Quo Vadis, Mozilla?: 3-Point Plan for World Domination

This past weekend Mitchell Baker "proposed a set of goals for the next two years... to move the Mozilla mission forward." Her proposal wasn't meant as a technical spec but more a set of ideas. In fact, the details of her plan encompass three points.

The most ambitions first point is to make Mozilla the "centerpiece of the Internet." Baker wants existing communities to continue expanding and provide means for external developers to participate. The competition for "thought leadership" should consider "organizational sustainability, shared decision-making, individual control," but also the open Web.

The "thought leadership" buzzword is right out of the 90s. A "thought leader," as described by Wikipedia, is "a futurist or person who is recognized among their peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights (thinklets)." The pursuit of ideas is then supposed to have a positive effect on business.

Baker's second point involves data. Mozilla should help people take ownership of and control their own data. At the same time, however, the public should be apprised of aggregated and anonymous data as a resource.

Not least of all -- and this is Baker's third point -- Mozilla should create effective products for the mobile market and show that "'mobile' is part of one, unified, open web." A definite nod here is to the efforts of the newly founded Open Web Foundation dedicated to developing "open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies." The foundation includes major players such as Google, Facebook, MySpace and SourceForge. An important OWF product has been OpenID, a service that allows universal sign-on with a single ID .

In summary, the Mozilla Foundation wants to be at the Web pinnacle and develop and actualize innovative ideas, especially those supported by standards. Baker had already presented her goals and requested comments at the 2008 Firefox Summit in British Columbia. The challenge is to breath life into these in part rather vague goals over the next two years.