• People don’t pay transparently for mobile services or devices
• People don’t pay for online news (although some surveys indicate many would)
• People often end up “subscribing” to brands (Apple, Google, Facebook) and becoming brand consumers rather than active participants in their own digital life.  That delegation of trust is often pragmatic, but it’s worrisome if unchecked by alternatives.
• The heterogeneity of the original internet can lead to an appearance of chaos, and many people prefer simpler, more uniform experiences.  Both technical and psychological factors encourage centralization of services with single providers.  Financially as well, “small, independent startups” have huge incentives to become part of one of the big centers of mass.

Finally, the huge psychological distance between the value of free services and the costs that funds them is one of the big topics that puzzle.  It applies to “how come I can get free map directions from Google but I have to pay to get them from TomTom?” as well as “how can I convince my neighbors that electing so-and-so to office will mean more tax revenue overall, which in turn will mean better schools?”.  In both cases, the number of steps between cost and service is huge, and coupling them tighter would destroy the huge advantages that centralization and scale offer.  (If I knew more about the derivatives crash I could make some pithy reference here).

I agree with Tim that “If you don’t want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don’t wait till it’s too late.”  I think he’d also agree that we need to think beyond code and copyright.  That’s like going to war with trucks but no tanks.  For the open, distributed, heterogeneous web to thrive, we need to incorporate thinking from a host of other fields, such as contract law, design, psychology, consumer behavior, brand marketing, and more.  Figuring out how to engage thinkers and leaders in those fields is likely one of the critical, still missing steps.

Mozilla Messaging Office (credit: Mark Surman on flickr)

The office itself is pretty much what I was hoping it would be. It’s much bigger than the old space, which means we can continue to all be together, for the vibe that it generates, and to facilitate communication. It’s even big enough for Bryan’s Love Sac, which is a huge draw for visiting kids and executive directors. The internet service rocks, especially compared to the ISPs we tried at the old place. (it’s a fascinating world when residential internet service is head and shoulders above what you can get in an office tower). We have still to install some more lights and another desk or so, but there’s no rush. There are some definite oddities to the space, like the bathtub in the open space, Andrew’s laser and fog machine, but I’m sure we’ll find interesting uses for all of that. It’s been also really easy to have people stop by and hang out, which I think helps us build connections with other Mozilla folks, other Vancouver tech, design, & open source people. Some of that was a bit awkward in our previous space.

Miniature Downtown Eastside (credit: joannaforever on flickr)

What is more interesting than all that “inside” stuff, though, is the neighborhood outside. For people not familiar with Vancouver, we’re located in the “notorious” downtown east side — a weird neighborhood with its own unpronounceable acronym: DTES. It’s a neighborhood with a long history, much of which I don’t know, and for much of the recent decades, not very healthy. It’s easy to simplistically describe it as skid row, which is certainly part of the truth. In particular, if you look at how the press covers it, it might seem a bizarre place to choose for an an office. A center of chronic drug use, the place where people go when they can’t go any lower, a money-pit for well-intentioned but ineffective social programs, all the headlines are bad.

If you go past the headlines and read the globe and mail reports, and more importantly, if you spend a bit of time here, the picture gets far more complex. I know I don’t know nearly enough about the social crisis to pontificate about it. All I can report are my impressions after a few days.

six lives (credit: SqueakyMarmot on flickr)

The first impression clearly centers on “the people in the street”. During the lunch hour in particular, the number of people idle in the streets is stunning. In most of Vancouver, like in most healthy cities, the people you see in the street are going somewhere — they have a place to go, something to do (the few stationary folks are usually smokers escaping the no-smoking rules, and geeks wondering where to go for lunch). Around here, the number of people who just seem to hang out with nothing to do is startling. It’s expected and undeniable that there’s despair, sorrow, drugs, and mental illness in these streets. But what I didn’t expect was to see this much idleness and boredom, states which my friend Jen correctly characterized as toxic. The ill-informed manager in me feels that part of the answer has to be identifying some activities that “these people” could do which would give some energy and impetus for action in their lives. Then I realize I have no idea what I’m talking about and keep moving.

Woodward project (credit: Beach650 on flickr)

The second recurring thought is that this world is possibly about to change radically. First, because Vancouver is a city with a growing population and a fixed size (there’s water almost all around), and this kind of economic black hole feels unstable. More specifically, there are some developments that I wouldn’t be surprised to see push the economics past a tipping point. The Woodward’s project is a huge tower about to accept tenants, which will include 536 condo units, a university campus, a grocery store, a bank, etc. People sometimes focus on the 40% of those condos that will be below-market (i.e. subsidized) housing. Those units will likely help relieve some pain, but I doubt the people sleeping on the street will qualify. I’m predicting more change from the influx of people to the market-priced units, the university, and other businesses that move into that building (and likely the neighboring buildings, whose property value will likely rise). All of the demographics will change (age, income, race, health, etc.), which I expect (and hope) will change the feel of the neighborhood. A thousand students means a lot of young, healthy, ambitious and optimistic people in the streets, faced with a situation that needs people as much as it needs money. People with incomes and property will mean more people who care directly about the neighborhood.

The Irish Heather (credit: urbanmixer on flickr)

The third thought is that the street scene you get at first glance is highly misleading. The restaurant scene, for example, is nothing if not high end. Across the street is Boneta, which serves $79 prime rib. Around the corner, the Irish Heather and its Shebeen whisky bar in the back, has 4 columns of whiskies. The related Salty Tongue is a great place to have work lunches, and Salt is hip enough to be a tasting room, not a restaurant. Even our building houses a fancy teahouse which serves pastry flown in from my home town. More reasonably, my friend Sally told me this morning about Deacon’s Corner, a diner that’s two blocks away, so I headed out there for lunch. The place was packed with 30-somethings wolfing down burgers, all hipper and more web-two-oh than each other. Food aside (although food is crucial), if you slow down when you walk in between “scary” people, you notice that behind the glass fronts are banks of young architects hacking on laptops. That that strange storefront is actually open, and selling cool art/crafts stuff. You notice that in fact you’ve seen quite a few friends in the neighborhood, and that’s not counting the social activists. You reflect on the fact that there’s a facebook group for the building you’re in, and that their apartments all look pretty swank and nice.

This is the downtown east side?

Which brings me to the fourth thought, which is that these neighborhood labels are awfully fungible. Looking north, we’re one block away from Water Street, which is the epicenter of Gastown, “tourist central” (it’s a bit funny when some of the tourists try to explore and end up on the “wrong” street). Two blocks south and you’re in Vancouver’s older chinatown, complete with yummy cheap steam buns (thanks Avi for the rec). Three blocks west, and you’re in the no-name neighborhood with hip clothing stores and (just to bring food back in), So.cial, Brioche, Nuba, and the awesome Greedy Pig (which is itself a few blocks away from the fanciest bits of Hastings St, complete w/ Cartier & Hugo Boss stores. What this makes me feel as well is that as catastrophic as the situation is for the individuals involved, from a city planning point of view, it’s extremely punctate, unlike the sprawling suburbs of so many urban centers. Surgical, small scale interventions feel more appropriate than large scale urban renewal.

That’s likely more than enough words after just a little bit of living here. So far, I’m enjoying it all. Do come visit, I’ll take you on a tour. I have yet to try the Guiness at the Heather…

A nice Guiness sign (not in Vancouver) (credit: xb3 on flickr)

Part of that is because it feels like it’s that most plastic of human endeavors. That, of course, is only true to the extent that the people involved in the creation of software _are_ plastic.

One of the fascinating things in the last few months is that it feels that, with the Obama administration, people are thinking big about societal change, in a variety of contexts.

The latest one to cross my twitter stream is Carl Malamud’s bid for the government printing office, which is full of great, big ideas. So cool.

Read up about it: http://yeswescan.org/, and follow the links to the proposals & the videos. They’re quite compelling, optimistic, ambitious, and, I’m sure, threatening to the status quo. At the very least, it’s a great conversation.

Godspeed, Carl.

For what it’s worth, I agree with both.

I agree with David that the people involved in the open web (and that includes all wikipedia authors, youtube uploaders, and consumers of the same) are part of a social movement, whether they self-identify or not. I’m really interested to learn from him and people like him what the history of social movements can tell us about how to take what has traditionally been a very geeky concept (open standards, open source, etc.), and make it politically and socially not just relevant but critical and much more powerful than it is today. The “opposition” is much more astute at manipulating both courts and markets to their advantage, but that will shift if we’re ambitious enough.

I also agree w/ Marc that the Mozilla Foundation can do a lot more than what it does today, in shaping, energizing, and facilitating that movement. Especially when I’m outside of North America, it’s the Foundation that has credibility, and that credibility is currently languishing, unleveraged. We could and should do more.

It’s nice to see that the Mozilla galaxy is growing up enough that there can be simultaneous energy towards one thing, and very different but also important energy towards this complementary set of thought processes.

Oh, for the record: when I say open web these days, I mean something much broader and richer than just “the WWW using open standards”, although that’s the definition that I first used. Thunderbird’s goals, for example, are in scope, even if it doesn’t have much to do with traditional web protocols yet. Things like data portability, identity 2.0, net neutrality, data privacy, etc., are all in scope. Trying to pin down exactly what I mean with that word is something I’m trying to figure out — as David mentions, we need to do a better job of defining what we’re agreeing on.

I look forward to the conversations.

The podcast was fun, as was the conversation afterwards with Zak and Boris. Unfortunately, the day was so beautiful that we went out for a beer to complement our strategy brainstorming. Nothing like drinking a good belgian beer in the sun to impact the afternoon’s productivity! Still, it resulted in some ideas bouncing around in our heads, and time will tell which ones survive.

Given that my brain was a bit shot, I decided to do what I seem to do now that I don’t have TV — watch some TED videos (preferably with Miro). I know, it’s awfully highbrow, but it’s what I seem to have lying around. I watched two. A relaxing one about artistic juggling, which is fun to watch, and Dave Eggers’ TED Prize wish video, which simply should be watched. Take the time and watch it, it’s butt-kickingly inspirational.

Just like Robert Sayre, I find it resonating with me, in a few ways. First, I certainly see the societal possibilities of amplifying what feels like an already existing trend. Second, the writers’ strike was for me a great personal kick in the pants that I needed to watch less TV. It’s as if the drug dealer is out of dope, and so you find that you can just do other things with your time, and you find you don’t miss the thing! Third, while my thinking on Thunderbird 3 has long been about how to make it fit within a web-enabled world, Clay’s piece explains both the higher level why: “enabling an architecture of participation”, and a metaphorical how: “mice” everywhere (if you didn’t read the essay, that won’t make sense), so that Thunderbird developers, add-on developers, communication channel providers, and most broadly Thunderbird users can find mice that fit their hands.

I was struck by the similarities and differences faced by this group and by the people I work with whether when discussing email or Mozilla.

The differences are easiest to describe: The people involved in Vancouver schools are naturally roughly co-located (although some of the issues go beyond the city boundaries, it’s still a local issue), while the people involved in the future of the internet are stunningly distributed.

On the flip side, at least the people involved in Mozilla, are self-selected and hence roughly aligned on broad themes, such as the Mozilla Manifesto. We’ll argue vociferously on some issues, no doubt — but there is still a stated common goal, and a lot of shared culture. In contrast, the people involved in the future of schools span an wide gamut, including community activists and parents, teachers, principals, custodians, school board staff and elected trustees, provincial ministerial staff and elected representatives, engineering firms, architects, geoscientists, and more. Needless to say, initial thoughts about “ideal outcomes” across these groups are often not even close to aligned.

The differences in vocabulary, perspectives, timelines, budgetary and organizational scales that these groups have to span, and the emotional issues that lie very close to the surface (such as child safety, trust, reputation, integrity), make diplomacy a real requirement for forward motion. Overlaid on this, the governmental regulation and budgetary scale for capital improvements bring in old-fashioned political skills. (On that note, it was nice to see some city councillors in the room like Peter Ladner and Raymond Louie, clearly learning about the issues affecting their city, even though the city has little influence on school construction issues. It was disheartening not to see anyone from the Ministry of Education, who has the most authority over the issue.)

Still, there are strong similarities between the “school renewal” and “email renewal” exercises. The leaders in both cases are deliberately working on a collaborative community building effort, out of necessity as much as ideology. In both cases, there is a constant healthy tension between trying to be thoughtful and inclusive, and needing to make real progress quickly. Also, I am routinely struck by the realization that behind the differences in names, personality types, job titles, backgrounds, or level of commitment, there are such things as Good Ideas, and once they are explained carefully and understood, these ephemeral things can bring very disparate groups in alignment.

In the case of the Think Schools event, it was hard to find people who didn’t appreciate the elegance of an old idea: that our schools shouldn’t be thought of (and budgeted for) as single purpose “teaching boxes”, but instead as multi-purpose community hubs, leveraging precious real estate to provide a variety of civic services (libraries, gyms, meeting spaces, cafeterias, playing fields), with an appropriate funding model. We had a presentation from someone involved in that setup in Seattle, which was inspirational.

The possible synergies from such a model are appealing no matter which perspective you take:

• From an educational point of view, it creates an educational environment that is part of a broader civic landscape, integrating childhood and education into the broader community, and by bringing in more users into a facility, can provide funding for essential non-funded spaces, such as libraries, music & arts spaces, daycare, and more.
• From an environmental and energy point of view, you can build and maintain buildings that are used by different populations at different times.
• From a civic policy point of view, you build neighborhood anchors in a city with few alternative assets to host them.
• From a public health point of view, you encourage walkable neighborhoods and community sports & health facilities, neighborhood libraries and community centers.
• From a maintenance and policing point of view, you have buildings and grounds that are in use almost all the time, reducing vandalism and the like.

The largest obstacle before this vision is the as-yet invisible path to that outcome past jurisdictional and budgetary silos, and, so far, a lack of political will. Everyone is aware that it is a huge obstacle. Still, getting 130 motivated people in a room for a day was a great start.

When it comes to the future of email, I don’t feel like we as an industry have yet figured out what the desired outcome is — we’re still at an early stage of visioning, with a rich cacophony of ideas, each one striking an interesting note, but without harmony yet. To stretch the musical metaphor, I’m hoping that what we in Mozilla can do is to provide both a “standard” (in the Jazz standards sense), and a couple of places to jam, and see what happens. Yesterday got me wondering whether having a face-to-face meeting on “envisioning the future of email” would be a good idea, even though the logistical challenges of doing so with a global community are enormous. Something to ponder.

After all, we don’t send emails to email addresses. We send emails to friends, family, colleagues, partners, bosses. We mostly don’t read corporate blogs, we read the blogs of our friends, idols, and enemies. We don’t send instant messages to aliases, but to significant others, co-conspirators, and other people.

What this means for Thunderbird’s future is still to be figured out, but I thought I’d mention it today because I saw this story from InfoWorld about a Yahoo initiative called oneConnect, which seems to be along similar lines of thought as my own, including interoperation with various social networking to build up a fuller picture of one’s true relationships, which is richer than any one provider’s perspective.

There’s one major distinction between my vision and the one oneConnect seems to promote, which is that I think individuals should be at the center of their own “social manifold”, not Yahoo, or Yahoo/Microsoft, or Google, or any other central party. And that’s a place where I think Mozilla’s approach, whether through the use of desktop software or hosted storage of client-side encrypted data, is the approach worth advocating. Individuals should be able to choose to trust providers to store that data for them, or not. And they should be able to change their mind as to the state of those trust relationships, especially given this heady M&A frenzy.

In particular, consider the implications of something like Yahoo’s oneConnect and the possible Yahoo/Microsoft merger, given this other story from Fortune about Microsoft’s approach to data portability.

Josh Quittner summarizes his perspective as: “My contacts should belong to me”. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

That brings to mind my experience with a vancouver thief, which, it turns out, did not end there, but I never updated this pseudo-historical record of random events.

On closer inspection of the garage, we found that in addition to stealing two bikes, they’d left a glove. Weird. We called the cops after a couple of days to report the theft for insurance purposes, and gave them the glove (“DNA testing, you know”).

The night after the cops came, we (oops) hadn’t locked the garage, and someone came back and rummaged through everything again, presumably to recover said glove, since they stole a pair of ski mitts. They also took our halloween candy from the freezer, and still didn’t take the vodka.

Just before ETech, we went for our last nighttime ski trip. Came back at 11:30pm or so, parked in the back to unload the gear. The light was on, which was odd. The door was open, which was worrisome. There was a strange man inside, which was infuriating. I yelled at him (very loud, it turns out), clearly scaring him more than I was scared, even though he had a box cutter (probably mine). He mumbled that he was leaving, and I let him go, which seemed the only safe thing to do.

Turns out:

• while the garage was locked, a window wasn’t latched. He unscrewed the hinge and broke the hinge open, then climbed in.
• he was slowly cutting up the fibers inside the security lock which was attaching my new bike to a cart in the garage (good thing I was feeling paranoid!). Another 20 minutes and it would have been gone.
• he stole my skanky smelly used-all-winter-in-the-rain sneakers (size 12) and left a pair of much nicer Skechers (size 8 ). Oh, and he left an umbrella

I’m quite convinced that all of these visits are just from one guy, not very bright, who has luckily for him stumbled onto us, a family that needs a few losses to really lock down our security, because life in jail just isn’t much fun. I think we’re secure now. Sigh.