I’ve written about my trip there before on this blog; they’ve also put up a page with a video about our conversation there on Transparency. It was a unique and amazing experience — and an interesting conversation and day took place. As the video makes pretty clear, a lot of people came in with the expectation of talking primarily about physical and architectural transparency, but I’ve been more interested in transparency as a metaphor — as a way to live your life, as a way to manage organizations. A lot of interesting ideas came out of the blending of physical and metaphorical ideas of what transparency is.

Of course, in my time at Mozilla this has been a theme we’ve come back go again and again, as we try to learn and discover how to lead effectively in an organization built on ideals of transparency. (That isn’t the only ideal, and there are many others that it interacts with regularly, but it is an important one for us.)

Leading transparently is often hard – it’s tough to know how to be most effective, how to get things done – and often, being transparent seems to be counterproductive. John Maeda, after spending his first year as President of RISD trying to be as transparent as possible, wrote this piece on transparency versus clarity, and a lot of things clicked for me as I read it – I’ve come back to it often over the past year or so.

And then the Wikileaks/Afghanistan papers situation occurred — and while leaking confidential information is nothing new, I think that the scope of the information leaked, and the way that it was leaked, is something that is quite modern. It raises a serious question: is it even possible to keep secrets in organizations and governments now? Should it be? Is this new transparency good, destructive, a little bit of both, or is it just too early to tell?  Jeff Jarvis posted a nice piece for thinking about this a couple of weeks back.

I’ve got lots of thoughts here, as you might imagine — living and breathing Mozilla over the past 5 years has made some things very clear and others not so much but not that many answers myself, so I’d love to hear (and engage with) a broad range of thoughts on this during the week.

I’m very happy to be moderating this Glass House Conversation online. Please contribute.

I’ll be in my role here at Mozilla until we conclude a successful search for a new CEO, and intend to stay involved and on the Board of Directors.

I’ll have more to say about Mozilla over the next few months as we go through transition — I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve done over the last several years, and very optimistic about what the future holds.

And I’ll have  more to say about Greylock as I move into my new role there. Venture investing is what I’ve wanted to do for quite a long time — I’ve been involved in many startups, even building an incubator a decade ago, and have interests that span enterprise, open source, and the broader web, among others. I’m incredibly excited to join an amazing team there — it’s a firm that I’ve noted to be incredibly strongly oriented towards entrepreneurs — it really matches my sensibilities as an operator extremely well.

Will be blogging and tweeting (@johnolilly) as per normal — more soon. Below is the letter I sent to everyone here at Mozilla, who I am deeply indebted to and proud of.

Everyone,

As my five year anniversary at Mozilla approaches, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to move on to my next role sometime later this year. This won’t happen today or tomorrow — I expect to be here and working for several months yet, and I’m planning to stay on the Board of Directors.

This is a tough note for me to write — I feel so incredibly lucky and humbled to have worked on such an amazing project, with such spectacular people, for the last few years.

But I’ve always been a startup guy at heart — Mozilla was originally going to be a quick volunteer effort for me, but quickly turned into a full time job, and at the beginning of 2008 turned into the CEO job that I have now. I’ve really been missing working with startups, and want to learn how to invest in and build great new startups, so am planning to join Greylock Partners as a Venture Partner once we transition here.

I’m in no rush, and the most important thing to me is to build the strongest Mozilla we can, with the best leadership possible. So my plan is to stay through that transition — we’re starting a CEO search now, and plan to do it in as transparent a way as possible — which means I’ll continue in my CEO role as normal for several more months, at least.

I’ll have more to say on the transition as we figure things out more clearly, but for now, business as usual. We’ve got Firefox 4 to ship, and Firefox on multiple mobile platforms. We’ve got our web services like Weave to stand up and make available to millions of users.

For now, though, I really want to communicate a deep gratitude to each of you — over the past few years we’ve done an amazing amount together, and changed the world in so many meaningful ways. 400 million users are directly touched every day by the work we’ve done so far, and many, many more are using better browsers because of our work. There are many more contributions and victories to come.

John

While fights over jurisdictional basis will provide ample material for debate and discussion, what’s most important is that the open Internet principles are adopted. An open Internet is essential to the continued innovation, growth, and entrepreneurship that has changed our lives and created a host of new opportunities.

Let’s not forget, the Internet is young. For example, it’s been roughly 7,000 days since the announcement of the world wide web. Who would have predicted its impact on our lives in this short period? Companies like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook didn’t even exist 2,200 days ago. There is no dispute that the web has facilitated profound social, economic, and even political change all around the world. Even notions that were once new like “ecommerce” have faded away, as now, nearly all forms of commerce touch upon or utilize the Internet. Remember when we even wondered whether people would shop online? A 2009 study by Professor John Quelch published in the Harvard Business Review estimated that the web accounted for $85 billion in annual retail transactions.

Openness is the quintessential quality of the Internet upon which all of these developments are founded. Given our experience in this short time, what the next 7,000 days will look like is no doubt uncertain. What is certain, however, is that if we fail to preserve and protect the open Internet, we risk losing the full promise of the web. That’s a risk not worth taking, especially in light of what we’ve seen so far.

We commend the Commission for its efforts to strike the proper balance of preservation without over-reaching. What Chairman Genachowski has proposed demonstrates exceptional awareness of the importance of preserving key principles of Internet openness without wholesale over-regulation.

I’ll explain the significance of the picture later, but for now, here’s the background: it’s me, on a Christmas morning a long time ago, in the basement of the Rome, NY house where we lived. Obviously, I’m adorable, but that’s not my point right now. The more important feature of the picture is the television at the right — it’s a Heathkit, and I’ll talk about it more below.

Ever since the iPad was announced & described, I’ve had the elements of a post swirling around in my head. My friend Ben last week wrote his, and it says a lot of the things that I was planning to say — you should go read it. I don’t necessarily think all of the same things are important, although I agree with him on most of it. For me, the essential point is that we — Americans, netizens, techies, almost any grouping that I can think of that’s meaningful — are at our best when we are makers, when we tinker, when we invent. We’re at our best when we’re taking things apart — whether it’s technology, laws, organizations — twisting them around to see how they work, tweaking them this way and that, and eventually creating something new.

Invention and entrepreneurship is at the heart of change and progress; hacking and tinkering is the thing that leads to that invention.

In a nutshell, what worries me about the trajectory of computing is not so much the emergence of tightly-controlled, non-tinkerable boxes, but the presumption that “normal people” don’t ever want to tinker, don’t want to be bothered with understanding how things work. I think it’s not true, really — certainly not for everyone — but I even think that this distinction between “normal people” and “tinkerers” or “techies” or “makers” is bogus at best, and really dangerously corrosive at worst.

So like Ben, I’ll get an iPad and am really excited about it from an interaction point of view (so please be clear, this is not an anti-iPad rant or an anti-Apple rant), and because it makes computing more human scale than ever — just like my Kindle has done. But I have real misgivings about it because of the controlled, closed stance that it’s starting from, and that other technology companies and technologists are adopting.

But first, a little bit of a story about my own background and evolution as an engineer, and how that happened at all.

When I was growing up, I remember my dad futzing around with everything. I remember him having a workshop in each of the houses we lived in (we moved around every few years as the Air Force stationed him in different places). I remember him working on our cars, our plumbing, and on our electrical systems in every house, on appliances, everything. I remember we seem to have built a deck for every house we ever lived in.

But I have this especially strong memory that until I was probably 10 or 11, every television we bought would come in a kit, as a box full of parts, that Dad would put together — it was always a project for him. Now, as a kid, having a Heathkit television was basically mortifying. I mean, I just wanted us to go buy a “normal” television at Sears like everyone else did. Our TV didn’t look like other folks, and being different as a kid is always a tough feeling.

And, in fact, our first computer was a Sinclair Z-80 that, you guessed it, came in a kit. Then, since there was no prepackaged software to run on it, I typed in a bunch of BASIC programs from BYTE magazine. Good times.

The upside of that awkward feeling as a kid, though, has been significant and long lasting. The upside is that I’ve never really viewed technology as something that was magic. It always had components that added up to the whole, that you could replace, that you could mix in different ways. I’ve always felt like technology (and organizations, and laws, and most everything else) comes to us in a way that we should be poking at it, thinking about how things work, wondering how to make things better, wondering what would happen if you removed certain things.

I think people will say to me: “Well, of course. You’re an engineer; you’re a tinkerer. That’s what engineers do — normal people don’t assume they can rewire their house, or swap out a power supply on their TV or change the way an operating system works.”

But I think that’s bogus. It’s not like I was born an engineer — the instinct to fiddle with things isn’t something we’re born with. I became a tinkerer because I was exposed to surfaces that allowed — that invited — it. I figured out that I liked tweaking and building and creating because I got a bunch of chances to do that stuff, from hardware to software and everything in between. I knew I could do it because Dad modeled that behavior, but also because the stuff we had around the house was inspectable and malleable.

Don’t misunderstand: I don’t think it’s a real problem that I can’t change the capacitors in my television today — I think that the most interesting surfaces for tinkering tend to evolve over time — and today the primary tinkering substrate appears to me to be the open web.

What I do think is a problem is that today, unless you buy the Apple SDK you can’t modify the software on the device that you already purchased — that jailbreaking is criminalized and actively fought against. That’s a problem not because $99 is so exorbitant, but because people who don’t know they could be tinkerers — who haven’t gotten the chances that they need — won’t ever get them in that situation. That’s a problem.

I do think there’s tremendous creativity being unleashed by the rise of the iPhone and next the iPad — that’s a great thing. And I don’t really have any problem with Apple building systems the way they want to — they create excellent products and experiences.

The thing that I’m worried about is this feeling that seems to be growing in technology communities that “normal people” — these non-tinkerers — don’t want to tweak things, shouldn’t be allowed to tweak things, can’t be trusted with technical matters. Many will choose not to, I completely agree. But we shouldn’t presume such.

We all have the potential inside us to make things. But we’re not born into the world as makers — the world around us — the people in it and the artifacts in it — help us to discover what we can be.

There are a lot of things to say here, and I’ll repost the content of our letter below (you can find it as well at opentochoice.org, a mini-site we’ve set up to celebrate and explore the choices that we have and need).

But the argument we’re making boils down to this:

• The Web browser colors the way that you see and interact with the Web — it’s an increasingly important mediating piece of technology.
• We’ve built Firefox to reflect the values of user control and security — and we always will. There are short and long term implications of this design point of view.
• But more important than choosing Firefox is that people make informed choices about the technology they use — it’s more important that you understand why you’re using the tools you’re using than any one specific choice.

We feel, too, like the issue of putting users, not servers, in control of their online lives will keep coming up more and more loudly in the coming months and years. Not everyone is working from the same point of view, and choices will matter in the long run.

I hope that you’ll write & blog & tweet about the important aspects of choice and user control as well, to add your voice to the conversation.

Web Browser Choice Matters

Our lives are full of choices. Where to eat? What to read? Who to spend time with?

The choices we make determine the quality of our life, and how we see the world. So many of these choices we take quite seriously, weighing the consequences, thinking about the implications, and choosing carefully and thoughtfully.

So it’s strange, then, that the majority of people in the world haven’t ever considered the Web browser on their computer or mobile phone — that so many people every day use the browser that comes by default.

It’s an important choice because the Web browser has become one of the most critical and trusted relationships of our modern lives – with nearly perfect knowledge of everything we do. It is the lens through which we look at the virtual world, and the medium by which we connect, learn, share, and collaborate. The browser you choose is responsible for providing you with the necessary tools to manage your online life, and to protect your privacy and security.

And so we’re pleased to support the European Commission and Microsoft in also recognizing how important choice is. In accordance with a landmark settlement, if you’re using a Windows PC in Europe and you’re still using the default Web browser, in the coming weeks and months you’ll see a Browser Choice screen appear. That screen will provide you the opportunity to make an active choice in the source of the software that acts on your behalf to broker your online experiences, and meet your own unique needs and interests.

As an international non-profit organization, Mozilla has always believed that the freedom to make smart choices should be central to making the Web, and the world, a better place. This shows through with Mozilla Firefox, a free, open-source Web browser that more than 350 million people around the world have chosen to use every day. Values of choice and self-determination are built into everything that we do, including Firefox.

We believe that the Browser Choice screen is an important milestone towards helping more people take control of their online lives — and we hope for the conversation to become broader and deeper. We’ve set up opentochoice.org as one place for you to discuss what this choice means to you — and we hope that you’ll add your own voice to this conversation and those to come.

Whether or not you decide to keep your current Web browser, we encourage you to learn more about your browser and the impacts it has on the way you see the world, and to make your own choice.

Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Chair & John Lilly, Mozilla CEO

A few thoughts on the comparisons — I think I’m not adding much here that hasn’t already been written:

• The fit & finish of the hardware I like on the Nexus One a little better than on my iPhone — but you should take that with a grain of salt, since my iPhone is more than a year old.
• Nexus One is much faster than my 3G iPhone, which is getting slower and slower with higher latency all the time.
• The web is a much more legitimate first class citizen on Android than on the iPhone — should be no surprise. It’s just more integrated in dozens of ways. Not as totally web native as Palm, but still really good.
• Notifications on Android, and background processes that can fetch data and fire notifications, are much, much better than anything on iPhone. (Except for the inability to have app badges — seems like they should add those soon.)
• And I really like that there are indicator lights — the trackball and the charging light — on the Nexus One to tell you things without needing to unlock the phone.
• The virtual keyboard on Android has some good advances, but ultimately doesn’t enable the quick accuracy of the iPhone — I think the iPhone is messing with hit targets as you type, depending on the likelihood for each letter — and it helps tremendously.
• I’m no longer really worried about the lack of applications on Android — it seems very clear that everyone will start writing apps for both iPhone and Android as first tier platforms — but I am a little concerned about the quality of the app experience on Android — the apps just don’t feel like they’re put together nearly as well. It seems like they can access more of the operating system than iPhone apps can, so they should ultimately be more compelling, but the user experience just is very inconsistent at best, and really awful at worst. This is clearly due to the SDK for each OS — Apple’s SDK just seems to allow developers to put together applications that feel better overall. This is just one area where the battle feels a lot like we’re repeating history with an Apple platform versus a more open platform.
• Google Voice on the Nexus one is a fantastic experience. It’s very clear that traditional telephony is walking dead.

At the end of the day, though, my iPhone experience is just more intimate than my Android experience — it feels more like it has my life on it, while the Android just feels like a very good phone and mobile web device. It’s just easier to get more of what I care about — my pictures, my music, my movies, games I like, and all my books (via the Kindle app) on my iPhone. So it feels more like an integrated part of my life than the Android. As frustrated as I am with my current iPhone 3G because of battery life & sluggishness & general physical-falling-apart, I still feel better when I have it than an Android.

So I’m encouraged by the advances of Android & the Nexus One — and fully expect that the huge array of players in the ecosystem will push things forward more quickly now — ultimately, we as consumers really need a platform for our mobile lives that’s an alternative to Cupertino — not because of what Apple is per se, but because multiple choices means that everyone has to get better.

1. In general, the Net has been neutral for the really explosive innovation phase over the last 15 years or so. Much of what’s being proposed is about protecting that.

2. There’s good experience & real data from around the world that supports neutrality as we move from the first phase of broadband rollout to the next. If you have the time, I highly encourage you to read the FCC-commissioned Broadband Study from the Berkman Center (with Yochai Benkler as Primary Investigator) [PDF link]. There’s actual data in it (a lot of it) and worldwide experience that we can use to develop our own policy.

3. Making sure that the mobile Internet is as open as the wired Internet has been is crucial. We need 1 global Internet, not a collection of non-open ones.

Beyond all that, it’s worth taking the time to read the Chairman’s speech of a couple of weeks back. It’s a fantastic and inspirational speech.

For the record, when they announced that I work for Mozilla on Firefox, everyone burst into applause, so that helped a lot.

The emerging theme is that everyone who’s had any type of success has had more than their fair share of mistakes, of periods of muddling through.

Anyhow, this is what I said during my 10 minutes…

————————-

I started preparing for this talk like I always do: by blogging & tweeting. I asked people what sorts of advice they’d give to their high school selves that wouldn’t sound like safely ignorable advice from an old guy. I didn’t get back a ton that met that test, honestly, except the sentiment that no matter what I said, it’ll probably sound like advice from an old guy (I’m a little sensitive about getting older now because I just got back from my 20th high school reunion!).

Vicky asked me to talk today about how we got where we are, and what we did to get here, and where we’re heading.

So as I started thinking about what to talk with all of you about, I found that I kept thinking about the turning points in my life — the inflection points where something I did or decided had a really profound impact on what my life would become. And it’s not that hard — I can look back at the 20 years or so since I was sitting where you were (more or less), and pinpoint a bunch of them — maybe 5 or 10 that really made a difference.
And here’s the thing: thinking back on all of them, when I was making those decisions, I never really had much idea that they were very important decisions. Let me say that again: for most of the important turning points in my life, I treated them with a little less seriousness than, you know, buying my next iPod. Now, I’m not saying that I didn’t recognize that sometimes decisions would have effects, or that I didn’t take them seriously. What I’m saying is that a bunch of decisions that I thought were really important turned out to be not important at all, and some things I decided to do just for fun changed everything (like when I went to visit an old high school friend in Jamaica who would eventually become my wife.)

Here’s a quick story to illustrate a turning point that I didn’t realize until much later. When I was a junior in college, I had decided to major in computer science, and was starting to get interested in something called Human Computer Interaction — designing systems for people to be able to use them effectively. I went to a lunchtime seminar by a guy named Robert Cailliau — a physicist from Switzerland of all places — and he brought with him a giant black computer called a NeXT — Steve Jobs’ creation that would eventually turn into the Macintosh that we know today. He started giving a demo of a program where you could bring up a page full of text and pictures, and click on blue underlined text to get to other pages full of text and pictures. And I remember saying to myself, “Huh, I guess that’s sort of neat — text & pictures, click click click.” And the next thing I remember was waking up when everyone was gathering up all their stuff to leave — I had fallen asleep — and missed, of course, the first demonstration I’d ever seen (or most people had ever seen) of the World Wide Web. So there you go — one of those powerful inflection points in my life — and I slept through it.

My theme throughout my few minutes here is going to be this: you never know when a decision you make is going to have a profound effect in your life. At least, I’ve never been able to tell. So my coping strategy — what I do to make everything work for me — is try to put myself into situations where there are tons of great choices, tons of great people, tons of great outcomes possible — so that it makes the odds that I make some really important & good choices that much better.

In high school, I felt like had everything pretty together — I loved math & physics in particular, and did pretty well — figured that I’d major in physics and if I didn’t get straight A pluses, I’d mostly get them. So of course I got to Stanford my freshman year, took my first physics class and proceeded to get my ass kicked. It was pretty horrifying, actually. Have you ever seen those bar charts with the numbers of people who got each grade? A histogram distribution of how everyone did? Yeah, so I had my own solitary bar, way over to the left hand side of the chart — and that’s not the good side. I quickly decided maybe physics wouldn’t be for me, but I did really start to enjoy computer science, and that’s where I focused.

Anyway, from Stanford I went to a startup in Austin where I realized I’d never be world class at programming or designing, but I could be world class at some other stuff — things like finding great people and hiring them and building awesome groups.

After a couple of years I went back to Apple, where I had been an intern during college — put yourself into situations where there are mostly great choices, remember? 1997 was an odd time at Apple — it’s when Steve came back and changed the place immediately — he’d always been a bit of an idol of mine. But as he started making decisions to change Apple, I saw them hurt a lot of the people there who I really cared about and respected — so then, at age 26, I decided it was time to start creating my own thing, and I set off with my mentor from Apple, my 2 best friends, and we started our own company, Reactivity. And through Reactivity, I got to meet and work with many of the people I’m closest to now & who are my mentors and peers and co-conspirators.

We did that for 7 years before I decided it was time for me to do something else. (and a little while after I left, Reactivity was bought by Cisco, a happy event for everyone.)

And then, as I say, another accident. I was looking around for what to do next — I thought I might start a new company or become a venture capitalist — but during that time I got to know this little team of people at Mozilla — there were probably 15 employees at the time (but a much larger community) — they had just released Firefox about 6 months earlier, and they were changing the world. So I joined. My basic line of reasoning went like this: how often do you get a chance to really change the world?

I think not all that much, to be honest. Since then, I’ve moved through a few jobs at Mozilla, becoming the CEO about 18 months ago. Now we’re up to about 250 employees around the world — places like California and Toronto and Paris and Tokyo and Beijing and Auckland — and about 300 million people (nearly 25% of the web) use our software each month to interact with the web.

Now we’re spending our time on a few things: working on making Firefox on Windows & Mac & Linux better than ever — we just released version 3.5 last month, and are already working on the next few. We’ve got a mobile version coming out — not for iPhone yet, but for some other handhelds — because it’s pretty clear that everyone is going to be using the web in their pocket from here on out. We’re a 250 person company that’s competing with Microsoft & Apple & Google — all of whom are relentlessly working on and improving their own browsers. So it’s never dull. Competing with these guys — playing on this level — is brutal — there’s always more to do just to stay in place, there are always challenges to react to. But now that I’ve done it, it’s hard to imagine not being in this environment.

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, a couple of days ago in Aspen said as a joke that he was like the Forrest Gump of the Internet — and you’re all too young to even know what that reference is, but it comes from a movie where the title character, Forrest Gump, was accidentally around some of the most interesting events in the world over the period of his life. For Craig to say that is ridiculous, of course. The real thing is that Craig is a very smart dude, and he’s been in situations where being smart and making choices can really matter. And so he’s been able to change the world.

I’ll leave you with a couple of other thoughts, both given to me by one of my mentors, a professor at Stanford named Tom Kosnik.

• find your peer group & treat them right — that means look around, find the peers who you really like and respect — and keep in touch with them, visit with them, call them a lot (don’t just facebook them!)
• do things that make your soul sing — this one’s easier, and I suspect will be a theme this weekend. But the shorthand is this: if you’re not loving what you’re doing, you’ve got to find something else to do. (which isn’t to say you shouldn’t work hard, or that it should always be fun — just that you should enjoy the overall thing that you’re doing.)

Last thing: take a few minutes to write down what you’re feeling as you go through life — and take a picture or two — you’ll end up doing some amazing things, and later on you’ll value being able to go back and try to see through your younger eyes, trying to imagine and remember who you were and how it felt.

Why I Came

I don’t know very much about journalism — next to nothing, really. But I do think that some aspects of journalism are critical if you want to have an engaged citizenry — a strong & free press is essential for any of us to know and understand enough about the world we live in to participate and engage. I think, too, that there are aspects of our American press that have historically served  us extremely well and are worth preserving. And of course, it’s impossible not to see the turmoil and change that the whole sector is going through — the disappearance of major papers is only the most visible. One thing I think I hadn’t really internalized is that the global economic crisis is really changing the situation much more rapidly than usually happens. Because of the financial pressure, old institutions don’t have the buffer that they might have had in better times — leading to much shorter time frames to layoffs and shutdowns. I think much of this was coming anyway — the crisis just accelerated all of it.

I’ve also been struck lately by some of the parallels of  mission of journalists (roughly, to enable engaged & informed participation) and Mozilla  (to insure an open & participatory Internet). So that’s one reason I decided to come — to learn as much as I could.

The third reason I decided to come is that there’s something new afoot in the world: lots of organizations are being created to serve a public interest — on very low cost models (enabled essentially by the Web) — and competing with traditional profit-oriented ventures. At Mozilla we call that type of organization a “hybrid,” and Mark Surman has been writing about that idea a lot lately. For that, I came in the spirit of sharing what we’ve learned at Mozilla as we’ve become a sustainable hybrid company — maybe some of what we’ve learned can be helpful to others.

But I have to say that mostly I came, as with any event, is because of the other people who were planning to attend and participate. I was invited by Alberto Ibargüen, CEO of the Knight Foundation, and all around awesome person. He’s done much since coming to Knight to reform the way they supported and funded new organizations, starting programs like the Knight News Challenge, as a way to create a sort of prize economy around innovations in journalism. (They’ve also provided funding for work at PCF, where I’m on the board of directors.) What they’re doing at Knight is a model to be emulated, I think — lots of experiments, lots of support, lots of provocative questions.

But beyond just Alberto, here’s a sampling of some of the 50 or so people who are here: Vivian Shiller (CEO of NPR), Esther Dyson, Jeff Jarvis (CUNY Professor), Marissa Mayer (VP Google), Dean Singleton (Chair of the AP), Marcus Brauchli (Exec Ed of The Washington Post), Walter Isaacson (biographer & CEO of Aspen Institute), Madeline Albright (former US Secretary of State), Reed Hundt (former Chair FCC), Jon Leibowitz (Chair FTC), Michael Kinsley, Sue Gardner (ED of Wikimedia), Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist), Robert Rosenthal (ED of CIR), Paul Steigler (CEO of Pro Publica).

And those are just a few of the names I picked out looking at the list just now — it’s neat to be a part of such a small & accomplished group — and is especially great when it’s on a topic I’m just learning about.

Finally, and beyond all the basic reasons for coming, I’ve learned that it’s important to try to pop out of operational work from time to time. It’s easy in the day-to-day of Mozilla to get obsessed with solving problems, with getting roadblocks moved out, with the details of trying to make things work. But being too much in those details for too long means, for me, that I sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture — being around others in a new context helps to reframe the things that matter in work and in life.

So that’s why I’m here: to learn and to participate and to help where I can. It’s been a successful event from that perspective for me.

One of the classes I remember fondly for being a little wacky (and interesting) was when he gave a talk about typographers who were persecuted for the material they were typesetting.

After I posted the other day, Professor Bigelow somehow found the post and gave us a little primer, which I include below because of the high awesomeness quotient. Really made my day – favorite comment ever.

Nice to hear, after all these years, that somebody remembers those classes.

Just in case the names and dates have faded from memory, here’s a brief refresher.

Antoine Augereau, Parisian printer and type designer, reputedly the teacher of Garamond. hanged and burned on Christmas Eve, 1534, on (supposedly trumped up) charges of printing heretical placards.

Etienne Dolet, printer of Lyon and Paris, burned at the stake on August 3, 1546, in Paris, on charges of blasphemy, sedition, and selling prohibited books.

Martin l’Homme, hanged in 1560 for printing a pamphlet against a Cardinal.

That all happened a long time ago, but in the 20th century, Sophie Scholl, among others in the White Rose society, was guillotined on charges of treason, on February 22, 1943, for distributing pamphlets against Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front.

I’m sure that somewhere there is good news about printers, too.

I’ve been doing this for a couple of reasons, neither of which is particularly related to the readability and aesthetics of the blog.

The first reason, and more important of the two, is that I wanted to experiment with the new @font-face support in Firefox 3.5. I have a strongly held point of view that you don’t really learn about something until you do it — and since I have a bit of an affinity to fonts, I thought I should try @font-face out on my own blog. I discovered a few different things in this process.

First, there are not a lot of really good fonts online that are licensed for use on web sites — either free & open fonts or purchased fonts. I think both categories (free and non-free) will see more & higher quality fonts available soon, since fonts are available now to so many more users than before. (@font-face was not new with Firefox, but obviously Firefox brings a lot of users along.)

Second, you learn a lot about your web server & how quick it can send data, since in addition to your web content now it’s gotta send font files that are 50-100 KB or more. My server, for the record, totally sucked. Now it’s better, but not as quick as I’d really like.

Third, the differences in implementations really become apparent. Safari opts to wait until a font file is loaded before showing any text rendered in that font; Firefox renders the text in already-resident fonts and then sort of “pops” the text into the new font when it downloads. That shows pretty clearly a difference in aesthetic between WebKit and Gecko (and probably the organizations behind them): WebKit (and Apple) prefers a solution to minimize visual divergence — so you never see text in the wrong font. Gecko (and Mozilla) prefers a solution to get people reading content as quickly as they can, even if it means a momentary rendering in sub-optimal font — because a lot of times people want to get to their content as quickly as possible. Anyhow, different decisions that will impact designers and consumers differently.

Finally, it helps us figure out where the bugs are. One of the initial fonts I used didn’t have some ligatures implemented — “ff” in particular — and Firefox handled that by just not showing anything.

[As an aside, I've been tracking TypeKit since before they launched, and am quite optimistic about their prospects. I'll try them out as soon as they open up the beta.]

The second reason I wanted to experiment is that I’m a bit of a font nerd. Have been since my mom got her first Mac in 1985. I really like type and lettering and the way that it affects how people feel and think. One of my favorite classes at Stanford was called “Concepts of Text” and taught by a type designer named Charles Bigelow — among other things, we had a couple of classes about typesetters who were burned at the stake for typesetting heretical documents. Good times.

Anyhow, I like type, and am really excited by the prospect of more sophisticated typography coming to the web. And as much as I like Helvetica — and I do! and you should, too, not to mention you should go see the movie — I feel like on the web today there’s a bit of a Tyranny of Helvetica — it’s somehow viewed as the most appropriate type for, you know, everything.

So I’m experimenting, and will probably do it more. Right now, I’m over-using (not to mention sort of mis-using) 2 fonts on this blog. I’m using Graublau Sans for the headlines — it’s an free/open license font designed for larger display settings. And I’m using Spiekermann’s newer font Axel for the body type — it was really designed for very small type — especially in cells in Excel spreadsheets, for example — but I liked that it has many similarities with his Meta typeface, which happens to be the one we use for the “Mozilla” and “Firefox” and “Thunderbird” wordmarks — but also had a relatively inexpensive (under $100 US) @font-face compatible license available for purchase from FontShop.

If I have some time this week I’m going to try to make some of the more egregious readability problems I’ve caused…um, I guess I’ll strive to make them less egregious. But we’ll see.

I do know that it’s fun to experiment with type again.

(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.]