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!

In addition to that, I wanted to share that last month we made Chris Beard our Chief Innovation Officer, a new position for Mozilla. Chris has been involved at Mozilla since before the Firefox 1.0 release, leading our marketing and product strategy through Firefox 2, and always seems to be integral to some of the most interesting work we’re doing. For the last year or so, he’s been building Mozilla Labs into something that’s generating a lot of good ideas and energy around the future. Last month we moved the Evangelism group to Chris’ area of responsibility (with specific management there by long-time Mozillan Chris Blizzard). And today we created the new Developer Tools Lab.

It’s totally in keeping with Mozilla’s style that innovation focuses not just on internal breakthroughs but on communications and tools that help everyone innovate, and there’s nobody better than Chris at thinking and operating like that. On a personal level, I’m always challenged by Chris’ thinking and innovation, and am super happy to get to work with him every day. Congratulations, Chris!

An amazing meeting in Beijing — Jimmy Wales seeing Chinese officials at the State Council Information Office. I met Jimmy in Dalian at the WEF event a year ago — he mentioned then that people in the Chinese government were interested in talking with him about Wikipedia. Rebecca’s got a great writeup on it, as she apparently saw Jimmy at this year’s WEF event there (The event last year is when I met Rebecca, too.) We live in interesting times.

Canonical/Ubuntu has worked with us on this a lot, and has been very helpful, as have the RedHat and Fedora teams.

This should make its way into all our platforms and builds at some point in the near future, and should make things better for all users.

Anyone who’s interested in the current issues around the Firefox license and Ubuntu (and, actually, all distributions), should read Mitchell’s post. This particular issue is mostly a mistake that we made in process. Working to address this now.

Mostly it’s about how Mozilla is organized, and how we push decision-making to the edges of any organization we have — it’s really an organizational design & behavior talk. It’s been fun to do diferent flavors of this over the last few months — people get really engaged.

Rob says it perfectly in just a few words.

update from Brendan on our JS engine work. it’s fast with lots of headroom in the future. good times.

It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here — their business is the web, and they’ve got clear opinions on how things should be, and smart people thinking about how to make things better. Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves.

Having said that, it’s worth addressing a couple of questions that folks will no doubt have.

1. How does this affect Mozilla? As much as anything else, it’ll mean there’s another interesting browser that users can choose. With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc — there’s been competition for a while now, and this increases that. So it means that more than ever, we need to build software that people care about and love. Firefox is good now, and will keep on getting better.

2. What does this mean for Mozilla’s relationship with Google? Mozilla and Google have always been different organizations, with different missions, reasons for existing, and ways of doing things. I think both organizations have done much over the last few years to improve and open the Web, and we’ve had very good collaborations that include the technical, product, and financial. On the technical side of things, we’ve collaborated most recently on Breakpad, the system we use for crash reports — stuff like that will continue. On the product front, we’ve worked with them to implement best-in-class anti-phishing and anti-malware that we’ve built into Firefox, and looks like they’re building into Chrome. On the financial front, as has been reported lately, we’ve just renewed our economic arrangement with them through November 2011, which means a lot for our ability to continue to invest in Firefox and in new things like mobile and services.

So all those aligned efforts should continue. And similarly, the parts where we’re different, with different missions, will continue to be separate. Mozilla’s mission is to keep the Web open and participatory — so, uniquely in this market, we’re a public-benefit, non-profit group (Mozilla Corporation is wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation) with no other agenda or profit motive at all. We’ll continue to be that way, we’ll continue to develop our products & technology in an open, community-based, collaborative way.

With that backdrop, it’ll be interesting to see what happens over the coming months and years. I personally think Firefox 3 is an incredibly great browser — the best anywhere — and we’re seeing millions of people start using it every month. It’s based on technology that shows incredible compatibility across the broad web — technology that’s been tweaked and improved over a period of years.

And we’ve got a truckload of great stuff queued up for Firefox 3.1 and beyond — things like open video and an amazing next-generation Javascript engine (TraceMonkey) for 3.1, to name a couple. And beyond that, lots of breakthroughs like Weave, Ubiquity, and Firefox Mobile. And even more that are unpredictable — the strength of Mozilla has always come from the community that’s built it, from core code to the thousands of extensions that are available for Firefox.

So even in a more competitive environment than ever, I’m very optimistic about the future of Mozilla and the future of the open Web.

I got to spend a bit of time with Nagi, our Mongolian localized, in particular, and when he wasn’t toying with me at ping ping, he told me a bit of his story. He grew up in Ulan Bator, capital of Mongolia, and moved to northern Germany in 2001 for school and work. He wanted an e-mail client in Mongolian, so he decided to localize the Mozilla Suite, and has been involved since. It’s at once an amazing and characteristic Mozilla story - Nagi wanted to scratch an itch - so he started working on an open project, and as a result has made the Web more accessible to thousands of people. Inspirational.

And it’s impossible to talk about Mozilla inspiration without mentioning the wonderful accessibility work done so diligently and for so long by Aaron Leventhal (long supported by Frank Hecker). Again, underappreciated work that has a gigantic impact on the lives of thousands.

Anyway, I left the Summit with more stories than before, and the knowledge that there are still a lot more to hear, and to tell, and still to be written.

Here at Mozilla that means some changes are in order, and Mike Shaver is our new Interim VP Engineering. Mike’s an amazing leader, deep technologist, committed Mozillian (Mozillite?, Mozillan?), and talented evangelist. He’s contributed lots of code and innovation to our current code base, including a number of the key Javascript enhancements you’re (hopefully) enjoying while reading this post in Firefox 3. He’s one of the most articulate advocates of the Open Web, and one of the most inspiring speakers on that subject (and many others) that I’ve ever heard.

All of which means that we’re in great shape with Mike taking on this new responsibility. The rest of the management and leadership in the engineering team remains the same as previously.

We’ve got a lot to do, starting with the upcoming Firefox 3.1 later this year, and I have great confidence that Mike will step into his new role and do a wonderful job.

But more than anything, he’s been a great leader and teacher, for everyone in the organization and in the larger community. And that means that while we’ll miss his day-to-day contribution, he’s left a legacy of other outstanding engineering managers and leaders ready to take new responsibilities — many of them who you can observe leading what we’re doing already.

So Mozilla owes a big thanks to Mike for his contribution, and I think will miss him greatly.

As a personal note, Mike’s been an extremely important collaborator and friend to me, and I’ll miss our day-to-day interactions very much.

But life moves on, and if I were you, I’d watch him closely, because he’s going to do great things in his next post, too.

I’ll also say that this is a fascinating, hopeful way to start a project, and I’m optimistic that great stuff will come out of it.

The last couple of years I’ve been lucky to do some traveling for Mozilla — in particular to China, Japan, and Europe — and have found my perspective on what the world looks like (and can/should look like) changing greatly. (And I’m currently in the middle of Fareed Zakaria’s excellent new book The Post-American World on this subject.)

I’m just repeatedly blown away (and sometimes overwhelmed) by what Global Voices is doing — it seems to me a necessary point of view in a world where national boundaries seem more & more artificial and sometimes obstructive to the way people are having conversations and getting things done.

[More generally, I'm interested lately in experiments on how to have broader, more distributed, but still coherent conversations on particular topics, and FF Rooms seems like one potential avenue...would love any thoughts in comments here (or on FF itself)]

Over the past couple of years of coming here, I’ve really come to appreciate Tokyo as a city — it never really feels super-dense anywhere even though there are lots of people living in a close space — and there are lots of green areas, sidewalks, public transportation, on and on. When you consider that it’s an absolutely gigantic city with maybe 28 million souls, the way that it works and feels is a stunning accomplishment.

The past couple of mornings I’ve gotten up early to jog 10k or so from my hotel and around the Imperial Palace, and it’s been great. Or, rather, yesterday was a good run, but not all that great, since it was rainy & cold and I was jetlagged. Today was much nicer, and felt great to run around a place that’s been important (and beautiful) for centuries. I’m starting to really like running in the early morning in urban areas like this (although I don’t do it too often, and Sunnyvale isn’t quite dense enough to be interesting) — it’s a bit of a communion with other runners — a shared start to each of our disparate days.

I found today & yesterday that it really helped my running, too, as there was always someone ahead of me on the loop around the Palace — so I always had someone to work to catch up to (and occasionally fall behind). As a result, I think I (re?)discovered something about myself: I tend to run better from behind. It’s easier for me to concentrate and focus enough to catch up, and it makes me a better runner. (Or at least a more consistent, faster runner.) That’s probably a little window into my non-running psyche, too, and maybe a clue to why I’m drawn to work at a place like Mozilla.

Or maybe not; I’m a little jetlagged for psychoanalysis. On to Narita, then heading home. Thanks to everyone at Mozilla Japan for another very good trip, and for an unbelievably great launch here in Japan. See you in Vancouver.