Great post by Mark Surman: 2010 Goals: Update on Mozilla Foundation Bits. Mark is spot on.

For years, the Mozilla goal was simple:

promote choice and innovation on the Internet

and the biggest lever we had to achieve this was Firefox. In 2003, there was a monopoly (which leads to lack of choice) and total lack of innovation (why would Microsoft invest in something that did not generate revenue and could threaten its business?). Making a modern, safer, easier to use, cross-platform and extensible browser made sense.

Fast forward 5 years or so. We're in a totally different place. The browser market is in much better shape than before. 2009 seems very promising with Safari 4, Chrome 1.0, IE8 and Firefox 3.1. There is absolutely no doubt that keeping on improving Firefox is the right thing to do, but in this new era, the old Mozilla goal sounds less relevant. Mozilla's momentum is bigger than ever, and its Manifesto (now available in 10 languages) is more inspiring than ever. But between a product and a manifesto, there is room for medium-term goals that would – to quote Mark – "strike a balance between aspirational (we want to reach far) and concrete (we want goals that guide our decisions)". We have "keeping the Internet open and participatory" as a more recent motto, but I find it a little too abstract for most people, even if I find it accurate myself.

I'm trying to think outside of the box set by Mitchell's article on the 2010 Mozilla goals for now and will leave you, dear reader, with something that hopefully will be food for thought in order to discuss what is Mozilla:

  • "Mozilla hasn’t just built a product... it has built a movement." (Suneel Gupta). Is Mozilla a movement?
  • It's also a global organization that enables mass collaboration to create the tool (the browser) that vehicles each of us on-line
  • It's also an experiment of new forms of organization. Not democracy. Not a company. More something like a meritocratic community.

All of these are different ways to describe Mozilla. Now I'd love to see my readers get suggest what should Mozilla should aim at doing/being in 2010. Or to put it in a different way:

What would you want to achieve by 2010 if you were at the helm of Mozilla?

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