Gardens and Math

Although it’s been half a year since my last post about a book, I have managed to read a couple of things since then (I just haven’t had the time to write about them). To catch up on things, here’s some quick mini-posts:

Second Nature: Lots of interesting stuff in here, especially the Why Mow? chapter. One part stuck with me that talked about how it used to be a point of pride to organize homes for consumption as people were moving off of farms. Now emphasis is shifting back to organizing homes for at least some production. And there is a lot you can produce without turning a house into a farm — you can produce food, water, dirt, energy…

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel: Just like the book on infinity, this book is less about math than it is about our experience of the world. In short, the world is a weird place. While I was reading, I kept thinking of the second best line from Ghostbusters: I’ve seen shit that would turn you white (this clip is notable for also having the best line from the movie).

Up next: When is a Planet Not a Planet?: The Story of Pluto.

Featured Mozilla-Based Applications For July

People and organizations are doing a lot of interesting things with Mozilla technologies. Here are two of the many Mozilla-based applications available. If you would like to suggest other applications to feature, please leave a comment.

TuneUp was created for music lovers, by music lovers. TuneUp automatically cleans up your music collection, gives you information about upcoming concerts in your area and more.

Wesabe is part money management tool, part community. Wesabe gives you the tools and the insights to take control of your finances and see all your bank and credit card balances in one place.

Update on the www.mozilla.org relaunch

It has been several weeks since we finalized the new www.mozilla.org design and I wanted to post an update on things. There are several different pieces we’ve been putting together to prepare for the relaunch.

The new design is on a staging server and we’re making a few more tweaks to the templates to polish things. If you’d like to help with the HTML and CSS edits, please let me know.

We’re also moving from CVS to SVN to put the site on a modern repository and to help us work with more people (for instance, the l10n community uses SVN to localize web content and we are interested in working more closely with them).

Out of date pages are being archived to make the transition to the new repository (and the move to a new PHP-based templating system) easier. We’ve trimmed the site down from roughly 24,000 files to just under 14,000 files so far.

Many existing pages are being updated and new content is being added. This will continue after the site is relaunched, so let us know if you’re interested in helping us tell the Mozilla story.

As we move forward with transitioning files to the staging server, we’ll need some help to make sure pages are displaying correctly. We’ll post more information about that soon. Thanks again to everyone who has commented and contributed so far.

I Am The Benevolent Dictator Of My Face

About a week ago, I asked for help choosing my next beard style. Unfortunately the most frequent suggestions were not practical and would take a long time to grow in.

So instead, I’m going with something that no one suggested—a horseshoe moustache. I had thought this beard style was a fu manchu but learned I was wrong (this really has been a voyage of discovery).

Now some may say that I’m going back on my promise, but I think this highlights an important point about open source communities—they are not democracies. I have taken everyone’s input into consideration, but ultimately I’m the benevolent dictator of my face and have made a tough call.

One Cause or Many?

For the www.mozilla.org redesign we’ve been working on adding new content to the home page and adding a new section we’ve been calling Our Causes. I have some questions about this section that I’d be interested in getting feedback on.

The idea is to use this section to tell a more complete story about Mozilla and the goals that are behind our actions. Or to put it another way, if Firefox is a means to an end we need a place to talk about what that larger end is.

Many Causes version

The initial approach to writing the main page for this section was to identify a set of community priorities (accessibility, privacy, etc.) that mapped back to principles in the Manifesto and describe what we’re doing in these areas.

After talking about this with other people it became clear that there was an alternate approach to consider. Instead of many causes, perhaps we have just one overall cause (making the Internet better) and everything else is just a means to this end?

Both approaches seem useful, so this leads to a few questions:

• Does the One Cause or Many Causes approach appeal to you more?
• Where else would the Many Causes content fit if it wasn’t used here?
• What name would you use for the One Cause approach? Our Cause, Our Goal, Our Mission, The End To Which Firefox Is A Means? (I’m joking on that last one…)

One Cause version

I have some thoughts on these questions, but no clear answers yet. The Many Causes version seems more correct to me because it has more detail to it, but the One Cause version seems easier to digest for someone who just knows Mozilla makes a browser.

If we used the more approachable version as the main page, there are other ways to use the more detailed version. It could be a sub-page or an introduction to the Manifesto (it rolls up many of the principles into concrete activities and that could be a good way for people to approach the full Manifesto text).

If we used the One Cause version, what about the name? I think Our Causes flows well, but the singular Our Cause doesn’t sound right to me. Maybe Our Goal or Our Mission is better? The current mission page is a bit out of date and could use a review, so maybe that gets folded into this process?

The response to my last post about site content had a lot of useful feedback, so I’m looking forward to hearing from people about this too.

Featured Mozilla-Based Applications for June

People and organizations are doing a lot of interesting things with Mozilla technologies. Here are two of the many Mozilla-based applications available. If you would like to suggest other applications to feature, please leave a comment.

Evergreen is an open source library automation system that helps patrons find library materials, and helps libraries manage those materials.

Skyfire™ is a free mobile web browser that allows you to experience the internet on your phone exactly like on your PC. Now, you can use the full web from your mobile phone with unprecedented speed and simplicity.

Four Travel Questions

Asa recently posted answers to four travel questions on his blog. Here’s my list of the most interesting things I’ve seen in each of the categories he listed.

Architecture/Building: Pantheon (I like Roman stuff)
Natural Wonder: Aurora Borealis (barely seen in Iceland)
Work of Art: Peace Fountain (that’s my photo in the article)
Animal: Reef shark (seen in Fiji on a dive)

Building or Believing?

As several people have mentioned recently, talking about Mozilla in a comprehensive way is hard. In the new design for www.mozilla.org we’re introducing people to Mozilla in just a few words and it is particularly difficult to do this in a small space.

Our current approach is to say that We believe that the internet should be public, open and accessible. In earlier comments, there were concerns that this was coming across as a religious message that could be off-putting and that this also didn’t convey any of the actions the community is taking.

Concerns about putting people off are valid, but it’s worth looking into this to find out what is making people uncomfortable since there’s no actual religious content in that message.

One of the definitions of belief is “a body of tenets held by a group” and this seems like an accurate description of Mozilla’s principles. The word itself seems neutral, but it comes loaded with a set of associations. I wonder if the problem then is a worry of having our passion (which is good and which the community has lots of) be confused for zeal (which can definitely be off-putting)? The dictionary lists those as synonyms, so I suppose there’s a fine line.

This concern also applies to other parts of our story. For instance, a manifesto is defined as “a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer” but how many people assume only radical ideas are published in a manifesto? Calling our publicly declared principles a manifesto is correct, but could it be off-putting for people new to Mozilla?

One way to address this is to change the introduction. Maybe “We are building a public, open and accessible internet” is better? It is certainly true—we’re not a think tank but rather a community of people who do things. On the other hand, this misses some of the poetry of our story. We are doing things, but why?

My feeling is that our passion is a major plus (who wants to get involved with a group of people who aren’t excited about anything?) but we have to be aware of how we are perceived by people who are new to Mozilla. Maybe we keep the passion a click away, so people can find it but it isn’t the first thing they see?

We probably won’t know what’s right until we try some things out. This spot on the home page could rotate and feature several introductions and we’ll see what works best (there are bound to be some interesting optimization tests we could run).

I’m certainly open to ideas about any of this, so please post comments, thoughts or suggestions for better introductions.

Hypersonic Paper Airplanes

The recent mission to Hubble was certainly exciting, but I’m looking forward to Endeavour’s flight in June. The Shuttle will be taking up around 30 paper airplanes that are going to be dropped from the space station. Would be fun to find one of these in our backyard one day.

Crowdsourcing My Next Beard Style

I’m not sure what to do next with my beard, so I figured I’d consult the wisdom of crowds* for help. Post beard style suggestions here and if there’s not a clear winner I’ll do a poll and we’ll vote on the top choices**.

If you would like some inspiration, Wikipedia has information about beard style options (I found out that I’ve been wearing Friendly Mutton Chops lately). Maybe you’ll want to suggest a Hollywoodian, Reed or a Donegal?

* The Mozilla community is a particularly good crowd to consult since facial hair innovation is a collective core competency.

** I’ll shave the winning style as long as it is not a neck beard.