Mitchell Baker Plenary - Mozilla All Hands, December 2018

Mozilla's mission calls us to engage in

the world, to understand the online world

to improve it, and to join with others.

The exact style with which we join with

others may change over time even as the

mission remains constant. This is our

first style of engaging with the world.

You'll notice it's very open-source

focused,

it's very developer focused, and it is an

invitation to participate in building a

better internet. In its day this was

radical. Open-source was not mainstream,

there was no open data open government.

open science,

there was no collaborative economy, there

was no sharing economy, there was very

little user-generated content, and open

source was one of the triggers that led

to these various movements. So in its

time it was a radical invitation to

openness and a radical invitation to

participation. This engagement model

served us astonishingly well. This model

built the communities that built Firefox.

This model allowed us to expand the set

of people who could participate in

creation dramatically. Our volunteer

quality assurance teams came out of this

era, our volunteer localization teams

came out of this era, our regional and

local communities that evangelized for

better internet and for Mozilla and our

products came from this model.

And not too long after this day, the

development of Firefox began in earnest

and we began thinking about Firefox

slightly differently. Especially the

development team was very focused that

Firefox would be consumer friendly and

the design cases and use cases were all

about an individual consumer and what

would her experience be online. And so we

evolved. And this was our second

engagement model with the world. It was

quite different. You'll notice it's much

more consumer focused. It was our first

step in putting the consumer, an

individual person, at the heart of what

we do. We took away— I should go back and

say the literal-minded of you will say:

“well, Mitchell, your first image was a web

page and now you've got browser content".

But I assure yo,u if you go back and look

at Mozilla,org for the day of Firefox

10 release, you will find a similar

shift in focus to consumer friendly. We

took away all of the information and

links about us, who we are, why we build,

and the tools that allow us to do those

things. And instead. we put a connection

to the Internet. In those days search was

new, it was incredibly exciting, and it

was the connection. And so we took the

experience that consumers wanted, and

that would improve their lives and we

put that at the center of our

presentation to the world. Now, that was a

dramatic change. It was a difficult

change. It took us months. And we fought,

we struggled. You know, the small team of

15 or 20 people, and Mountain View, and

the larger team remotely around the

world to make this change. Because it is

not a classic change from

open-source organization to shift to

consumer focus. The second thing that we

did is behind that search box. We had had

a search box in the early Firefox

versions and the product before that, but

we had never been paid for it. And so

this puts a business relationship with

revenue as the first thing people saw

when they opened Firefox. Now that was a

dramatic chang,e and also very difficult.

With months of consideration and work

and planning. And the comment I remember

the most from a news article was loss of

innocence. And I thought, well yes, and...

Because we were convinced that something

as complex and broad as a browser or

access to the Internet needed full-time

attention, needed a volunteer community

as well but, at the core, we could not do

this on a part-time all-volunteer basis.

And so, we had been relying on charitable

contributions and companies which

somehow felt innocent out in the world.

But it is not innocent. And relying on

charitable contributions and fundraising

for the size and scope and scale that we

needed is not at all in a sense. And one

of the things that the current

foundation fundraising team remains

quite excellent at is fundraising

without allowing any of the donors or

grantmakers to call the shots. That's a

very rare and difficult thing. And so I

felt, yes, loss of innocence, and that now

there is actual money in the system, and

this is the most direct most transparent

and most scalable way to sustain the

organization.

And it ties our sustainability to the

use of our product and its value to our

users. So, we made it through that

transition. And that of course, together,

the focus on consumers and the ability

to sustain ourselves made possible the

size and scope and scale of what we have

accomplished since then. And in that era,

it was before the surveillance economy,

Google was new, search was new, the ad

system was rudimentary, and so at the

time, it felt exceedingly aligned Search

was an exciting piece and people loved it.

Now that model has sustained us through a

long and very rich period. Long

development on Firefox development, on

new products, from focus to Firefox Lite,

to Firefox monitor, to all of the other

work that you are engaged in. And it has

given us a name, globally, of trust and

allowed us to engage in a range of

programs from new product development to

the advocacy work that the foundation is

doing. So that has been very successful

and it is time to evolve again because

these products are a bit one-dimensional.

Mozilla creates a product. Let's say, I

use that product. It is a tool for me. A

tool where I might protect myself, I

might wear some lines, my experience. You

know, Mozilla and Firefox do a few things

on the back end particularly related to

security and malware problems, but much

of the power of the tool is for me to

use. And that's an important foundation

that we should keep. But it is no longer

enough.

It is time to take the next step at

putting an individual consumer at the

center of everything we do. That's

because it is a complicated world out

there. If you get online even with a

single phone, you have a browser, maybe

two, maybe three. You have a world of apps,

and each one of them is doing something.

And all of them are in a sea of data. And

my ability as a single human being to

protect myself or customize my own

experience or have impact and control

over what happens to me is very limited.

And even if we build a portfolio of 10

or 20 great products, and they're all

separate, and they all rely on me to

somehow use those products to build the

experience I'm looking for, that is

asking too much of consumers. And so this

era of putting people in the center

requires more. It requires a relationship.

And in the past, we've been very proud of

the degree of anonymity we have with our

users. That is an important foundation

because anonymity is important in life.

But today we need to add to that to

actually have a relationship, a known

relationship between Firefox and the

person using it. And that relationship

should cover multiple products multiple

experiences and it must address the data

problem. We live in a world of data. It is

valuable. It is not going away .The

problem is how it is handled. And

traditionally at Mozilla, we like to take

a hands-off approach and say we're not

going to do anything with data because

we don't want to make a mistake. It is

time for that to change. Because who else

in the world is going to help us? Who is

going to help me or you or the people

you care about, or the people we don't

know elsewhere in the world navigate the

sea of data?

Who else will be a responsible steward

of data?

Who else can build and influence an

ecosystem that acknowledges the value of

data and applies it for your benefit or

my benefit, but not the benefit of a few

shareholders? Not many organizations in

the world can do that. And we are here

and we have the opportunity to do that.

And so that is the next evolution in

front of us. Now, this evolution is also

not easy. We will experience a broad

range of emotions,

from fear to excitement, to deep anger

and frustration when we make mistakes. To

confidence that we can do something new

and we can evolve again and stay true to

the core of Mozilla, we evolved Firefox

to be consumer focused. We are still open

source and looking out for users we can

evolve our relationship with people, so

that we engage sometimes anonymously

sometimes soon honestly, and sometimes in

an identity based system. We will go

onward. And as we do this, there are a few

themes that we know we need to address.

The first one, you are the product. This

is unacceptable. This is an area that is

directly in front of us that is closely

tied to the products that we build and

where we should become the advocate of

individuals, both anonymously as we do

today, and in a much closer way with an

actual relationship. We know how to block

trackers we know, how to be defensive.

I want us to play offense.

I want Mozilla products to help me go

out in the world and make sure I am not

the product and that my data is used in

a way that makes sense to me. A second

theme is content. And in part I mean

pocket and content, But I mean it also

more broadly like we rendered the web.

The web is content and today it is hard

to know what is real, what is lies and

what is actually going on with content

out there. We have types of expertise

that need to be in this dialogue and

that need to be building products to be

experimenting with how do we fix this.

And a third great theme it's the

addiction economy. Because the product

piece and the monetization piece get

wrapped up in encouraging us to take

actions that are profitable. And as a

human being, very few of us alone are

strong enough and aware enough and

knowledgeable enough to understand the

power of the AIs today, aimed at us

pushing and pumping addictive behavior.

The human psyche is prone to this, and so

it will take technologists building and

experimenting with different forms of

interaction to build new ways of

engaging with data and information. And

as we address these things, people today

are asking, you know the Internet is

broken, what can I do. One part of that

answer should be,

get yourself a relationship with Mozilla,

make it as deep as you want.

Sign up, don't sign up. But you should

have a relationship with Mozilla. That's

where the tools are. That's where the

products are that are trying to help you.

That's where you can find better

experiences and that's where you

can help improve the internet as you

improve your own experience. And if we do

that, then we help everyone demand better

of the Internet. And if we grow, the set

of people who can demand better of the

Internet and join together to experience

better things as we build them, then this

era of Mozilla and this style of

engagement will be as rich and powerful

and exciting and transformative as

anything we can imagine. That is our

challenge and our opportunity. Thank you.