2007

Personal stuff / politics — 2 Comments
14
Nov 07

no new library for sunnyvale

Last week was election day — and one of the things I was really hoping would pass, Measure B to support building a new library here in Sunnyvale, lost. Lost big, actually: we needed 2/3 and only mustered 59%. That’s a gigantic margin, and I think indicates broadbased opposition to the new building, or at least the $108M price tag.

I’m a bit discouraged by the vote — the library that we have in Sunnyvale is way too small for the population it serves, and is nearly 50 years old. It’s funny in that while I worked on the campaign and am also on the Library Board here, getting a new library doesn’t have a lot of effect on my own life. I tend to buy my books, I tend to access the Internet, well, everywhere. But I think it’s an important public good, so worth supporting.

Anyway, I think that I now believe that the combination of soaring construction costs, a general population who’s losing touch with libraries (and maybe books), and a fiscally conservative city government taken together mean that Sunnyvale may never get a new library. Branches maybe, a bookmobile maybe. But I think this may mark the last opportunity to get a real central library built.

On reflection, I’m not really sure whether I think that’s a bad thing. I know that my personal relationship with books is changing. I’m still reading a lot, of course, but I’m consuming a larger percentage of my content either on the Internet now or in video form. I’m starting to get annoyed that books are so heavy and take so much space in my house, not to mention that they’re a pain to move. I really, really want the eReader that’s coming from Amazon to be useful and have great content. I’ll switch in a flash.

I’m starting to think more about what needs it is that libraries satisfy, and whether we can reasonably expect a building 30 years from now to satisfy needs then. It feels to me like our pace of change is speeding up now, and I hesitate to predict what public spaces for collaboration and learning will look like even 10 years from now. (A visit to university classrooms today is incredibly provocative for me — they’re nothing like they were 15 years ago when I was there.)

So while I’m disappointed that we didn’t get the bond passed, I’m now thinking it might be a good challenge/opportunity to try to escape the constraints of big buildings for libraries. What’s next?

While I’ve got you here: Jim Griffith, Sunnyvale resident and a friend of mine, did an incredible amount to try to get this bond passed. Phone banked every night. Raised a ton of money. Got a campaign headquarters and dozens of endorsements. Put up lawn signs. Wrote op-ed pieces. Went to meeting after meeting after meeting. Jim’s work makes me hopeful that local government can work.

nerdTech / OSX — 2 Comments
14
Nov 07

stacks and bins on leopard

this is a really beautiful hack to address the unfortunate icon mess that stacks in the leopard dock are. i’ve been looking at my new bins all day and am super, super happy that i changed it. it’s the small things.

Mozilla / Travel — Comments Off on Tokyo
14
Nov 07

Tokyo

Just got to my hotel in Tokyo, going to take a shower then go to a meetup here with, hey — other people who live near me in Silicon Valley! 🙂

Really here to see Chibi and Kaori and Gen and Kohei and Joi and Nobu and other folks from Mozilla Japan as we think about what to do here in 2008. It’s been fun and productive to work with the team here as they’ve grown from just a couple of folks 2 years ago to a real office now. Japan is a tough culture/market to really crack for open source, but Chibi (Takita-san, head of Mozilla Japan) has worked hard on raising awareness of OSS here for years, and is making real headway. I’m excited to talk with her, the board, and the rest of Mozilla Japan tomorrow.

But tonight, Web2 types. 🙂

2 random tidbits: (1) in Japan, my iPhone seems to be an iPod — no connectivity at all, and (2) I haven’t been here in a year or so, and am reminded what a great place Tokyo is. I’ve been to lots of great places in the past couple of years — Tokyo really is one of the world’s great cities, alongside London and Manhattan, in my view.

Mozilla / nerdTech — 2 Comments
13
Nov 07

congratulations Miro!!

One of my very favorite software projects, Miro, launches their 1.0 today! I’ve written about this before, when Miro was called the Democracy Player. Today represents the culmination of two years of hard work by the Miro team, and a serious start at reinventing video. As Josh Quittner at Fortune points out, this makes even more sense in the context of the WGA strike — entertainment is changing quickly, for sure.

[2 disclaimers: (1) Miro uses Mozilla technology for their Windows & Linux versions, and (2) I’m on the Board of Directors of the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation, who makes Miro.]

Mozilla — 8 Comments
12
Nov 07

uncategorized

I’ve been thinking a lot the past day or so about Noam Cohen’s piece in the New York Times about Mozilla. It’s really been rattling around inside my head because it missed so much of the essence of what Mozilla is and what we’re doing. It’s ostensibly a story about how Mozilla has sort of grown up — going from cute little underdog to corporate competitor. Here’s one line: “But in trying to build on this success, the Mozilla Foundation has come to resemble an investor-backed Silicon Valley start-up more than a scrappy collaborative underdog.”

But here’s the thing: by trying to categorize Mozilla with simple labels (SV start-up, scrappy underdog, cold war proxy (!), corporation, open source project, on and on…), he’s missing the point. Mozilla is a complicated thing, filled with tensions and subtleties.

We’re an open source project. We’re also a set of companies around the world.

We have distributed decision making. We also make some centralized decisions.

We’re a non-profit. We also pay people competitive wages for the industry and the geographies that they live in.

Our mission is to keep the Internet a medium of participation by everyone. We also care about Firefox market share because that’s our most useful tool at the moment to achieve the mission.

We do resemble a startup — we recruit talented techies who could work anywhere in the world, we work 24/7 on our technology, we participate in industry events. But we’re trying to build an organization — and an idea — that can last 50 or 100 years, and can make the Internet experience better for all.

We’ve got business relationships with Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and many others. But we prioritize the user experience over any business term.

We have a mission, but we also compete, in direct ways, for the hearts and minds and clicks of humans using the Internet.

We have a lot of money in the bank compared to any other open source project. We don’t have much compared to anyone else who’s generally considered competitive with us.

We donate money to other projects, but we also use money that we have to further our public benefit mission.

We build applications that people use — Firefox is one of them — but we also provide a technology platform with an open license that many, many developers have built great things on, commercial or otherwise.

I could go on and on and on. Mozilla doesn’t fit into clean categories — it never has, in my view. It didn’t fit neatly into a category when it started as an experiment at Netscape nearly a decade ago. It didn’t fit neatly when the small team left AOL to start something completely new called the Mozilla Foundation. And it doesn’t fit now, as an organization/company/project/product with more than 100 million people around the world using Firefox and with something approaching $100M in the bank.

I think it does a disservice to the project to over-constrain Mozilla with simple labels. I’m glad that Noam got as many of the facts right as he did. And I’m glad that more people are starting to tell the story about who Mozilla is and what it’s trying to do in the world — it’s an important story. We’re trying to do a better job at helping folks understand the story, too, in all it’s messy, complicated, contradictory and uncategorized glory.

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