(photo credit: Jay Goldman)

To tell you the truth, I didn’t know what to expect 4 summers ago when I started at Mozilla. We were in our (extremely small) space on Villa St; Firefox was taking off; I was quickly learning that the Mozilla-style of doing things did not quite match what I expected . I knew that it was an important project; I knew it had smart, unique leaders; I knew that I didn’t understand much about how it could possibly, you know, actually exist.

But it was an undeniably exciting time — tons of people were using and discovering Firefox — there were probably something like 20 million users at that time. Firefox 1.5 was nearly finished; Thunderbird 1.5 was on the way. And it just felt like there was a ton of promise and opportunity on the web that hadn’t been there a year before.

A couple of months after I started we moved into our current offices at 1981 Landings Drive (pictured above), and in the intervening 4 years, tons and tons has happened. Mozilla has grown, of course — into a network of community and contributors around the world that create a product that’s in more than 70 languages and used by more than 300 million people. But the web itself has gone through an enormous explosion of innovation. When we moved into this office in late 2005 was a time before YouTube became huge (they were just 6 months old) — and was really before video on the web was meaningful. It was before Facebook was big — would be another year until they opened up to everyone. And of course it was way before Twitter came on the scene.

And, of course, the world of the browser looks incredibly, impossibly, and wonderfully different today than it did then, with a faster-than-ever Firefox dropping soon, an improved IE8, and Safari, Opera and Chrome each competing and innovating. Oh, and the whole mobile browsing thing happened, too.

In just the four years that we’ve been here — out of the 11 since the Mozilla project started — the web has been transformed, and has itself transformed so much of the way we live our lives. It’s easy to gloss over, since we see the changes every day — and it’s easy to see the road that we’ve traveled on as being inevitable — but it really wasn’t. The reason we have a vibrant, open web today is because of millions of little decisions and contributions made by thousands of people in that timeframe — people who work on browsers, people who build web sites & applications, people who evangelize for standards, people who use the web and ask/demand that it be better.

Leaving this building for our new home at 650 Castro (which, for the eagle-eyed Netscape historian will look familiar) gives me a bit of a chance to reflect on how much our world has changed while we’ve been here, as well as the part Mozilla’s had in effecting that change.

And I have to say that looking forward, I can’t wait to see what the next 4 or 5 years brings, and what we can do from our new home & vantage point. The web continues to be the driver of an unprecedented amount of change, and I don’t see that slowing down any time soon.

So as Mitch likes to say: onward.

I didn’t really know much about the Glass House or the event or what I was getting into when I signed up — only that Diego Rodriguez, who I think quite highly of as a design thinker & friend (go read his blog!), strongly recommended that I participate — so I did, and I’m really glad I did. It was a bit of a different world for me, but gave me much to think about in my own contexts.

I think it’s going to take me a few posts to write this up — I’ll need one for the place/context/history and what the National Trust is trying to do; will need one for the people & objectives of the Conversation Series; will probably need another for the ideas that came up. But want to capture some of my thoughts before they flit away, so will start writing. [I started writing this right away, anyway, but now am just getting around to finishing it.]

Philip Johnson was a complex guy, for sure. One of the leading architects of the Modernist movement, he’s built some of the most influential buildings of the 20th century, from his own residence, the Glass House, to the Seagram Building in NYC, to the Crystal Cathedral. What I didn’t know before is that he’s known as much for the people he influenced and mentored — many of whom were probably better architects.

Anyway, he built this house for himself called the Glass House, and it’s exactly what it sounds like — a house that he lived in for more than 50 years with walls made only of glass.

Building a house that’s completely transparent is more than just an architectural statement (and it definitely is a significant architectural statement) — it’s also a personal statement — a statement of values, of ideals. It’s made more interesting by Johnson himself — among other things, a gay man who had voiced support for Nazi Germany in the 30s (although he later clearly & obviously regretted it and couldn’t really even understand it). Think of that. To be a gay man (not openly, but more of an open secret) in mid-20th century America and deciding to build a house that anyone could see right into, and even through. There’s a lot to parse in there by people who know a lot more about the human psyche than I do, but right off the bat you can see any number of ideas: idealism, design, openness, exhibitionism, power — it’s a really complicated mix of things.

And it’s made more complicated by the fact that the Glass House isn’t really a glass house — or rather, that particular building is made of glass and transparent, but it’s situated in a much larger context — 47 acres of extremely maintained landscape, and something like 19 total buildings that make up, really, a house turned inside out. And the Glass House itself is the only building made of any significant amount of glass. (with the exception of the ceiling of the sculpture museum)

So there’s the Glass House, with a living room, kitchen (although minimal — they called it more of a martini bar), dining area, bathroom (in the brick column), plus some walnut cabinets in the middle. Made of steel & glass, with a red brick floor.

And the Brick House, made up of a small guest room, bathroom & library — purposely built to be a little uncomfortable, because he didn’t like his friends like Andy Warhol staying for more than a couple of days, as he said “guests are like fish, they should only last three days at most.” (Same basic dimensions as the Glass House opposite, same elevation & length, but half the width. (There’s definitely an optical illusion going on there — they look roughly similar.) The irony/symmetry/connection/whatever of the Brick House being opposite the Glass House is incredibly compelling.

And the art gallery, buried under a mound, as an homage to an Egyptian tomb for someone who’s name I now can’t remember. The point that Dorothy Dunn, our guide, made is that it’s a great irony for an art collector to build a house where the walls are glass — no place to hang art! So they built this underground bunker sort of thing, and it can hold a LOT of art for the space — the works are on a sort of giant rolodex system, so you can rotate in whatever art you want to look at. Mix & match. It was fun to get to look at all the things on the wheels behind the works that were showing.

The sculpture gallery, which is built sort of like a hothouse with a glass ceiling — and one of the guys who maintains it confirmed that it often feels like a hothouse — that it’s hotter than hell in the summertime. The space of the sculpture gallery is a little difficult to show with 2 dimensional pictures, so I’ll include a few, as well a bronze cast that is  outside the front door called Ozymandias. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on that particular statement.

One of my favorite buildings is his library — easily 100-200 yards away from the main house — and with a funny sort of shape. But it must have been a cozy place to read and work.

Right near the library, there’s the Ghost House — a primitive archetype of a house, really — I don’t know what it’s really for other than just, you know, looking like a house.

Out on the grounds there are a number of other things — at the front gate, there’s a place for receiving people that we didn’t spend much time near.

And there’s a little man-made lake with a sort of terrace — hard to really make sense of this, since it seems to have been built on a smaller scale, for effect — but you can see from my pictures that if you’re at all taller than me, you had to duck down a bit to be inside.

And a cinder block statue that didn’t make a ton of sense to me — except that it made sense when viewed from the Glass House itself, which I think is part of the point — a lot of the space was designed for experiencing from particular points of view, with the inside of the house being the most important one.

Even the grounds themselves were very manicured and varied, with streams, lots of different textures of foliage, etc.

Make no mistake: this is a beautiful & wondrous place. It’s not remotely like any other place I’ve been or heard of, and it’s amazing. I felt lucky to get a chance to go (tours are booked a year or so in advance, but the access that we got was more than a tour — it was total access, really). I also felt very lucky to get a chance to participate in the discussion on transparency — more on that, plus some more interior (such as it is) photos when I get a few more minutes to write.

I gave a talk & had a conversation to start the week off — I wanted to talk about some of the context that we find ourselves in now and how we can think about becoming a longer term organization, now that Mozilla’s first 11 years are behind us. I focused on the tension between what I’ve come to call Poetry & Pragmatics. The pragmatics of an organization are how you do things; the poetry of an organization is why you do them.

There’s a big difference; they’re both important, and sometimes they amplify each other, sometimes they conflict. Getting the balance right, from day to day, from year to year — that’s the thing that great organizations do over time, and it’s what we need to always think about how to do better.

I also talked a bit about how we’re going to need to change going forward, adjust to new circumstances, avoid holding onto outdated ways of thinking, try new things.

In that spirit, I’ll attach my slides from that talk here — it’s a bit of an experiment for me to post what’s essentially an internal talk — lots of context missing, lots to misconstrue — but I really believe in the content and so figured I’d try sharing. See what you think.

Next week I’m traveling to New York to participate in a conversation at the Philip Johnson Glass House — it’s a sort of design+culture+art salon where a number of leaders talk about various topics and seek to understand and act as catalysts for new sorts of action.

I was invited after an introduction from my friend Diego, who attended a John Maeda-led Conversation last year on Simplicity — Diego reports that his experience there was incredible and thought-provoking.

Our conversation will be moderated by Cliff Pearson of Architectural Record, tackling the topic of “Transparency.” Many of the participants look to be design & architectural — it looks like I’m the lone Left Coast/tech nerd representative. (Think they’ll be surprised when I tweet from our session in the spirit of transparency? )

In that spirit, wanted to blog with some links before I went, and ask you what you think is important to talk about in the context of transparency in our modern society? Transparency of organizations (like companies and governments)? Transparency of products (like open source)? Transparency of thoughts? Action? Buildings? What aspects of transparency deserve more thought & attention & discourse?

(photo credit philipjohnsonglasshouse.org)

A friend, Sean White, kept telling me I should look at Human Computer Interaction — I eventually did, and got involved with the curriculum that Terry Winograd was creating at Stanford, I helped TA for Bill Verplank, read this article by Mitch Kapor, and just generally found the thing that I really, really loved to do, which was try to build computing systems that made sense to people and made them generally happier and more productive. These people are huge in my history, and in the field — they invented so much of what we think of now as software design — I feel incredibly lucky that Sean encouraged me to follow that path, and incredibly lucky to have been at Stanford at that time.

So when Professor Winograd asked if I’d like to give a talk at 547, I of course said yes. CS547 is a seminar course that has been a who’s who of people doing amazing work in design — the list of speakers over the past 15 is truly unbelievable — people who have made real and massive differences in making computing (and the Internet) more accessible, useful, and joyful for people around the world.

As we got closer to the event, I got more reflective on the path that I’ve taken from there to here; the choices that have led me to be more interested in how to help more people do design — to help more people participate and engage and change their world — and how Mozilla represents such a natural point on that path. And of course that made me more self-conscious than ever about speaking in this forum — it’s a small class, but the history and the implications are not.

I was touched that Bill Verplank came by — and happy to get a chance to talk with him, 15 years after being his teaching assistant. And I have to say that I was shocked as I heard myself talk — how many of the ideas that I use today, in 2009, I realized came out of our interactions back then.

Anyway, I was happy to get the chance to talk, in this storied forum, and extremely humbled. And very proud to give the talk with Mike Beltzner, one of my very favorite collaborators and co-thinkers on design. I’ll put the slides below, and you can see video of the talk as well (link is at the bottom of the page — sorry for the WMV!)

To start with, a few pieces of context. I’ve had the first generation Kindle since it came out; got the 2nd generation Kindle (verdict: betterish) when it came out — so now my wife & I are each reading on a Kindle. And we use 1st & 2nd generation iPhones as well. We have a lot of screens. It’s a little ridiculous.

Anyway, I’ve read maybe 50 books on Kindles now — I probably do about half of my book reading on the Kindle. (And none of my newsreading, which is 100% web; and very little of my magazine reading — but The New Yorker on Kindle is growing on me quickly now — suspect The Atlantic won’t be far behind.)

And so the first thing you need to know about all the various Kindle reviews on the web is this: throw them all out. People read differently — everyone is unique in their relationship to (especially) long form writing — what we usually call books. Many, many reviewers on the web have been reviewing the Kindle like they’d review a new laptop or a new cell phone — pick it up, play with the features, make some conclusions & write them up. But I’d wager that a very high percentage of these reviewers don’t read that many long form books, and wrote their reviews, in order to be timely, before they’d really spent much reading time, let alone notetaking, highlighting, etc. That makes a real difference, and I think makes most reviews very very suspect.

When you get time with the Kindle to read longer books, you realize the reflective nature of the eInk page, while far from perfect, is much better for reading lots of pages than an LCD screen is — way easier on your eyes, much more natural feeling. And while everyone wants to touch the text, I think a touch screen is not actually ideal for reading — smudges will be brutal — especially for a non-backlit screen.

So while I was early to try the iPhone app, I was pretty dismissive of it — didn’t think I would use it at all.

But I have, a lot, and it’s changing the way I think about my books. I’ve found myself reading more when out & about — while waiting for my oil change the other day, in between meetings while traveling, etc — all on the iPhone. Because my books are synced — so I have my content with me all the time, and know what page I’m on all the time — it’s easier to read them because I’m more likely to have them with me, in one form or another. Which means that I’ve been keeping the threads of each book more present in my head, which tends to reinforce my desire to read more, as opposed to alternative timewasting activities (especially when traveling) like news reading, video watching, or iPhone Yahtzee playing (I’m addicted, a little, but I could totally stop any time I wanted to.)

So this is sort of a shocking development for me: the iPhone Kindle + physical Kindle + library of books in the cloud is actually extending my attention span and increasing my reading, which has been on the decline for the past few years. It’s making me want all my books to be cloud-accessible and sharable with Kathy’s Kindle, too (not to mention others in my friends & family circles). The ability to view notes on the iPhone means that I can blog books with quotes even without the Kindle, which was a challenge before.

And so it makes me want to have my long form reading content + notes available & searchable on my laptop as well, naturally.

So you can see where things are heading: the utility of having ubiquitous access to content will ultimately trump the old forms. There’s no going back. I said it when I first got my Kindle, and it remains truer than ever: I thought that it was books that I really loved — but I was wrong — it’s reading longer form articles & stories & novels & histories — it’s the words and ideas and flow that I really love.

Happily, the Kindle ecosystem reinforces that feeling a ton — surprised & pleased.

[and yes, the DRM is killing me. it really gets in the way of legitimate book-type sharing. i really don't like the closed nature of the system. but i think, like music, that this will fall over time.]

For now, I want to capture this one thing: on both a personal and professional level, TED is amazing and transformative. It’s chic to be sort of cynical about the conference circuit, glib about how you’ve seen things like this before. But it’s not appropriate in this case. I feel that virtually every interaction & talk over the past 3 days has made me want to become better at what I do, and to do more to change the world we live in as well. It’s made me want to do more at Mozilla, but beyond that to be a more present and thoughtful human, husband and father.

Because my first experience at TED has been one where being smart is cool, where using data is obviously the right way to do things, where science rules, where art transforms. It makes me think harder about what to do at work to have a greater impact, and what to do at home to be a better family member.

It’s as good an event as I’ve ever been to, and especially with all the cynicism in our world today, I think it’s important to note TED as a force that promotes education, science, and art as a way to improve the world.

More soon, as my brain recovers.

ps – everyone here uses Firefox.

I was tagged by Deb & Tristan. (you’re both on notice)

The Rules

1. 1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. 2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. 3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. 4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

My 7 Things

• My direct ancestors include Robert E. Lee and also people who came over on the Mayflower.
• My dad was in the US Air Force growing up, and so I’ve lived in many different places, but all in the US. I was born in Sacramento, CA, then: Fort Walton Beach, FL, St. Simon’s Island, GA, Rome, NY, Omaha, NE, Las Vegas, NV, and went to high school in San Antonio, TX. I’ve lived in my current house probably longer than anywhere else in my life. (5 years)
• I was a band geek. And a Latin geek. And a math geek. Competed in all of them in school, at state & national levels. For all the stereotypes, I  look back on all those experiences with exceptional fondness, and they were all foundational to me. Oh, also, computer geek.
• I met my wife, Kathy, my freshman year in high school (1984), when we dated on & off (and in band, as it turns out). We got back together 10 years later, and then married in 2000. By total coincidence, her mother and my mother were in the same sorority at Emory at the same time and knew each other. (Dad was at Emory also.)
• I really like television a lot. A LOT. The Wire is my favorite, and I really miss Arrested Development (although 30 Rock has its moments). And Buffy, a lot. But to tell you the truth, and I know this will be disillisioning to many of you, I’m starting to lose my taste for it, and often lately can’t even find anything to watch. Impossible, and very sad, I know. ["Teacher, mother, secret lover." -- name the quote!]
• The job I held the longest in high school was as a short-order cook at a Chinese fast food restaurant called Qwik Wok. I was pretty marginal at that, but can cook a LOT of fried rice at once. One time I took an egg roll because I was really hungry. Got busted. I’m like the opposite of sneaky.
• My favorite movie of all times, without reservation, is Bull Durham. I can’t escape it when it’s on.

My Tagees (I’m terribly sorry)

• Adam, because he needs something that’s not just BSG to write about this week.
• Diego, because he’s awesome, is writing more lately, and I bet will have something gnarly to say.
• Bob, because I’m interested to see whether he’ll do it or not, and what he’ll say.
• Klep, because he’s funny as hell and should write more.
• Mitch, since he’s been so interesting on Twitter lately. (mkapor — follow!)
• Joshua, because he called me grouchy last night. Maybe you can use your 20% time for it.
• Tariq, who I guarantee will say something surprising.

Huggy Rao is a very smart guy who teaches and writes at Stanford — I’ve gotten to know him a little bit over the past year or so, and think very highly of him. So when he asked me to read his upcoming book, I was of course very interested.

It’s a book about how markets are shaped by rebels and insurgents — about how hot (as in tense) situations create the context for cool (as in jazz) reactions and solutions. He looks at the rise of auto clubs, microbreweries, and more.

The relevance for Mozilla is clear, of course, and so I gave Huggy a quote he ended up using for the book jacket. A very academic book, but highly readable and relevant, and I think more relevant than ever given the way that markets are increasingly looking like politics. (A subject for another post.)

Highly recommended.

It’s been interesting to be back — both incredibly familiar and pretty foreign to me. [As an aside, I have different feelings when I engage with the d.school -- I think maybe it's because I've gotten more involved with Diego & Bob & George and design later in my life, and am increasingly interested in those sorts of problems -- so I associate undergraduate CS education at Stanford with some exceptionally strong (and fond) emotions that come along with growing up in college.]

On the incredibly familiar side, I understood all the language; I recognized section leaders pulling a huge stack of papers out of their bags; using the time before the class to grade those programs; talking about whether something deserved a “check” or a “check plus.” I recognized the tiredness that comes from going all the time, but also the common fun & shared interest of the section leaders. And while I guess my time at Stanford pre-dated Joss Whedon, I even recognized the feeling when they all started talking about how much they love Dr. Horrible. And of course, of course, I remember looking forward and wondering what life in the world was going to look like, how I was gonna convince someone to give me a job I probably wasn’t really qualified for, and, really, what the hell people at work did with all their time.

On the unfamiliar side, holy cow these students know so much today, about so many things that are important. In 1995 when Bryan and I were both getting ready to start at Trilogy, I think we had a pretty good idea of what companies like Apple and Intel and HP did, but beyond that, not so much. But the students I talked with yesterday & Monday are incredibly informed. They understand the differences between Firefox & Chrome & Safari & IE, and even the implications of those differences. They understand how the Facebook platform works — many have written Facebook apps or web apps that are already in the world. And they understand more than I would have imagined about open source, which makes me hugely optimistic.

They asked lots of great questions. Some were super-specific, about things like what we’re going to do with Ubiquity over the next year, how we think about competition with Chrome, what it is, exactly that product managers do. (That last question I told them they’ll be asking for a pretty long time.)

But also things like how to decide what job to take? How to measure success? How much risk should I take right now? Does it matter if I do systems or AI or HCI?

And, of course, all of us older folks on the panel found ourselves saying things like “well, you won’t really get this now, but…” or “it took me 3 jobs to really figure out anything about that”. But the coolest thing, really, was that everyone on the panel agreed that the single most important thing was to not over-think it, to do what makes you engaged and interested — to do, in Tom Kosnik’s words, “things that make your soul sing.” And more importantly, to do things that matter to people, that change the world, that make things better. And even with all the economic doom around (more on that in my next post), that message of small groups of people getting together to change the world really resonated and made sense.

So with distance now, some things are clearer, some things not so much — that’s a characteristic of being human, I suppose. But I’m excited about this next group of people who are ready to change the world.

Sheila’s got a new post up about changes to OSAF — and the move to a mostly volunteer organization. As part of the transition, it’s made sense for Mitchell, Katie and myself to step off the board, and to bring in some exceptionally interesting and talented new members.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the results of the last few years at OSAF have been mixed — with significant contributions coming in the areas of CalDAV (yay!), and thinking about user interface for task management — but without as much implemented as everyone would have liked. For the record, the chronicling of the project in Dreaming in Code, was not, it seemed to me, quite fair or accurate, and I feel that there were significant missed conclusions in it.

The recent 1.0 release is significant and has many diehard users.

I’m proud to have been associated with OSAF and the leadership there, including Al, Mitch, Katie, Sheila and many others, and I’m happy that there’s a new, stronger board in place to be stewards going forward. I’m looking forward to watching what comes next. Congrats to Sheila, Jared, Andre, Alex & Eugene!