The Nature of Mozilla

Mitchell Baker's keynote presentation at Mozilla's Summit 2013 on the Nature of Mozilla.

Welcome.

Welcome to Brussels, welcome to Toronto,

welcome to Santa Clara, but most important,

welcome to Mozilla.

We're here, Mozilla is here and each one of us is here to build the Internet the world needs.

We are here to build an Internet that is open and innovative.

We're here to build an internet where people come first, where each one of us has as much opportunity,

as much ability to make decisions and as much control over our online life as we can manage.

No one else will build this Internet; no one else can.

Mozilla is unique. We're not a typical company trying to generate revenue for our shareholders;

we're not a government; we're not a non-governmental organization. We are Mozilla.

We are at our core not about a legal organization; we are about our cause and about the idea of doing things.

The heart of Mozilla is a global community with a shared mission.

That's what gives us power; that's what gives us impact; and that's what allows us--

sorry, thought there was a different slide in there--

that's what allows us to have the impact that we do.

That's what makes us different: it's this global community with a shared mission.

Build the Internet the world needs.

Now, I've been a member of the Mozilla community since the very beginning, back in 1998.

Mozilla came out of a company called Netscape which was then acquired by a company called AOL.

And so for the early years of Mozilla's life, I and my colleagues at Mozilla were mostly employees of AOL.

Now, AOL was the giant of its era. You can think of it a little bit like Facebook. It was how people got online.

it was a giant. It was a useful service, it became a walled garden, very closed,

very hard to get to the Internet from it.

In other words, we were Mozillians in the heart of an organization that did not share our mission.

Some parts of that were great because we had some resources, other parts were really quite difficult,

because our identity was as Mozillians, as a community of people,

as our mission to build the internet where people come first.

That was not AOLs mission but that's where we lived for the first few years.

In 2001, I was fired from AOL and I was fired in a fight over whether Mozilla was to serve people

and whether our products were to put people first or whether Mozilla existed to serve AOL

and to generate revenue from AOL. And so, it wasn't actually that surprising, the core of us who were closest to

Mozilla, I'll say the eight or nine of us, spent many hours thinking what would happen if we all got fired

and trying to figure out how to keep Mozilla alive. Could we get a machine out? Who would run the machine?

Did we have any money? Who'd reemploy one person? How would we keep Mozilla alive?

Also, a story that maybe sets a tone for Mozilla even today, we worried about how to get our little stock of

t-shirts out of the AOL building into where we could control them. Our secret weapon in that was

Marcia Knous who's here with us today. Because we figured Marcia was the least likely of us to get fired

and she had the key to the room with the t-shirts.

That actually turned out to be important.

The next set of t-shirts we had at Mozilla I bought personally because there was no organization.

AOL wouldn't buy them and we needed them, so I bought them all and tried to recoup my money afterwards.

We lived at AOL, I was fired, everybody else was at AOL.

So I led Mozilla as a volunteer for a number of years.

I was fired in 2001, I found another open-source organization that employed me one day a week to

work on Mozilla. I did the rest as a volunteer.

And then, as we came up to Firefox, in 2004, I finally became a fulltime paid contributor again.

During that period of time I had a very different organizational role, no employment role,

chief lizard wrangler as a description of who I was, but still a Mozillian and I would venture to say if you ask other

people from that era, they would still have considered me a Mozillian and their leader in that phase.

That was because our open source community and the employees at AOL were very clear

what was important to them. Even the employees could not put their heart and soul and to building

the technology if it wasn't aimed at Mozilla. So even though they were AOL employees

and I was a volunteer on the side, we formed a Mozilla community that eventually led us into the future.

A couple of years after I was fired, in 2003, AOL decided to stop investing in browsers,

because everyone knew they were dead and they didn't matter. So AOL gave us $2 million in a start-up grant,

laid off everybody who was working on the browser, and we formed the Mozilla foundation.

That was an exciting moment, we hired 10 people and tried to figure out a way to generate revenue

to be able to continue to pay those 10 people and to be able to grow. I was not one of those paid

by Mozilla at that time, I was still paid a day or two a week by this other organization, and volunteering.

I had a new title, I was president of the Mozilla foundation, but that was just a name.

We were still the same community, we now had no one at AOL, a few employees at Mozilla

and we started growing employees at other companies. That went on until Firefox.

Many of you have seen this picture, this is the employees at the time we shipped Firefox 1.0.

Many of them are still here in our three cities.

Another interesting thing is the person on the far right standing up.

He was employed by either IBM or Google, I don't remember which.

A couple of these guys, and Vlad is here today,

employed by Oracle, to work on Mozilla.

A set of us there were employed either by Mozilla foundation, or in my case, someplace else.

So these are the employees, you can see we were successful because each employee

represented a community much, much bigger.

And, one thing that's wrong with this picture is that it happened unexpectedly during a workday

when some photographer was in for an article and so it has only employees. It doesn't have

all the other volunteers who were engaged in making Firefox 1.0 successful.

So I'd like to invite anyone who was active in Mozilla at that period to drop me a line.

I'd like to figure out how to make a corresponding image to this. That includes all the

other people, so we can get one united image of that set of people.

So with Firefox, of course, the world began to change.

We've generated revenue, we made a new organization, we made the Mozilla Corporation.

I had a new title, now I was CEO of the Mozilla Corporation.

We got paid by that one, sort of a different role but not really.

To me, still chief lizard wrangler, still part of a global community.

And so with Firefox, as it became successful, we've been able to grow

employees of course, but equally important volunteers the entire size of the Mozilla community.

And this of course is what we looked like 2010, at our last summit in Whistler.

Where we had about a total of about 600 people.
So, the size of each of our cities here.

And we've found that the ability to actually work together and form

and strengthen this global community with the shared mission is key to our success.

Here we have a subset of the people at the summit.
Today, we have many different roles.

Volunteers engage many, many hours a week. Volunteers engage when they can.

Employees engaged many, many hours a week. In all cases, many roles,

one community, one Mozilla.

That's the key to what will make us successful
and to have the maximum impact

as we go to build the internet the world needs.

We have community, we have a mission, we're very fortunate at Mozilla.

Our mission is abstract and big. What we actually do can be concrete, because we build product, we build technology,

we build the internet, we build initiatives,
we build teaching organizations.

We can do very concrete things so that we can put our mission in front of people

Give them a better experience and help them understand what the world can be.

We're also very fortunate and that we have a set of principles to guide: how we make decisions;

how we think about things; what the internet should look like; what our product should look like;

what Mozilla ourselves should look like.

And often, we wrap our principles up in a single word, and we say we want the internet, we want the web to be open.

We protect the open web.

And open is a good word because it covers so much.

It's also a difficult word, in that it's now part of the main stream.

We've been so successful over the last decade that

this key value coming out of the open source and free software movement

of being open, has moved into the mainstream and spawned, open science, open government, open citizenship,

plus, some people using the word to mean things that aren't so important to us.

And so today, I want to take the word open and break it down into three ideas to represent the principles.

These are the same principles that are the foundation of the internet when the internet was designed originally

They're the same principles that Tim Berners-Lee used to design the World Wide Web.

They are the principles we've used to build our products and the principles we used to build Mozilla.

First, the internet should be knowable.

We should be able to see it, touch it, feel it, change it.

At Mozilla, that gets expressed as open-source,

sometimes open standards. View source,

meaning you don't even have to be a developer to see a good part of what goes in to making up products and websites.

These are practical, useful tools for us,
but they are also deeper.

These things allow people to know more.
And if you don't know what's going on,

you can't really be in control.

If everything is secret and in a box and you can't see it or understand it,

your chance of influencing your own life is very small.

So this principle of being knowable,

so people can know more is one key concept starting with

the design of the internet through products in Mozilla today and going forward.

Second principle is the internet should be interoperable.

This sounds like a technical specification and it is that, but it is much more.

When something is interoperable, each one of us has more choice.

As a general consumer, I have the choice of what I product I use.

Something's interoperable, I'm not locked in to one technology stack.

I could choose a piece of hardware and it doesn't necessarily determine

where my data lives or who owns it or who gets to use it.

I would have a choice of: my hardware; my browser; where my data goes;

what services I use; how I pay for things.

On the web, that was the case for a while.

Today, not so much.

It's important for consumers, it's important for developers.

Interoperability allows developers to have an idea and plug it in.

Today, we even see a Mozilla that we need to think about the entire stack:

the operating system; the app store; the hardware; the data; the services; the trust;

the advertising that goes with it.

We have to think about the whole thing to be able to have an impact now.

And so as the world becomes interoperable again,

developers will be able to plug in or to make products that work horizontally,

and so bring about the kind of explosion, excitement that the web brought 20 years ago.

The web was the first instance of cracking open big vertical stacks.

The other thing about being interoperable is it is decentralized.

It allows people to make decisions without being part of some big central organization.

If the internet is interoperable,

you can be anywhere in the world and plug in your device.

If you see a problem or an issue, you can solve it where you are.

You don't need to go to some big central organization

and ask for permission and make sure your idea doesn't threaten anybody else.

You are able to try things out and see what works in your environment.

So interoperable allows the distributed decision
making that have made the last 20 years so powerful.

When you have the internet as knowable and as interoperable,

you can know more and you can do more.

You can do more without asking permission and you can do more at whatever level of problem you're trying to solve.

The third principle, the internet should be ours.

We know that parts of the internet will be built by large commercial organizations

and that's good. That economic engine brings a huge amount of resources to bear

and we can see that the great companies of today make products

that people like and bring whole new realms of activity. That's all good, but that is not enough.

The internet must have a part that is public benefit.

The internet is part of the structure of modern life and it's part of the structure of modernizing one's life.

The structure of solving problems that we're facing today.

So part of that internet must be for the public. It must be about us as people, even when we're not spending money.

When you think about the things on does with your family, or your friends, or your community, or your school,

or your society, or your city that aren't about generating revenue and, will never be, about generating revenue.

Part of the internet must be built to encourage that, to welcome that

and to bring the possibility of civil and social value.

And so, when you have an internet that is knowable and interoperable and ours, we can do better.

We can participate in the commercial activities of our time

and we can also build civic society and communities and friends and families

and all the other activities that make human life so rich.

Knowable, you can know more.

Interoperable, you can do more, and when the internet is ours, we can do better.

Increasingly, I think about Mozilla as champions of a web where people can know more, do more, and do better.

Many of us will probably to continue to like the word open. Because it's deep in our past,

it expresses many thing, it's tied to our technology and that's fine too.

When you hear the word open, think about especially if it's got a lot of passion in it

and somebody is really focused on this must be open, the set of reasons and the ideas that go into that word open.

Among ourselves, even I will probably continue to use open,

but I like this phrase about what is it that we're trying to build? What's the human experience?

This has very real influence on life at Mozilla.

When we are knowable, interoperable and allow all Mozillians to feel like Mozilla is ours,

much more can happen than we actually can imagine ourselves.

And I'm going to ask in a minute or two for you to think of an example, turn around and talk to the people next to you.

Think of an example of where this has happened where you've seen it,

or if you don't understand it and have some questions to raise those as well.

I'm going to give an example from the very early part of Mozilla about the kind of things that happened

when we allow and encourage people to feel like Mozilla, our mission, is ours.

In the early days Mozilla is old enough that many of the ways we communicate today didn't exist.

Certainly no Facebook, no Twitter, no Google search,

no blogs, no apps, no geolocation,

cellphones even weren't ubiquitous.

If you sometimes wonder

why mailing lists and newsgroups are so deep into Mozilla,

it's because we started when that's all there was,

when those were actually exciting things.

And we had trouble communicating in a social way.

One day, we woke up and there was something new on the web,

something called MozillaZine. Made by someone in New Jersey,

who looked up and said,

"Wow, Mozilla is important but we can't communicate.

I can't tell what's going on. That sucks. I can do better."

and he made MozillaZine. He didn't ask us,

he didn't try to fit in to whatever we were doing.

He just went ahead and he acted.

And so we woke up one day and suddenly we had a way to communicate.

Now, it's pretty primitive by today's standard

but it was exciting by the standards of its time.

Everyone who worked at Mozilla, and everyone who contributed to Mozilla, would submit articles

and, we'd all get up each morning and see what was happening in the rest of the world.

This turns out to be really important, at least for me personally.

Just seeing Mozilla was good,

but articles began to come in from around the world.

And that was a reassuring moment to me,

because those days before I was fired were very, very difficult days.

And part of the thing that was important was seeing

that the idea of Mozilla was already real in the world.

We have local communities of people who felt the internet is ours, Mozilla is ours,

and we're out doing things, not asking us.

What did I know, in California struggling with AOL, about who has control and what is Mozilla all about?

What would I know about how to make Mozilla real around the rest of the world?

One day we came in and there was an article that Mozilla.pl,

our Polish community, had a new plan for supporting Mozilla.

They were going around door to door

giving technical support to using Mozilla products.

I remember that moment because I thought this is really important.

How can I can give up?

In those days California was a long way from this part of the world.

Communications were not as good as they are today, travel was different.

When I realized it was happening in Poland,
it was happening in Indonesia,

it was happening in Pakistan, it was happening in Slovenia,

it was happening across Europe.
It was happening in outposts across Asia.

Then I realized, however difficult things are here and now,

this is really important and there are other people out there counting on the idea of Mozilla.

And those of us who happen to have more time or energy or resources,

we have the challenge and the fun and the responsibility.

Very early on in the Mozilla world, it became clear to me that being knowable and interoperable

and letting people feel the movement is ours is really a key to success.

I'm going to ask you to take a few minutes now

and just find two or three people around you

and give some thought to Mozilla as knowable, interoperable, ours.

What you see, where you've seen that work.

Or if you don't understand it, maybe ask and see who's around you who can give you some examples

and just let the idea settle a little bit and experience what the people around you have seen and felt

and I'll be back in just a few minutes. Thank you.

Okay, that's who we are, that our set of principles.

I want to get a little more concrete and talk about what we do.

We make our values and principles real with four great pillars of activities.

As you can see, they're all much better

when they are intertwined and work together.

I'm going to talk about them as separate right now, but in our daily life,

our real success comes when these activities all function well together.

These pillars of activity; one, we build products.

Two, we empower communities.

Three, we teach and learn; and four, we shape environments.

Building product, this is the cover of wired.de.

I'm told that it says how Firefox will change the world.

We're best known for building product

with the technology core that's always been at Mozilla.

We build products for a bunch of different reasons.

One, we're trying to build the internet the world needs.

Two, we want individual people to have a better experience.

Three, we want to have impact and mind share for our ideas so that we can pull other parts of the industry with us.

When we build products, we build them to incorporate our values. We want our products to be knowable,

open source, open standards, open API, open development, view source.

We want those to be part of those products because it's convenient

but also because they represent our values.

We want our products to put people in control of their lives.

We want our products to respect people,
to care about their security and their privacy.

We build our products to represent the values we've talked about.

Of course, our products can't be perfect and they won't be pure.

We're trying to reach the general consumer market.

Many of those people have no idea of the principles we're talking about.

We hope that we can be the first entre.

Firefox 1.0 was the first open source product most consumers had ever used.

Before that, everyone knew open source could never produce a good consumer product.

But we did, and we found after that, people were used to hearing the word open or open source.

Changing environments, touching people where they are.

This means that our products are always a balance

between what is the purest expression
of our values that we can imagine

and what will people accept? Where can we touch people? How can we be the first point of contact for our values?

That is a balance between impurity and pragmatism.

That is one of the challenges of Mozilla. That's actually what's made us successful.

And that's actually what's given us the impact we've had today, is that we have been an open source organization that is pragmatic.

We compete in the market place and that brings a grounding to us. Now, this is not easy.

Over the course of the weekend, we will have many discussions about here's the value that we're aiming for,

can we get there?

If we can't get there in one step, what do we do?

Do we stop? Do we take a half a step?

Those are hard discussions,
they're the good discussions though.

Those are the discussions that allow us to figure out

How do we have impact today in the world we're in today

and move ourselves, our own products and other people, along the path towards the more open place we want to be?

A second great pillar of activity is empowering communities.

We do these for several reasons as well;

one, the practical reason, we can't possibly succeed with employees.

That's the shallow reason.

The deeper reason is that Mozilla
is about building the internet we need.

That's a long term task.

That task may go on 50 or a 100 years, it could go on a long time.

If you think about Mozilla 50 or 100 years from now,

it's very unlikely, any product we're working on today will be important then, except perhaps the network.

The browser as we understand it, in 50 years things will be very different.

So one critical legacy of Mozilla is the critical mass of people

who share our mission, are eager to do something about it and are confident to make an impact.

And so empowering communities is important to Mozilla for our day to day practical work that we're trying to do.

Now, it's important to a legacy for the future, so the mission continues whatever product goes,

and whatever initiatives are most important 10, 20, or 50 years from now.

When we empower communities, there are some parts of Mozilla communities that are very close to us.

Here we all are.

And that set of working together in a pretty coordinated fashion,

to try and get our product initiatives, and teaching efforts put together and more impactful.

And so that's a very close community, very high touch.

We want to invest a lot, and be very intentional, in empowering these communities.

And little further out, are communities who share our mission but, are off doing other things.

They're not building Firefox, Firefox OS, Identity or Webmaker

They're out bringing openness and the internet we need to some other part of life.

And for those communities, we don't invest as much,

because we are not so close, but they are related to what we're trying to do.

and allies in the overall mission. And so for people who are close, where we know what we're trying to do, what's critical right now,

this community empowerment and investment is very intentional.

We'll be doing more of it, I certainly hope.

Because each one of us needs to represent many more people than ourselves as we go forward.

The third great pillar of activity is we teach and we learn.

Sometimes we teach directly as through Webmaker or Appmaker or Symbol.

Sometimes we teach indirectly, through our open development processes.

We are best, when we mentor people well, who come into the community.

We are best when uh... you know someone files a bug or test case that it isn't quite right, and gets a little attention to get it right,

rather than being told "Oh, that's wrong." that mentoring piece of pulling people in and helping us all grow together,

is key part of being successful. And learning, on an ongoing basis, is another key part. Most good teachers will tell you,

if you try to teach, you end up learning. And in our case, that should be true as well.

Billions more people will come online in the next decade.

We should be learning.

We'll be entering whole new products areas,
we should be learning.

We are engaging experts in a whole new product area,

lots to learn there. And when you're really learning, we will make mistakes.

And part of really learning is being clear, when we could have done better.

Look, I learned this earlier at Mozilla, way, way way back to those AOL days, we finally shipped a milestone, M19 I think it was.

A very painful activity, we were losing market share.

We were dying in the market.
We couldn't get our product dial in time.

We finally got a milestone out we thought would be really helpful.

And immediately, one of our contributors started screaming in every way.

All caps in every communication channel you could imagine.

And he happened to work for IBM, and he was doing something Mozilla like at IBM.

And he started screaming at us that we had made a mistake, and he couldn't participate.

And this big milestone had been, I forget exactly, but we have done something, so that he couldn't participate.

It was painful, in the middle of that we looked up, I remember Brendan looking up and saying "He's right."

And so we did a chemspill;
not technically a chemspill, not a security issue,

but that kind energy and activity.
Because we hadn't figured out, we'd just made a mistake.

So we will make mistakes, the key is how we handle them.

Can we be clear about them? Do we learn from them?

The most, if you just make a mistake and make a mistake that's really bad.

If you make mistake and learn from it, that's really good.

And we're entering the unknown, there's no charted path.

So we need to make some mistakes, and we need to figure out how to make small mistakes, if we can.

How to make them fast. How to learn how to fix them, and try something new.

And so I predict that will be a part of the discussions over the weekend, too.

How do we do new things? How do we make decisions?
How do we make mistakes, and how do we learn from them?

And the forth grate pillar of activity is shaping environments. So when we build our products,

we want each of person using these products to have great experience.

But we also want those products to shape the overall environment.

We consider investment in Internet Explore to be a success for Firefox, because we're shaping the environment.

We consider the competition in the browser space to be successful for Firefox,

because we're shaping environment that is more open and closer to values as we care about.

We also will also be shaping environments that may not be totally technical.

For example, the policy area is one where we began to get more involved,

because the policy environment is threatening to the internet the world needs.

And so when we work in that area it's not to have the ear of the legislator.

It's not make ourselves important.
It's not to make Mozilla's life easier.

We get involved in policy, because we need impact that environment to build internet we need.

We'll be looking at other environments.

For example, personalization, ads. Advertising is here to stay, that's for sure;

and it's really yucky right now. So, what could that look like?

That's a big part of online life. Ads, tracking, personalization, can we make that better?

Can we shape that environment? How do we do that?

We've got some ideas. Some people say we shouldn't do that.

I think we should. Because we all live in the middle of that,

and that's the environment that isn't right yet. And it needs technology, it needs policy,

it needs people with our vision of what the internet should be, to get involved.

And so shaping environments is a key part of why we build product,

why we build communities,
why we spend all this effort on teaching and learning.

And of course, we are successful, and we have impact when all of these are woven together.

When we're building products, and the products are empowering communities,

and new people are off building their own new thing, that make Firefox, Firefox OS, Identity, or Webmaker better.

Our products should always be trying to shape environment, our communities should be trying to shape environment.

All of these things woven together, are what lets a group people the size of Mozilla have the impact that we do.

And so I ask you to imagine what the world could be like? Imagine, if we go out of here, and have a great weekend,

take the ideas and learning back; if each of us starts to represent more than ourselves, bigger communities.

Imagine what the world could be like in 10 years.

Imagine if each person here represent a thousand Mozillians doing things.

Imagine if we could improve the advertising world, so we didn't feel tracked and unsafe online.

Imagine if 55% of people online touched a Mozilla product in some way or other.

How great could the world be if we make Mozilla, more importantly,

our mission, and our principals, and ever larger part of online life?

And the great thing is, we have that opportunity,
it is right in front of us.

We have global mind share, market share, people want us to succeed.

We have resources. We have vision. We have each one of us, and many more people who are eager to have us succeed

And the number of people drawn in and interested in the kinds of things Mozilla stands for is immense,

so we have the opportunity, the challenge is huge, the chance for impact is huge, and it's really important.

So let's do it. Thank you.