 First, I'd like to thank all the organizers for inviting me. I'm very honored to be here. And to thank each of you for coming, it's really great to see so many people interested in a topic that sometimes is as abstract as open. So I'd like to talk a little bit about what does it really mean to be open, and some examples about how we do that with Mozilla Firefox. And if we have some time after that, a little bit about the different degrees of open. And in the slides, you'll see more material than I'll cover. That's in part because there's time for questions at the end. I'm told it's a 20-minute discussion and 10 minutes of questions. So if you see something in the slides that I race past or don't cover at all, feel free to ask questions about it. That's why it's there. Open, first and foremost, is a state of mind. It's a way of looking at the world, a way of thinking about possibilities, and a way of relating to other people and their ideas. So today, I can give some guidance or some ideas or some thoughts about what works with Mozilla. The Creative Commons folks will give a lot of ideas about what works. But the key is state of mind. What's the state of mind that you approach questions with? And so that state of mind has a lot of different aspects. Some of them feel wonderful at the beginning. Some of them are a little bit uncomfortable at the beginning. For those of us who came from cultures that were very closed or very secretive or very perfection-oriented or very control-oriented, moving into the open space can be a change. I was trained as a lawyer. And I worked as a lawyer for a decade, which is a very secretive setting in that era. And everything you did was secret. Everything had to be perfect. You didn't share anything. You couldn't ever talk about anything because it all belonged to your client. And it was very closed. And the consummate success was that no one actually knew what you were doing. And so that's a big change to go from that setting to open source, open standards, open development, open content. I had to say I have found it to be intensely liberating. At the very beginning, it was quite odd when someone would look up and say, oh, we've got a question. Well, we'll just sort of post it and see what happens. Or we have some issue with the machines that run Mozilla. Well, we'll just spend some time in the IRC channel and see who else has seen that problem and sorted out. But it turns out if you can get past the original hurdles, it can be intensely invigorating. And part of the reason is no one of us is perfect. So it's much easier to admit that I am imperfect than to try and pretend I'm perfect and make everybody else believe that I'm perfect in the background. So this state of mind is really important. And in one core of it is to say, how much can we focus on opportunities for other people to try out ideas and for other people to be creative and for other people to try and combine and do new things, whether or not I think it's a good idea, whether or not I necessarily know about it, and in many cases, without my control. That is a key aspect of openness. And so if you're thinking about openness, I suggest anyway that you come back and think about how much am I really feeling control oriented and how much am I thinking about how do we spread out innovation? Because when you have a setting where one organization, you say, or me, is in control, that's a big bottleneck. Anybody who wants to do something needs to come to me and I have to have time, I have to know them, we have to have a discussion, I have to decide, I think what you're doing is worthwhile. And that's all before you can even start something. So an open frame of mind is more about here's a set of assets, here's a set of ideas, go try things with them, go experiment. And after you've done some experimentation, maybe we can all see that your idea is phenomenal. Maybe we'll look up and say, oh, that idea didn't go anywhere. But open is about saying, oh, that's a different idea. I didn't think of it, but it could still be a great idea. It's really different. I would never do anything that way. Go ahead and try it. Go ahead and experiment. And let's look at things afterwards. Open, another key concept of open, is that centralized control has a lot of costs. There are hidden costs very often and we tend not to see them. So even in organizations like Mozilla Firefox, periodically we'll find ourselves sort of sliding back into a control setting. And then we look up and we say, well, why is that? And try to shift out of it because that never works for us. But a centralized control can feel comfortable because you have a sense, you know everything that's going on and that you control everything that's going on and all the information is flowing into me and I get to make decisions and I get to direct and guide things. But what you don't see is all the cases where that's not true. All the cases where you think information is flowing into you but it's not. All of the opportunities that could be developed but you don't notice them or don't think they're important so they die. And increasingly in the age of technology, it's very hard to keep track of everything. Probably anyone who's got kids who are 12 or 13 or 14 year old is already beginning to see how hard it is to have centralized control over technology use. So this is a state of mind that I think you'll find running through all the discussions today, whether it's science or creativity or government or open data. And I'd encourage you, again, if you get in the middle of something you start to feel uncomfortable go back and just think about these things a little bit because as you get used to them they're much less sort of uncomfortable and disconcerting them. They might start out to be. But openness does not mean anarchy. Sometimes I find that people think, especially with Mozilla, that openness means anybody can do whatever they want and there's no framework or no structure. But that's not the case at all. When you have openness you need a framework as well. And your frameworks, of course, can be very open or very closed as well but open source is a framework. And I think Chris will talk a little later more in detail about open source. So I won't say too much about it except to say that it's a relatively well understood framework for how groups of people work together on a voluntary basis without employment and with this sense of you try your ideas and we will merge it all together. Public benefit or social benefit or civic benefit or community benefit is another framework. We use that at Mozilla. We're not only an open source organization we're a public benefit organization we're a non-profit sort of NGO type of organization. And that is a framework that guides our decision making very clearly. Creative Commons is another framework. That's a framework for how to share digital content and how to work within a copyright system but also allow more sharing and collaboration and innovation. And in the technology and internet world we have DNS the domain name system is a framework. The core technology that underlies the internet the TCPIP protocols those are a framework as well those are an open framework and they end up looking like this. So this is a topological map of the internet and of the packets of data as they move around the internet. It looks a little like a cell or a nerve cell I guess it's dark if you can see there. But this is the underlying structure of the internet is a framework for openness. You can develop a machine, a service you can plug it in wherever you want and it travels through that map of fiber and wireless connection but you don't need to go to a centralized authority and ask for permission to plug in a machine and to put a certain type of data on it. And so that's the framework of openness has been successful at the very basis of the internet. And Mozilla and Firefox is another framework for working in the open. And because open seems abstract sometimes I'm gonna give a few details about how we actually work in the Mozilla setting. Oh sorry that was too fast. So Mozilla is not as well known as Firefox but we're the creator of the Firefox web browser we're a global open source project with many thousands of contributors. We have about 350 employees and tens of thousands of contributors to the Firefox product and about 400 million people worldwide use Firefox. We're also as I said a public benefit organization. What we're trying to do is to build a layer of the internet that's a global public asset not a commercially owned private piece. So we build a slice of that internet for individual civic and social value. That's what Firefox is. It looks and feels like a piece of software of web browser but the reason we build it is to build this layer of the internet. We're very intentional about complimenting private economic gain because we understand the power of corporate and economic incentives and techniques but we're trying to compliment that with a different aspect of the internet. And so this question of being open is part of our philosophy and the reason that we exist. As well as building software we build communities of people with this can do spirit. It turns out when you have an open setting that the ability of lots of people to actually do things rather than to be unhappy or to complain about their world or to sit at home or to do nothing but play video games if you give people an opportunity to do something they get involved. And the number of people who get involved at Mozilla at a very young age is very high. From 12 and 13 and 14 years old on we find lots of kids who aren't playing video games but are building Firefox and building the internet. And there is in a really open setting where people feel they can be respected and engaged and immense amount of sharing and innovation and community feeling that develops. So Mozilla is as I said open plus public benefit that will be true of Creative Commons as well. It will not necessarily be true of every open setting that you might look at. So you'll see places where openness works very well in commercial settings as well. Now we use an open innovation style at Mozilla because we have to. Partly because it meets our mission but for very practical reasons. We have a mission about building a part of the internet but we live in the market. We're successful based on how many people use Firefox, how many people contribute to it, how many people care about the values we care about, how many people go off and do other things that build the kind of internet that we want. So we have to be open. We are very small compared to our competitors. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook. You can't pick bigger companies in the technology space. The slice of the internet that we're trying to build is not the same as any one of those organizations. And so the option that we have is to be a community based organization. And so we do this partly because we believe in it but also because it's been effective for us and as far as I can tell there is no other way for something like Mozilla to succeed. So we take the idea of people getting engaged to an extreme. Our process for building Firefox is open in the extreme. So we have 350 employees, maybe 150 of those are engineers and you can see the percentages here of the part of Firefox that is built by people who are not employees, who are volunteers, who want the internet to have the qualities that Mozilla Firefox represents. And so in order to make this happen, we are open about almost everything. What you see here, it's very dense text but this is a list of bugs. Where they are, what's, a bug. This is a list of things that we want to change in the software that makes up Firefox. And anyone can propose a change. This is all public. We could, if we had an internet connection and wanted to, we could go look at these now and we could submit a patch if we wanted. Anybody can comment on what needs to happen. And this is really important if you really want to be global. Because otherwise it's so easy to end up talking to the people you already know. And we know more people in California than we do elsewhere. But that's changed over time because we increasingly start to know more people everywhere because people show up. Anybody can submit a change. Now, it turns out it's not hard to get people to submit changes to want to participate. The much harder part is to go through the discipline process of making that change good enough that we'll actually accept it and call it part of Firefox. We communicate all the time. So these are just images of some of the ways that we communicate in the open. Our decision making process is in news groups. We're a little old style, it's not in forums yet, it's an old news group. But it's there. And so you can see the questions that are raised, the discussions that happen, what we're planning. And we try to communicate. One part of being open is communicate until you can barely stand it anymore and then communicate some more. So on the right, for example, because we have people in remote places around the world, we're trying various robot technologies. And this is a robot, the head on it is someone in Toronto or Singapore. And the robot moves around the office. So if you're in a remote office, you take one of these robots and you drive it around the office with your face on it. And it turns out it's a much easier way to communicate to people. So we try all sorts of things. We do make sure though that there's order. One thing about openness is it's easy to get to a setting that feels like anarchy. So it turns out we have, our framework has a lot of discipline in it and a lot of structure in it. And this is something you need to think about very carefully in each individual setting. We have immense amounts of structure for what goes into Firefox. We have to because it's gotta be of equality that people like and software is hard and web browser is intensely hard. And so we have many checks and double checks and reviews and approvals in order to make Firefox as good as it needs to be. You may not need that many structures in whatever you're working on. And I think some of the panels this afternoon in different areas will have different ideas of how much discipline and structure do you need. And this is a key piece when you think about openness or trying to build an open system. What's the framework? What are you trying to accomplish? You need a framework so that people share values. If people have the freedom and you're encouraging people to go out and try new things, you want them going in the same direction that you're going in. So at Mozilla, if you're going in this direction of building the part of the internet that we think is really critical, then we're very supportive and helpful. If you start going in a different direction and building an internet that's manipulative or spies on people or takes their data, then we're not at all helpful. Open source or not, we're just not gonna help you. And so this question of how much order and discipline is one to think through as well. And as you start each new effort, no one can think that through for you. There won't be an exact checklist that says, oh, Creative Commons or Mozilla or Wikipedia has this discipline, so ours needs to look the same. That might be a helpful starting point, but each new setting will need its own kinds of structure. And of course, if you've got an open setting, it certainly doesn't mean that leaders aren't important. In an open setting, leaders are incredibly important as well. To articulate the framework, to articulate the values, and to help your openness keep moving in the direction that you're trying to accomplish. And this is, I'm gonna go through this quickly because there's not a lot of time. This is an example of the scale that one can get through openness. This little circle is, you know, our one employee, represents one employee at Mozilla, you know, 10 or 15 times as many, all of our engineering employees, the number of people who contribute to Firefox daily, the number of people who contribute code to Firefox over the source of a product release, the number of people who tested, these are all volunteers, right? We would never have enough size or scope or scale or money to do this. Now, Microsoft and Apple probably could, but we never could. And then you get to 400 million people. So one of the great advantages of openness is the kind of scale that you can get. And if you're trying to be effective in the internet, you have to have scale. And so, especially for newcomers, where, you know, even, you know, a million users is not enough to make a big difference on the internet. Or 10 million users maybe, but at 400 million users were maybe a quarter of the usage. So if you wanna be successful in the internet, you need scale. And if you're looking for ways to get scale, then openness is a very, either useful or sometimes necessary trait. And finally, I just wanna come back to thinking about what open might mean. There are many different degrees of openness. I think it's sometimes tempting, but not helpful to think this organization or effort is utterly open and this one is utterly closed. There's a lot of degrees. And I suspect that as you go through the panels and the work and the shops, you'll see all of these raised. And so the first degree is transparency. Can people see information? And so that might be government data. In our case, it's everything. It's what's the source code? What's our planning process? What's our discussion process? What are our problems? You know, it's hard when you start out to let people see your problems or what's not working very well. But certainly in our case, we couldn't succeed otherwise. People can't help. So there's transparency. There's another degree of openness is how much can someone use the information you've made available for their own purposes? But it's very easy to say, well, here's some information. You're welcome to use it as long as you do what I want with it. You're welcome to use it as long as I'm positive it benefits me. You're welcome to use it as long as you ask me permission every step of the way. And some businesses do that, some organizations do that. It is not as powerful a method for engaging people if they are continuously coming back into your setting. So the question of open is, how comfortable can you be in letting people go their own way? So one of the tenants of open source is you can take everything we do, not the name, but you can take every piece of code that makes Firefox and you can go off and build something that competes with us if you want to. Or you can build something totally different. You can do whatever you want with it. That might be uncomfortable for us, but your ability to go off and follow your own path is part of how we operate in the open. Now we work very hard to make sure you want to continue to work with us, but you don't have to. Another degree of openness is how much can you actually contribute? It turns out that many people are eager to contribute to an effort. That's true if it's open, even in corporate settings, people are very eager to continue to improve something. If I'm using a product and it's not working properly for me and I can fix it, a lot of people want to fix it and make their own lives better. And so the open way of doing that is to have a setting that it doesn't require a lot of negotiation beforehand. So in our case, you can submit an improvement back to us. And I'm sure Chris will talk about that in his open source talk. And then there's the ability and open to actually affect decision making. One of the things that we are very focused on at Mozilla is that wherever you are, if you get involved in building Firefox and you're competent and you're dedicated, you can earn authority and respect and leadership within the Mozilla project. You don't need to be an employee. You don't need to be any place in the world. You need to be good at what you're doing and your peers need to respect you. That doesn't mean me as the leader of Mozilla. That means if you're working in code, the engineers that you're working with need to respect you. And if they respect you, then you can earn leadership. And it doesn't mean that you have to come to hiring managers or California or do anything else. You need to earn the respect of your peers. And then that respect translates into decision making ability in our project. You can of course go off and do your own project, but if you want to affect what we're doing, there are mechanisms for doing that that are based on what you actually do, how much respect you earn and how the people that you're working with think about you. And so finally in open, sometimes there's a back and forth about what open means free of charge. Like if something is open, does it have to be free? I actually don't think this is really settled yet. There are some cases in which it's true. If you're talking about open standards, the answer is yes. If you need to pay to access or see or use an internet standard, it is not open. Same as true of open source. You can't be open source if you need to pay to use it. And open APIs as well. In other areas, does everything that's quote open need to be free? I think that's unresolved. Or will vary over time and space. So I have some details on all these stages of openness and if there are questions, we'll come back to them. But I think I'm going to skip these for a moment and come back to the approach to openness. Like openness, especially if you're someone like me who started in a closed setting and moved into an open setting can be disconcerting at first. But as I said earlier, it can also be wildly energizing. And it enables a set of possibilities and collaboration and innovation and sharing that aren't actually possible in a centralized setting. And I think I'm going to stop here because I was asked to take, leave some questions. Yes. Hello. Yeah. My name is Basim. I'm working in Manotea Company. It's one of ICD companies. Actually I'm talking about the openness and the benefit for the openness of idea. If I have any innovation or idea and I will make it open for other people, I was expecting something that my idea will be grow. But actually the growing of ideas need some collaboration. And in Middle East, actually there is a lot of time I didn't find open source community. If there is any idea for Mozilla to open some open source communities in Middle East, in the region actually. All right. This is my first question. Second question about the openness or open source and make it free or not. I want to talk about, for example, the J-BOSS community. J-BOSS make something as free and open source, okay? But they provide also for commercial using, they provide something with a cost to get more, what can I say, more for using J-BOSS products. So they make open source community and also make some commercial products. Also for IBM, it's make Apache products and also make some commercial products. Yes. Okay. So there were two questions. I'll start with the second one. The second one was a comment in part about is open equal to free? And I think with software, with open source or free software, we know the answer to that. We know that the source code is free and there's business opportunities around that. And there's a fair amount of expertise about different business models around open source software. So there, the answer is settled. But on the larger question is, do other activities that might be open, do they all need to be free? That's what I think is unanswered. So for software, I think we've got it. But for, I don't know, pick something else. Well, certainly Creative Commons has a different answer. So there are ways in Creative Commons that you can say this is not free for commercial use, for example. So you might have something that's open in a Creative Commons content licensing sense that isn't free of charge. And the first question was about open source communities and finding, I think gatherings of people who have an interest in this open state of mind and is Mozilla thinking about opening some kind of office or facility or something in this region? Yes? And the answer is yes, I've been thinking about it. We typically, we do things differently than most companies. We don't go say, oh, it's time to have an office in this region and bring someone or hire someone and start things. We, because we're so community-based, we look for a set of people who have the open frame of mind and we try to build things around them. And so all of our offices around the world are built around people. And so that sometimes takes us a little longer to get started because we have to find a cohesive set of people. And I think we're just starting in this region but it's very high on my mind. I'm actually interested in thinking, can Mozilla find and join other organizations that are interested in the open state of mind, some of which might be software and some of which might be something else? And that's a little bit of a change until very recently I think Mozilla always thought about building Mozilla-like software in a region, not a Mozilla space or a hacker space. So I think we will but I don't have a timeframe. Any gentleman back there? A gentleman, a blue and white checked shirt. Hello. First of all, I'd like to thank you for Firefox. I've been a user for a couple of years and it's really great. However, you've talked about how you are changing the Internet. I'm wondering how, as a web browser, going to change the Internet? I mean, whether you open a website with Internet Explorer or Firefox or Google Chrome, it's still the same website. So how is Firefox changing the Internet besides being a great browser? Did everyone hear the question? Okay, I'm trying to find the right place to start. So our goal of Mozilla is not to make the web browser exist forever, just because it does now. Our goal of Mozilla is to build the best set of tools for building an open Internet that has the open and participatory values that we talked about. So currently, that's the web browser and that's why we build it. So we don't have the goal to say, we must maintain the web browser as the center of our life just because we know how to build one. But what we're trying to build is the web as a powerful platform, so that the web has the capabilities so that you don't need a bunch of proprietary technologies like Silverlight or Air or increasingly the Apple iOS technologies, all of which are very closed. And so to answer your question, think what Firefox does is it continues to make the web strong. So the web started out as text. In the next period, the web will explode with video. And I don't mean YouTube. I mean the ability to have visual information with the flexibility and power that we currently have with text. That's a large part. There's a lot of Mozilla effort. I think Joey will mention that a little bit. I believe that what we will do is we will use Firefox to build more capabilities into the web. So who are you? That should be something that's available across websites. Who do you know? What are your social relationships? What's your identity? All of these are things that currently live in a vertical stack, either on one website or one set of products and they're not accessible across the web. And so what Firefox will do to change the internet is to build these capabilities in so they're accessible across the web. And one more. Do you have any that you wanted from Twitter? Okay, last one. Over here. Firstly, thank you for the talk. So I'm a student here at Carnegie Mellon University. It's nice that you're at the Apple App Store because I think now, when you talk about openness, the other debate we're having is Apple is saying, okay, the future is now in HTML5 and then Adobe is saying, well, most of the web is running on Flash and then here you have Mozilla supporting, hello? Supporting openness at the same time but then you're seeing how do you get to the people when you're trying to use the middleware? Like, do you use Flash, Air? And recently you also have an app on the App Store, Firefox one, but you haven't had a browser to compete with Apple's offering. So do you think that when you're being open in terms of your contributions, do you also use proprietary outlets like Apple's App Store to actually encourage it? Let's see. There's a couple different questions in there. I'm trying to think about, I'll start by saying I think Apple is an example of something that has openness in some small slice but not truly like, I've heard people describe Apple, their App Store is open because developers can build applications. But it's actually not an open system because what you can build is very carefully controlled by Apple. So you mentioned we don't have a browser for the iPhone. Apple claims it is illegal for us to put Firefox on the iPhone. Now whether that was tested in court, I don't know but they're very clear that they claim it's illegal and very explicit. And so in the app, not only can you not put a browser on it, you can't use certain programming languages. I mean Apple is very rigid about what is and what is not possible. And it's controlled completely by their vision. So it's got some great traits because it's a good marketplace for developers. For example, to earn a living but I wouldn't call it an open system. Yes, we have an app in the App Store. There is a part of Mozilla and a part of open source and free software that says no, you should never touch anything that is an open source or free software. So you should never have anything in the App Store. In the early days, people told us we shouldn't build Firefox for Windows because Windows isn't free software. At Mozilla, our framework is moving the internet industry and moving the quality of the internet towards what we want, towards open and participatory. And we do a range of things that we believe are practical and meet our values to get there. And so in some cases, we do work or use proprietary software. For example, we don't ship flash. Like that's, it's inconvenient as a user. But we don't because we as part of what comes out under the Mozilla name do not include proprietary software but we make it easy to get flash. We set up a system that says your version of flash is outdated, you are at risk. And so we try to balance our words poetry and pragmatics. And I think I'm well out of time. This one question. We'll take this question again, the gentleman that asked the mirror. The question is about opting for working with volunteers rather than with employees. This is sort of selectiveness in people you work with, and is it or is it a way of giving incentives to people to do better work? Working with volunteers has some things you cannot get elsewhere, or it's very hard to get, and it has some things that are very difficult. So the obvious thing that's difficult about volunteers is their time commitment is flexible, and sometimes the rest of their life gets in the way. So actually planning how much time your volunteers have and when they have them is very difficult. Some of the things that are really great about volunteers are that they are more willing to express their perspective than employees. Now that feels uncomfortable. Chris works with volunteers too, and he's laughing, because it feels uncomfortable. So I'll give a concrete example. We build Firefox in English. It ships on the same day in 75 languages, almost 80, and those are all done by volunteers. People who want the internet available in their language are local. Those volunteers are very dedicated, and they work very hard, and they work very long hours when we come to a release time. And they can be very demanding, and they can be very loud, and they can be very angry when they don't feel they're getting what they need. And the tools one has to stop them are narrow. An employee can be unhappy with the direction of what's happening, but there's a lot of reasons for an employee not to be very shocked about what he or she feels. Losing a job, losing a raise, whatever it is. But when you have volunteers who put that kind of time and energy into a project, and they feel they own it. Not in a money sense, but in an emotional sense that Firefox belongs to all of the people who create it. Then they will continue to speak up until somehow you answer them. And if you have a good project and good leadership, the answer may be, I'm sorry, you're not going to get what you think you want. This is why. Or it may be, you're right. We're not doing a good enough job to answer them. And so it's uncomfortable, but the ability to avoid reality is very narrow when you're leading a set of volunteers. And although that's uncomfortable, in the long run it's what makes us successful. So thank you.