto a modern API that extends and complements the legacy MSAA API while at the same time being modeled on nonproprietary Unix/Linux accessibility APIs (including the OpenOffice.org API).
• Creating test cases, testing tools, and related QA infrastructure for the above projects.

Building a community of accessibility developers

Originally the Mozilla accessibility “community” consisted of essentially one person, Aaron Leventhal of IBM. We need to attract new developers and other contributors to the task of improving Mozilla and Firefox accessibility; we also should make a special effort to attract developers and other contributors who themselves have disabilities, in line with the goal of helping people “scratch their own itch.”

Proposed initiatives in support of this goal include:

• Using small “mini-grants” to encourage existing Mozilla developers to try their hand at accessibility-related projects.
• Encouraging Mozilla accessibility developers to interact more deeply with each other and with the broader community of accessibility developer, through sponsorship of travel to accessibility-related meetings and conferences.
• Improving the accessibility of key Mozilla project tools and infrastructure components to developers with disabilities, enabling them to participate in an equal basis in Mozilla project activities.
• Creating tools, documentation, and related resources specifically intended to help developers concerned with Firefox and Mozilla accessibility issues.

Extending accessibility across platforms

Historically assistive technology products such as screen readers have focused almost exclusively on Microsoft Windows and on major Windows-based applications such as Microsoft Office. Combined with a high learning curve for users of AT products, this has resulted in an AT market and user base that is dominated by proprietary software to a degree significantly greater than other areas of IT. This dominance also means that there has been relatively little success for open source AT software and not much of a community of open source accessibility developers.

Our goal is to break this dependence and to make open source software and development processes as important in the AT market as they are becoming in the wider IT market. Key initiatives in support of this goal include:

• Enhancement of the Linux and Mac versions of Firefox to support better accessibility on those platforms.
• Support for harmonization of accessibility APIs across platforms (e.g., harmonizing IAccessible2 for Windows with ATK/AT-SPI for Linux).
• Support for creation of open source alternatives to existing proprietary screen readers and other AT products; examples include NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) for Windows and ORCA for Linux/Unix.

Conclusion

The Mozilla project is well-positioned to play a leading role in Internet accessibility. It has one of the most popular and accessible Internet-related products in Firefox, it has a thriving community of people developing Firefox and Mozilla code and related add-ons, and it has the financial resources to make an ongoing long-term investment in the future of open source accessibility. My comments above are meant as a starting point for further discussion as to how Mozilla can best support the cause of making the web more accessible to all.

Why accessibility is important for Mozilla

Since I joined the Mozilla Foundation last year I’ve spent a fair amount of time working with people involved in Mozilla-related accessibility issues. Why do I consider accessibility important enough for the Mozilla Foundation to spend time and money on it? I’ve been thinking about this question and I’ve concluded that there are lots of reasons, all good but some more compelling than others.

I’ve often heard the following reasons given for promoting accessibility; I think they’re good reasons, but in various ways they leave something to be desired (as I note):

• Accessibility is important to comply with government and corporate standards. My initial encounter with accessibility issues occurred when I was working in Netscape’s government sales group and got called in to a government agency to hear complaints that Netscape Communicator was not very accessible to blind users and other users with disabilities, and in particular was not compliant with the US government’s Section 508 requirements.

  That sort of experience is one way people think of accessibility: At best it’s an annoyance you need to worry about if you’re doing government business, at worst it’s something you could be sued over. In that respect and others accessibility is not that dissimilar to security: just another cross-product issue that developers have to worry about, but often wish they didn’t.

• Making software accessible helps people with disabilities live more productive and satisfying lives. Many people working in the accessibility field either have disabilities themselves or have known people with disabilities, and use their personal experiences as inspiration for their work on accessibility-related projects. For example, in his interview Aaron Leventhal notes his encounter with a man who was blind and deaf and used a Braille display to assist him in running a non-profit organization. As Aaron put it, “The experience had quite an impact on me… [I]dealism is what brought me into the business of accessibility.”

  However, although inspiration can be very motivating I think it would be a mistake to rely too much on it. Otherwise I think the rest of us (i.e., those not working directly in the accessibility field) run the risk of falling into the “Olympics syndrome”: We watch the games on TV, watch the five-minute videos about John the speed skater or Jane the marathon runner, think “how inspiring!” and then after the games are over we promptly forget about John or Jane, leaving them to live and work in obscurity for the next four years.

• All of us will likely have a disability at some point, so it’s in our own interest to support better accessibility. For example, I’ve always worn glasses, but recently my vision has been deteriorating a bit; thus I’m very glad for the features in Firefox that allow enlarging the text on web pages. Similarly, we never know if we or a member of our families might become permanently blind, paralyzed, etc.

  There’s nothing wrong with an appeal to self-interest (indeed, I’ll repeat this tactic below); the problem is that in this case the self-interest is not necessarily that strong—when we’re young we think we’ll never grow old, when we’re healthy we don’t think about getting sick, and if we don’t have any disabilities then we discount the possibility of ever having any in the future.

Can we come up with more (and perhaps even better) reasons to support accessibility-related work? Here are some that I think are important in the context of the Mozilla project:

• Improving accessibility is key to our mission of promoting choice and innovation on the Internet. In this respect improving accessibility is like supporting multiple platforms and multiple languages: Our mission is not just to promote choice and innovation for people using Microsoft Windows XP, so we develop Mozilla-based products to support three main platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and encourage ports to many others. Our mission is not just to promote choice and innovation for people who speak English, so we support localization of Mozilla-based products into as many languages as possible. Similarly, if we promote choice and innovation only for people who have good vision, who can use a mouse, who can type, and so on, then we won’t be fulfilling our mission. If we’re going to promote choice and innovation then we should promote it for everyone, without exception; otherwise we’re not living up to the ideals we set for ourselves.

• Users with disabilities could be key supporters of the Mozilla project. As I’ve previously discussed , there are several different groups who for one reason or another are part of the Firefox value network and who in their various ways support the Mozilla project. In particular the project depends on the efforts of those who help evangelize the use of Mozilla-based products, test the products and report bugs, create extensions for Firefox and other products, develop new web applications supporting Firefox, contribute to Mozilla code and documentation, and so on. In working to make Firefox and other Mozilla-based products more accessible we have an opportunity to build another group of passionate project supporters and contributors.

• Improving accessibility is key to improving access to information, communications, and applications for everyone. We sometimes tend to think of accessibility issues in a very narrow fashion, for example, as just involving getting products to work with screen readers. But in reality accessibility is a very broad topic; in fact, it’s so broad that in my opinion it’s even misleading to use the term “accessibility,” because that term is stereotypically associated with technology used by people with disabilities. The overall goal is really enabling someone to more easily and quickly find information, communicate with others, and engage in online transactions, in situations where there are constraints on the input and/or output mechanisms that can be employed. Stated that way accessibility benefits everyone: Lots of people might like to have better ways to use the web while driving a car, or hurrying through an airport, or dealing with a dog or a toddler, or doing a host of other things that don’t involve sitting in front of a traditional keyboard and computer display.

Why Mozilla is important for accessibility

Above I’ve discussed why I think accessibility is important for the Mozilla project. Now I’d like to talk about what I think the Mozilla project has to offer to the community of people involved in accessibility issues as users of assistive technologies, as creators of AT products, and so on.

• We can bring more choice and innovation to AT users. There are plenty of people with disabilities who are quite happy to use Internet Explorer, Windows, etc., but there are other people who don’t want to be restricted to a single set of products. We can provide them with more choices, just as we provide those same choices to everyone else.

• We can give AT users more ways to help themselves. Up to now AT products have been created, sold, and supported using the traditional proprietary software model. We can offer AT users not just alternative products but an alternative way of doing things, namely the open source model. This is potentially attractive both to individual users and to organizations advocating on behalf of those users. As Aaron Leventhal put it in his interview,

  Perhaps the most powerful approach is for blindness and other disability-related organizations to work together, and actually hire their own members with the technical skills to go work on the problem. After all, this is open source, so why not make it how you want rather than deal with company X’s idea of accessibility?

  Beyond just “scratching their own itch,” working on open source projects like Mozilla can also be a way for people with disabilities to build their skills and find new job opportunities.

• We can drive new and better accessibility standards for the entire industry. Firefox now has enough market share that we can work with other organizations to develop standards, and then be a key driver for those standard by implementing support for them in our code base and encouraging their implementation in AT products with which we interoperate. DHTML accessibility is just the first example. We’re also having a lot of impact on improving desktop accessibility APIs by explaining how to use them, making them more powerful, and synchronizing them to work in similar ways so that the differences among them are lessened. This will make it much easier for other future cross-platform applications to be accessible. We communicate with the developers of all the various web and desktop accessibility APIs to reduce unnecessary gaps and differences, and in this way and others help bring the whole industry together onto new and better standards, to the benefit of everyone.

• We can support the growth of a new generation of accessibility developers, especially for free and open source software. We can get talented new developers to work on accessibility in Mozilla, and they can then take what they’ve learned to other projects or to other non-accessibility areas of the Mozilla codebase.

• We can help bring the benefits of disruptive innovation to the assistive technology industry. In his interview Aaron has a lot to say about what he sees as the current “state of stagnation” of the AT industry. To be fair, I think that what Aaron sees as stagnation can also be seen as a necessary conservatism caused by the long learning curves for people to become productive with AT products, combined with AT vendors having to continually adapt to whatever changes Microsoft and other software vendors make to their products. In such an environment change is not necessarily always a welcome thing.

  However in the longer run I think that the AT industry will be affected by the same forces for change that are now affecting the software industry at large: the growing popularity of free and open source software (FOSS), the rise of web-based services as an alternative to or even replacement for desktop applications, and the move away from traditional software licensing schemes to alternative business models.

  The Mozilla project is deeply involved in all three of these trends, and as such I think that we can potentially be a force for positive change in the AT industry. To take but one example, in a more web-centric world more and more significant applications will be web-based, and adapting such applications to the user’s particular needs and abilities may be more straightforward in the long run, since the web is based on standard protocols and formats, and the nature of the web means that web applications can be modified and repurposed without necessarily having the cooperation of the application provider. (Greasemonkey is a good example of what’s possible in this domain.)

Where do we go from here?

So, accessibility issues are important to us, and we can play an important role in promoting better accessibility for the Internet and web. How specifically should we proceed? Here’s what the Mozilla Foundation has been doing thus far, and what we could be doing:

• Promote better accessibility for Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. This is our most important priority, has been the primary focus of Aaron’s and others’ work over the years, and is also the primary focus of the accessibility-related grants that the Mozilla Foundation has been making. At present we have a pretty good accessibility story for vanilla Firefox running on Windows; however our story becomes less good when we turn to non-Windows platforms like Linux and OS X, to products other than Firefox (e.g., Thunderbird), and to Firefox extensions and other Mozilla-related add-on products. We need to do more work in all these areas.

  At a platform level, our goal is for Gecko 1.9 to be the first platform that makes it possible to write true cross-platform accessible desktop applications (i.e., using XUL).

• Provide support and advocacy for efforts to make “Web 2.0” applications and services accessible. The Mozilla project has been a pioneer in this area by virtue of Firefox’s support for accessible DHTML. However there’s much more we could be doing, including evangelizing the use of accessible DHTML to web application providers and other browser developers, and helping to support creation of better documentation and tools to help web developers make AJAX-enabled applications more accessible.

  Here our goal is for developers to be able to write powerful web applications with HTML and JavaScript while still offering excellent accessibility. Such applications if written carefully will also have the additional benefit of working well on small devices using browsers like Minimo (since writing accessible web sites is very similar to writing good sites for small devices), as well as providing other benefits such as good search engine optimization.

• Help with other open source accessibility efforts. As we try to improve our own accessibility story on non-Windows platforms, we’ll find that we’re constrained by the accessibility architectures and tools on such platforms. In particular, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done on Linux-based platforms, e.g., to provide better accessibility APIs, screenreader software, and so on. We should help support such efforts if and where it makes sense.

  The accessibility of open source software is important in particular because of the battle in Massachusetts over the Open Document Format—it’s a serious tipping point for government open source adoption. In the past open source software was considered generally inaccessible, which sent the message that customers need to turn to proprietary software companies that are legally required to make their products accessible; otherwise improvements to accessibility wouldn’t happen. Now there’s a counterexample: When people ask whether products that support ODF will ever be as accessible as Microsoft Office, Firefox is often brought up as an example of a product that can be even better in terms of accessibility.

• Help promote and sponsor other new approaches to better accessibility. As noted above, the move to web-based applications opens up some new opportunities to providing better accessibility, and it may make sense for the Mozilla Foundation to sponsor research and development work in this area. As one example, perhaps some of the work being done to provide better systems for bookmarking and site navigation might be adaptable to improving accessibility for complex web sites. (And vice versa: research into improving the accessibility of complex web sites might provide good ideas for how to improve bookmark systems and browser navigation aids.)

In summary, accessibility is important to the Mozilla Foundation and will continue to be important to us. The project has done a lot thus far, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what we might do in the future.

However I don’t want to give the impression that accessibility will be the only or even just the primary focus of the Mozilla Foundation. It just happens to be a good example of the sorts of things I think the Foundation should be involved in: activities that support the overall mission of the Foundation, complement the core product development activities of the Mozilla Corporation, and are consistent with our nonprofit nature.

For all the reasons discussed above I’ll continue to push to have the Foundation be involved in the accessibility arena, but at the same time I’d like to see us become more active in a wide range of other activities. More on this in future blog posts.

Why were we there?

We attended the CSUN conference basically because Aaron Leventhal suggested it to me several months ago, and I thought it sounded like a good idea. More specifically:

• I thought that accessibility was important, and that promoting accessibility in Mozilla-based products was a good task for the Mozilla Foundation to take on.
• Although we were already going to have indirect representation at the CSUN conference (in the form of the IBM team that’s been working on Firefox accessibility), I thought it was important for the Mozilla project to have an “official” presence to show our commitment to making our products accessible.
• Given the release of Firefox 1.5 with improved accessibility support it was a good time to be at the CSUN conference, as we’d have something concrete to promote.

Our goals for the CSUN conference were as follows:

• Promote Firefox 1.5 and its accessibility support to both end users with disabilities and organizations supporting those users.

• Promote new technologies like accessible DHTML to organizations trying to create web sites that implement advanced features (e.g., using AJAX techniques) while still remaining accessible.

• Initiate dialogues with and get feedback from end users, assistive technology vendors, and other organizations (both for-profit and nonprofit) concerned with accessibility issues.

• Start building a community of developers working on Mozilla-related accessibility features, especially those implemented using Firefox extensions.

As noted below we achieved all these goals and more.

Who was there?

Our success at the CSUN conference was due to contributions from lots of people. Here’s who did what:

• The Mozilla Foundation sponsored a booth in the CSUN exhibit area; we were one of over two hundred CSUN exhibitors spread across two hotels.
• The Mozilla Foundation also sponsored travel expenses for four student volunteers actively working on Firefox accessibility extensions and related topics:
  • Charles Chen (University of Texas). Charles has created CLC-4-TTS and Fire Vox, a JavaScript function library and accompanying Firefox extension to make Firefox a “self-voicing” browser for people and platforms that don’t have general-purpose screen reader software.
  • Hans Hillen (University of Amsterdam). Hans is working on a Firefox extension to assist with site navigation and related functions, building on his previous NavAccess work.
  • Brian Romanowski (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Brian is part of a team at UIUC creating an accessibility extension for Firefox, for both end users and web developers.
  • Doug Williams (University of North Carolina). Doug is working to improve Firefox support for Braille displays.The students did booth duty and talked to end users, attended conference sessions, and jump-started some collaborative activities around areas of common interest.
• I did booth duty and represented the Mozilla Foundation in discussions with other organizations.
• Mike Beltzner of the Mozilla Corporation did booth duty, represented the Corporation in discussions with other organizations, and was a co-presenter with Aaron Leventhal at one of the conference sessions (see next item).
• Aaron Leventhal of IBM presented a session “Firefox 1.5: Web Browsing Beyond The Status Quo” with Mike Beltzner and Glen Gordon of Freedom Scientific (creators of the popular JAWS screen reader). Aaron and Mark Pilgrim of IBM also helped out at the Mozilla Foundation booth; Aaron introduced Mike, the students, and I to key people at various assistive technology (AT) vendors, while Mark got feedback on accessibility-related issues for Firefox 2.
• Rafael Ebron of the Mozilla Corporation arranged for us to have a good-looking booth display and a nice collection of Mozilla logo items to hand out to attendees. (The Sharpie Mini markers were a particular hit.)

What happened?

In general the CSUN conference was an “over-the-top success” for the Mozilla project (to quote Aaron Leventhal). Here are some of the highlights of the conference as far as we were concerned:

• With Firefox 1.5 the Mozilla project has a good accessibility story; Firefox has now reached near-parity with Internet Explorer in terms of its support by the dominant screen readers (JAWS and Window-Eyes) and screen magnifier software (ZoomText). Both end users and organizations interested in assistive technology are noticing this, with people stopping by the booth to tell us how much they loved Firefox (even JAWS users, who historically have had problems using Firefox). The conference session on Firefox 1.5 was incredibly popular, with a standing room only audience and over a hundred people turned away at the door. (Aaron repeated the presentation later for people who missed it the first time.)
• There’s more and more support for Firefox by vendors of screen reader software, screen magnification software, makers of special-purpose assistive devices, and so on. In some cases Firefox will be included as a core part of their products and devices. (We saw some very interesting Linux-based devices, a break from traditional Windows-centric AT products.)
• As a result of the accessible DHTML work by Aaron and others at IBM and elsewhere, the Mozilla project and its corporate partners are starting to get a reputation as innovators in this space. Both Victor Tsaran of Yahoo! and Becky Gibson of IBM presented very popular CSUN sessions on DHTML/AJAX accessibility; there’s a groundswell of interest this topic, some coming from surprising places. Accessible DHTML is on track to become a very key technology, with more organizations planning to participate in the W3C Dynamic Web Content Accessibility project working in this area. As Aaron put it, “Both Firefox and DHTML accessibility are officially recognized as the future by the community now. . . . [W]e’re leading the industry to support new web standards which will help the entire web be more accessible.”
• Karen McCall, a well-known accessibility consultant and JAWS user, is the author of a new book on using JAWS 7 with Firefox. Karen told us that she prefers Firefox so much that when she trains government employees to browse the web with JAWS she recommends they ask their IT support staff to have Firefox installed in their systems.
• We are reaching out to try to build potentially productive relationships with other nonprofit organizations interested in accessibility issues, including the National Federation of the Blind, Benetech, and WebAIM. These organizations are interested in innovations like accessible DHTML, and more generally in the power of the power of the open source development model to support user-driven innovations in the accessibility space.
• Last but not least, we are starting to build a larger and more vibrant community of Mozilla/Firefox accessibility developers. Having the student volunteers attend the conference and do booth duty was invaluable in terms of promoting future collaboration between them, learning about users’ needs and wants firsthand, and getting more integrated into the overall Mozilla developer community. (In particular, I recall a conversation between Charles Chen, Mike Beltzner, and Mark Pilgrim in which Charles got to find out how Mozilla development really works.)

What happens next

Clearly given the success of our participation in this year’s CSUN conference it’s an easy decision to return next year for the 2007 conference, with a better booth location if possible (for example, next to or near the IBM booth). We’ll almost certainly sponsor volunteers again next year, albeit with some reasonable limit on the number of attendees. We’ve also been discussing a number of other things to improve the experience next year, e.g., having a CD of all software being demonstrated and a single demo laptop with all software installed, having an “accessibility hackfest” among Mozilla attendees, and so on.

That concludes my conference report. Overall I think that the impact of the Mozilla Foundation’s CSUN- and accessibility-related activities has more than justified the investment that the Foundation has made in them thus far, and I’m looking forward to working with the Mozilla Foundation board of directors to extend our efforts in this area.

P.S. Rich Schwerdtfeger of IBM has another report on the CSUN 2006 conference from an open source perspective.