Tag Archives: mozilla

From here to open – How the City of Toronto began Opening up

Toronto the open

For myself, the biggest buzz at ChangeCamp Toronto was that the city showed up with lots of IT staff (much of it quite senior) who were trying to better understand how they could enable others to use their data and help citizens identify and solve problems. In fact the City of Toronto ran what I believe will be seen later as the most enduring sessions in which they asked what data should they start making available immediately (as APIs).

For those not in the know, think of an API as a plug that rather than delivering electricity instead delivers access to a database.

The exciting outcome is that web designers, coders and companies can then use this data to better deliver services, coordinate activities in neighborhoods, make government more transparent, or analyze problems. For example, imagine if all the information regarding restaurants health violations were not hidden deep within a government website (in a PDF format that is not easily searchable by google) but were available on every restaurant review website? Or if road closures were available in a data stream so a google maps application could show which road were closed on any given day – and email you if they were in your neighborhood.

This is the future that cities like Toronto are moving towards. But why Toronto? How did it arrive at this place? How is it that the City of Toronto sent staff to ChangeCamp Toronto?

The emergence of open in Toronto

I’ve tried to map this evolution. I may have missed steps and encourage people to email me or post comments if I have.

The first step was taken when people like David Crow created a forum – Barcamp – around which some of Toronto’s vibrant tech and social tech community began to organize itself. This not only brought the community together but it also enabled unconferences to gain traction as a fun and effective approach to addressing an issue.

Then, in late 2006 the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) issued an Request For Proposals (RFP) for a redesign of its website. Many in the tech community – who had no interest in doing the redesign – were horrified at the RFP. It was obvious that given the specifications the new website would not achieve its potential. A community self-organized around redesigning the RFP. Others took note and, because they cared about the TTC, wanted to also talk about simple non-website changes the TTC could make to improve services. TransitCamp was this born and – with enormous trepidation, some TTC officials showed up (all of whom should be loudly applauded). The result? The tech and social tech community in Toronto was engaged in civic matters and their activities were beginning to make it onto the city government’s radar.

Other Camps carried on through 2007 and 2008 (think OpenCities), building momentum in the city. Then, in November of 2008 – a breakthrough. The City of Toronto hosted an internal Web 2.0 conference and invited Mark Surman – executive director of the Mozilla Foundation and long time participant in the Toronto social tech space – to deliver the keynote entitled “A City that Thinks like the Web“. After the talk, the Mayor of Toronto stood up and said:

” … I’ve been emailing people about your challenges. Open data for Google Transit is coming by next June, and I don’t see what we shouldn’t open source the software Toronto creates.” He also said “I promise the City will listen” if Torontonians set up a site like FixMyStreet.com

You can hear the Mayor Miller’s full response here:

In short, the Mayor promised to begin talking about opening up (and open sourcing) the city. Freeing up Ryan Merkley and the City of Toronto IT team to attend ChangeCamp…

Lessons for ChangeCamp Vancouver

It remains unclear to me whether ChangeCamp is the right venue for tackling this opportunity in Vancouver.

We in Vancouver are not as far along the arc as Toronto is. We do, however, have some advantages. The map is more obvious to us and some of us have good relationships with key staff in the city. However, this process takes time. To replicate the success in Toronto, governments here on the west coast need not only be at ChangeCamp, they need to be running sessions and deeply engaged. For this to occur cultures need to be shifted, new ideas need to percolate within government institutions and agencies and relationships need to be built. All this will take time.

Microsoft: A case study in mismanaging a business ecosystem

A lot of fuss has been made about Microsoft’s inability to compete in the online space and the web specifically. Indeed, it is widely acknowledged that Microsoft was slow to understand the web’s implications and adjust its product lines accordingly. How did the largest, most successful software company in the world fail to predict or even, once the future became clear, effectively adapt to the rise of the internet? More importantly, why hasn’t it been able to acquire its way out of trouble?

Numerous articles have been written on this, many focusing on Microsoft’s strategy and the fact that it likely faced a disruptive innovation problem. I’d like to supplement that analysis by focusing on the predatorial way Microsoft managed and engaged its business ecosystem in the 1990s. I’ve not seen this analysis before so I thought I would throw it out there.

The 1990’s were a good time for Microsoft. It experienced tremendous growth and its operating system was by far the dominant choice in the market place. It had tremendous leverage over everyone in its business ecosystem, including its competitors, customers and complementors. While this was seen as a source of strength (and profit) it also laid the foundation for many of its problems. The story of Microsoft’s competitors in its traditional marketplace – especially those that have adopted an open source space model such as Linux, Mozilla and Apache – is well documented and forms the core of the traditional disruptive innovation thesis. But I think Microsoft’s inability to counter these threats, as well as its inability to compete in new spaces – such as against Yahoo! or Google – isn’t just a result of the fact that it crushed its traditional competitors but also due to the mismanagement of its relationship with its complementors and partners. More importantly, the disruptive innovation thesis fails, on its own, to explain why Microsoft hasn’t been able to acquire itself out of its problems.

I’ve been told that one of Microsoft’s great strengths is that it has fantastic tools for developers (I’m not a coder so I can’t comment myself). However, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Microsoft lacked a sophisticated or long-term strategy for engaging the software products and companies those developers created. Given that Microsoft was sitting atop the computer software ecosystem the company had one goal – staying there. This lead it to view anyone as a potential competitor – or if not a competitor than at least someone eating into profits that it could otherwise capture. Rather than balancing the growth of the value network with trying to capture its fair share, Microsoft prioritized the latter over the former. Consequently, many companies that produced products within the Microsoft ecosystem – particularly for Windows – were often not seen as complementors, but as rivals. Microsoft was aggressive in dealing with them – it was gracious in that it would usually offer to buy them out – on its terms – but always looming in the background was the threat that if you didn’t sell to them they would copy what you did. Consequently, many little companies that designed applications that enhanced Windows were forced to sell – or were put out of business after Microsoft copied their products and integrated them into the operating system.

A business ecosystem is like a natural one. It doesn’t matter how nutrient rich the environment (like say, one with excellent development tools) if emerging lifeforms are consistently snuffed out, pretty soon they will elect to grow and evolve elsewhere – even in places where the nutrients are weaker. This is precisely what I suspect started to happen. Likely, fewer and fewer developers wanted to approach the Microsoft ecosystem with a 10-foot pole because they would either be bought out on unfavorable terms or at an early stage (before they were too valuable) or worse, Mircosoft would simply crush them by using its enormous resources to replicate them and eat into their business.

The repercussion of this is that Microsoft saw fewer and fewer new and innovative products being created for its platforms. Programmers and developers shifted to other platforms, or created whole new platforms where they would be free to grow ideas. This, I believe, prevented Microsoft from understanding how the web would change its business. Not only did its current profits create a disincentive to altering its business strategy but it snuffed out one of the few groups of people that could warn it, educate it and challenge it, about the impending changes – its complementors and partners. Equally important is that it diminished the pool of potential acquisition targets whose culture, technology and processes might have helped Microsoft adapt. There were simply not that many mid-sized mammals in the ecosystem: Microsoft had prevented them from evolving.

Today – based on conversations I’ve had with some people in Microsoft – I get the sense that they are trying to become a better partner (or at at least, they may be aware of the problem). Perhaps Microsoft will succeed in becoming a better partner. It won’t however, be easy. Changes to how one treats complementors and partners often require rethinking the very culture of an organization. This is never an easy or quick process. In addition, it takes time to rebuild trust and attract new blood into the ecosystem… and any misstep will count dearly against you.

There are also almost certainly some interesting lessons in this for other dominant players – such as Google. Will Google behave differently? I don’t know. In many regards Microsoft behaviour was rational. It was seeking to preserve its position and maximize its share of the pie. This was made all the tougher because its market was evolving and the future was unclear. No one knew which pieces of the value network would be critical (and therefor most profitable) and so Microsoft was simply trying to stake out as many of them as possible. It is easy to imagine Google behaving in a similar manner. But I suspect that if it does, it may also find it hard to escape Microsoft’s fate.

Big thank you to David H. for pointing out some typos and errors.

Cultural theories of risk and the rise of emergence systems

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My (very cool) friend Alex T. recently introduced me to the grid/group typology. As explained in wikipedia:

Mary Douglas, an anthropologist studying traditional African religion observed that different societies feared different sorts of threats, and that these differences correlated with differences in their social structure. Later, Douglas argued that social structures differ along two principal axes: “grid” and “group (see graph).”

The important things is – if your society organized itself along one of these structures – it is challenging, if not impossible to see a solution outside of that structure. What I think is exciting is that the egalitarian mode of thinking – thanks to the internet and social software – may be ascendant, explaining some of the reason market based systems (individualists) and bureaucracy based systems (hierarchist) feel threatened.

From Christopher Hood: The Art of The State (again via wikipedia):

Fatalists feel isolated in a world that imposes arbitrary constraints on them. They view nature as a ball on a flat surface, rolling randomly in any direction. There is little they can do to control their situation, and resign themselves to riding out whatever fate throws at them.

Hierarchist see a society with a well-defined role for each member. Thus , they believe in the need for a well-defined system of rules, and fear social deviance (such as crime) that disrupts those rules. Hierarchists see nature as “perverse/tolerant”: it can be exploited within certain limits, but if those limits are exceeded the system will collapse. They thus rely heavily on experts, who can identify those limits and establish rules to keep society within proper bounds.

Individualist see their choices as unconstrained by society and they lack close ties to other people. They value individual initiative in the marketplace, and fear threats like war that would hamper free exchange. The individualist view of nature as resilient. Like a ball resting at the bottom of a cup, nature will return to its original stable position after any disturbance. Thus, individualists embrace trial-and-error, as they have confidence that the system will fix itself in the end.

Arguably, much of the left-right axis of our politics is a battle between Individualists on the right (let the market rule!) and Hierarchists on the left (government oversight!) with fatalists abstaining (what’s the point?).

Hood’s description of Egalitarians is intriguing mostly because I think it is quite narrow and, if slightly tweaked, could help describe the rise of an important new block of voters (part of the neo-progressive movement Taylor and I write about).

Hood description (again, via wikipedia)

Egalitarians experience low grid and high group. They live in voluntary associations where everyone is equal and the good of the group comes before the good of any individual. In order to maintain their solidarity, egalitarians are sensitive to low probability-high consequence risks (such as nuclear power), and use them to paint a picture of impending apocalypse. Risk and Culture was, in part, a polemic against the environmental movement, which Douglas and Wildavsky saw as sharing the worldview and social organization of religious cults. Egalitarians see nature as fragile, like a ball balanced precariously on an overturned cup. Any small disturbance will send it crashing down. Thus egalitarians advocate the precautionary principle and cling to traditional ways of life that have proven to be sustainable, rather than risking disaster by trying new technologies.

Hood describes the Egalitarian way as one with high levels of cooperation within a group that is socially distinct from the outside world and which relies on dynamic rules set through constant debate and case-specific solutions to every issue as it arises.

Hood’s contempt is well placed. Many tightly held communities facing what they believe to be massive threats can indeed take on cult-like characteristics. But that is not their only possibility. Indeed, societies that organize along these lines have new powerful tools – namely the internet – to use to organize themselves. More importantly, these communities can coordinate themselves and achieve powerful outcomes even with weak bonds. Many of the “egalitarians” I see today are those creating projects that seek to engage citizens and pool individual resources to address collective problems. Indeed, many open-source projects fit this mold very well.

More importantly, most of these projects are not cult-like, but are self-organizing and emergent. They see that a situation (like the environment or the open web) is vulnerable and they don’t believe a) it is self-correcting (like individualists) b) it can be perfectly moderated or controlled by top down systems (like hierarchists); or c) that collective or individual action is futile (like fatalists).

There are few examples of egalitarians (or emergents) that spring to mind as successful – certainly the organizational and political discourse has been dominated by hierarchists and individualists. Maybe this explains why people have such a hard time defining new forms of organisation – like open-source projects. They are trying to peg their participants as either right-wing market loving individualists or left-wing regulation loving hierarchists. The fact is they are neither. While hardly uniform, my experience is that they are often libertarians (low-grid) who believe in free-association, collaboration and emergent systems (high-group).

The increased manifestation of this new structure in society could diversify how we perceive and try to solve problems. But in the short term observers (like pundits on CNN) will continue to try to put force this peg of a new circular group into an old square hole.

Improving the tools of open source

Wikipedia: Community Management as its core competency

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Last week Paul Biondich lent me The Starfish and the Spider and I just finished reading it (I know, I didn’t put it in the sidebar). Indeed, a number of people I respect have had great things to say about it – John Lily suggested the book ages ago and I remember reading his review and wanting to pick a copy up.

Tons of exciting ideas in the book. One that excited me most related to an idea (articulated by many people) that I’ve been trying to advance – namely that Community Management is core to open source. Specifically there was this exciting piece on how Jimmy Wales, the “catalyst” behind Wikipedia, spends his time:

Jimmy focuses a great deal of attention on maintaining the health of the Wikipedia community. “I go to speaking engagements all over the world at conferences, and everywhere I go I meet Wikipedia volunteers,” he told us. “Usually we go off to dinner and talk shop about Wikipedia. The Wikipedia gossip is the same all over the world-just the characters are different. The problems that affect community are always the same problems.” When he doesn’t meet the members in person, Jimmy spends “a ton of time writing e-mails internally, to the community, touching base with people, discussing issues that come up on the mailing list.” But “as far as working with Wikipedia, I don’t write articles. Very, very little do I ever edit. But I do engage with people on policy matters and try to settle disputes. (page 112 – paperback edition)

It could be that in starfish organizations the role of managers and leaders isn’t to tell people what to do, but help settle disputes, grease the wheels and make sure that groups are working well. Is this to say other expertise are not needed? Not at all. But it is great to see another take on how soft skills such as dispute management, facilitation, negotiation and mediation may be essential for sustainable success of starfish organization (like open source communities).

The Evolution of Open – notes from Open Everything

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Day 1 of Open Everything at Hollyhock has passed and I’m now up far too late blogging about it.

Numerous insights, but possibly the most interesting occured during the spectrogram exericse where we asked participants to physically locate themselves along an axis (in our case a piece of tape along the floor) in response to questions we asked them.

The most interesting was a two dimensional spectrogram where we first asked people if “The Organization I work for is open.” Then, after participants chose their spot along this first axis we asked them to migrate along a Y axis according to the question “I personally work in an open manner.” Below is a re-creation of how the participants distributed themselves around the room.

Obviously definitions of “open” and “how open” one is was up to each participant – but then this is the point of a spectrogram!

At first blush it simply seemed that many people were personally open (or trying to act in an open manner) in their jobs and that there was pretty equal distribution between who was in an open vs. closed organization.

However, the distribution of people in the quadrants was not random. Those in the bottom right quadrant (quadrant 2) tended to be people who were in more conservative institutions like universities, governments and traditional companies. These people were the IT professionals, consultants, organizers, etc… but more importantly, they were rabble-rousers within their respective organization, trying to initiate change. In short, you had CHANGE MAKERS trying to shift their org into a more open space.

In the top right-hand quadrant (quadrant 3) were people in emerging open source projects and generally smaller organizations that were striving to be open. This was a group of people who’s organizations were become increasingly open. These ACTIVISTS believed in the open idea and were excited about where they – and their organizations – were.

Finally, in the top left hand quadrant (quadrant 4) were the VETERANS of the open movement. Here were people who worked in well established open source or open projects. Their challenge was they were experiencing the limits and issues of being and acting consistently in an open manner. As they push about against the most extreme limits of open they saw the necessity and value of not always been completely and totally open (for example, there are only so many thinking processes, conversations, and discussion, I can take the time to share).

So the big ah-ha was realizing the growth curve that people and organizations go through as they engage in, and become, more open. First you have change makers who agitate and work to enable organizations to adopt open methodologies. Then as the organization becomes more open people become activists, celebrating the open idea and pushing it into all areas of the organizations. Then those within the organizations begin to run into the operational and practical limits of open and, importantly, recognize the importance and role of “private” or “closed” as essential and so guard it. Critically, I also think that those in quadrant 2 or 3 are often measuring open differently then those in quadrant 4 – who because of their boards and/or stakeholders, hold themselves to a very high bar.

The best part about this is that it means there are individual and organzations lessons to be drawn as one migrates through these stages. It also means thatt those passionate about open, but in radically different quadrants (say 2 vs 4) may have very different priorities and/or concerns. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t both equally committed to a common ideal, just that they are looking at it from very different places.

Mozilla knows it is part of a social movement

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So I while back I wrote that the open web is a social movement. The post generated a fair number of pingbacks and emails as well as a few comments. Some people wondered – is the open web a social movement? Is Mozilla part of a social movement? I sense… there may still be doubters.

Today, I bring tantalizing evidence that the open web is indeed a social movement and that Mozilla is actively promoting its growth.

As part of the “party packs” shipped out to people who volunteered to host Firefox 3 launch parties Mozilla included these bad boys:

The Mozilla Cause Bracelet

The rubber bracelet is the sine qua non ingredient for any well known (and sometimes less well known) social movement. For example (or for those not up to date on your rubber bracelet colours) white bracelets = make poverty history, yellow bracelets = livestrong.

The rubber bracelet is THE symbol of a social movement. Hip movements have them, emerging movements want them, and to be clear, non-social movements look silly with them. Although there is no rule preventing it, when was the last time you saw someone sporting a wristband in support of “make mircosoft (more!) profitable” or “re-make the breakfast club.”

And so I thought it was curious that Mozilla handed out wristbands – not advertising the launch of Firefox 3, or even saying “Support Mozilla.” Instead, orange wristbands = support the Open Web – Mozilla.

Remind me again. How is the open web not a social value? And how are its wristband sporting supporters not part of a movement?

Communities within Slideshare

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So my presentation on Community Management as a Core Competency of Open Source recently passed the 7000 views mark. I admit that I find it somewhat incredible that one can create a lecture that gets viewed this many times. But still more interesting is seeing how the content and community around Slidecast has evolved.

Presently my presentation is the 74th most viewed slidecast on Slideshare – it just got run over by “What Teachers Make” which blew by it on its way up the charts (and rightly so, it really is quite good even if it doesn’t have sound). I am also pleased to note thought that my bit recently passed “Paris Hilton Photo Collector” and is moving in on the Beautiful Women of Japan and 50 Funny Cats.

I’ve been visiting slideshare a fair bit since I first posted to it 8 months ago. What has been interesting is that as it has gets more popular it seems that both the slidecasts get better (for example “What Teachers Make”), and that the more interesting slidecasts are polling better (note “What Teachers Make” meteoric rise). Indeed my own presenetation’s relative rise against cats and sexy women is further example of this trend. A year ago it seemed at least a fifth involved scantily clad women – but the days of those slideshows doing well appears to be in relative decline (they are still there, don’t get me wrong). It just appears that once you are this deep in the long tail, lots of other content is more interesting to people.

All this is to say that yet again Andrew Keen should be roundly ignored, but then the very fact you are here probably means you were already ignoring him…

The challenge of mozilla’s magnetism

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Mozilla is unique. The project gets more media, more publicity and more buzz than virtually any other open source project. It is, in much of the public’s mind, the poster child for open source and the open internet. More critically, this isn’t some interesting observation, why this is the case, and what it means, is profound implications for the success of Mozilla, the open web and the future of the internet.

I would argue that Mozilla’s uniqueness is not a result of being the most successful open source project. (I’m sure there is much heated debate over which is the most successful, largest, most complex, most important, etc… open source community/project). The fact is, it’s irrelevant.

Mozilla matters because Firefox is a consumer product. And not just any consumer product, it is THE consumer product that allows people to interact with the world wide web, the most consumer oriented part of the internet. Thus, while Apache, Linux, Sendmail and the million of other open source projects matter (a great deal!) the simple fact is, Mozilla is the brand that represents both the potential of open source and the importance of an open internet. This matters because it means a) Firefox and Mozilla are the catalysts in creating social awareness among millions of consumers about the importance of the open internet and b) as a result, Mozilla will likely be the first port of call of these newly awakened activists who wish to find ways to contribute.

This, of course, is both a blessing and a curse.

One the one hand it often seems that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, has an opinion about Mozilla (and boy am I guilty of this). I’m not inside Mozilla but I can imagine the constant barrage of “helpful” ideas or suggestions or worse, outright complaints or threats, must feel exhausting. The banging on the gates never ends and engaging in it could distract the community from its important work.

On the other hand… how great that an increasing number of people have this energy and passion for Mozilla and, by extension, the open internet. Many of those banging at the gate – and a good many more who are simply too intimidated or too unsure to even do that – are primed and ready to be among the next million mozillians. The banging (or loitering) is a symptom of a desire to contribute – indeed it may be the only outlet they know of or have.

The real question is – how do we engage these people?

Should Mozilla do more to shape and lead the social movement around the open web? As David Ascher also notes, the opportunity of broadening Mozilla’s tent by absorbing these newly minted activists into streams of activities and helping channel their energy and enthusiasm is an exciting prospect. But I’m not sure the answer is a definite yes. As Mitchell Baker – in part – points out, the risk of diluting Mozilla’s mission or its culture is a serious one.

However, the social movement around the open web is going to keep attracting supporters. Again, because Mozilla is one of the leading catalyst in creating this social awareness these supporters are going to show up at it’s doorstep first. Regardless of the choice (absorb or not absorb) to successfully support the movement I’d argue that at the very minimum Mozilla needs a plan to a) greet these newcomers and make them feel welcome; and b) some capacity to point them in the direction of a variety of institutions, organizations, projects and activities, where they can channel their energy. The more people the movement can engage – or to reframe – the more communities of action with can create within our broader community of interest, the more likely we will be successful in acheiving an open internet.

Collaboration – a dirty word rescued by connectivity

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Col·lab·o·ra·tion
n.

1. The act of working together; united labor.

2. the act of willingly cooperating with an enemy, especially an enemy nation occupying one’s own country.

During a conversation over breakfast yesterday I was asked to talk about my experience in open source public policy (through Canada25) which led me to talk about the differences between cooperation and collaboration I’ve ruminated upon before here.

After outlining the idea my friend stopped me and said

“You know, it is interesting, for people in my generation (re: boomers) collaboration was a dirty word.”

He went to explain that he’d talked with young people in his organization and had discovered that they had largely abandoned the word’s negative connotations, but he was again struck by how easily I embraced and used the term. For boomers – he explained – “collaboration” brings forward notions of Vichy France or narcs, people who sold out or who betrayed their origins in some way, often for gain or even to work (usually on behalf of) of a new (usually alien and/or evil) outsider.

What a difference a generation makes. Today I see more and more of my friends using the term. Which begs the question…

Why?

One hypothesis I have relates to the changing nature of our economy and how we work.

I don’t know if people have to work in teams more frequently then they use to, but i feel fairly confident that even if the frequency of teamwork has remained consistent, the emergent, or self-organizing, or even self-directed nature of those teams has probably increased. Thanks to the telecommunication revolution, and even just the rise of the knowledge economy, we are increasingly being asked to work together as we exchange, mix, re-mix and mash up ideas.

As a result, I think ours is a generation that is grasping for more nuanced and complex ways to describe working with others. No where is this more important than in the online world where the opportunities for both communicating, and miscommunicating, have never been easier. And within the online world nowhere is this more important than in the open source space where whole new models of how people can work together on large complex problems are emerging. With so much going on, is it any surprise our vocabulary is adjusting?

I say great. We need a more sophisticated and nuanced vocabulary to describe how we work together. The fact is people can work together in lots of different ways, conflating that variation with a single term is likely to make success harder to repeat.

Now… the revival of the word evangilism among non-religious coders is also interesting. I’ve done research as to where that came from and would be curious how it started getting used. The resistance to that word – especially given the culture wars in the US – is likely to be much greater. Outside the technology geek world that word still triggers LOTS of people.

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