I was outed as a new member of the Mozilla Foundation team by a press release about a now-long-past keynote address, so there isn’t really much to announce here. My contract has me working primarily as a technology strategist, a necessarily-vague position that has been described pretty well by Mitchell’s post about new people and roles in the Mozilla Foundation world. I continue to help with release management, organizational governance, and even advising the intrepid devmo squad, but I try to spend most of my time with my sights on the technology strategy issues that are of significant interest to our community and products. (Which is not to say that I do spend most of my time there, but I’m learning how to do so better every day, and with every gentle nudge from my wicked-awesome manager.)
The primary area of technology strategy that I’ve been working on so far has centred around “identity”, which is of course a topic broad enough to consume several lifetimes. I count myself lucky to have developed a grounding in identity and privacy issues while at Zero-Knowledge, as it’s allowed me to get up to speed more quickly than I might otherwise have been able to.
The biggest strength of the current identity climate is also the biggest weakness: there are a number of identity systems that provide different capabilities, are built to emphasize different values, and require different amounts of infrastructure support. As the Mozilla Foundation is chartered to promote choice and innovation on the Internet, it would seem that we’re in good shape on at least half of our primary concern: choice.
I don’t think it’s really the case, unfortunately, because the sort of choice that the user faces is not one that empowers them at all: in many ways, it forces the user to pick a winner, and it forces similarly unpleasant choices on developers that want to take advantage of “Identity 2.0” capabilities in order to build interesting services, technologies, and experiences. Choice competes with innovation here, and while that’s a tension that arises in many contexts, it’s of even more concern when we’re talking about something this central to the web experience — and, I feel I can say without gross overstatement, to the social fabric of modern life, as mediated by all this computer nonsense.
(I should point out that all of the interesting proposals for modern identity infrastructure permit users to exert control over what organizations actually hold their private information, which is a huge step forward from the Passport nightmare we faced not that long ago. I still think that having to choose an identity system is a bad scene, but it could certainly be worse.)
Being the technology strategist for the Mozilla Foundation has its perks, and chief among them is that I get to work with a truly amazing team on a project that really is at the center of the modern web. Right after that, though, is that a lot (lot) of people want to talk to me, and while it can be a mixed blessing in terms of time management, it’s tremendously helpful in making sense of something as complex as the identity landscape. I had good, if preliminary, discussions with folks from the Passel and SXIP camps, while I was at OSCON, and I’ve since been setting up meetings with other identity-system boosters to get other perspectives. (If you are with an identity system group and you haven’t made contact with me yet, please do send mail and some information about your system, because I’m by no means done with that part of the process.)
Most recently, I had the pleasure of meeting with Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s Architect of Identity and Access and the father of InfoCard. He came to spend some time with me in Toronto this week, and I was delighted to discover that we share many of the same positions on the key obstacles to having viable identity infrastructure on the web today. The InfoCard work looks to be pretty good from philosophical and architectural perspectives, and I’m trying to learn enough about the whole bloody WS-* stack to really grok the details. We had a very good conversation about a wide range of technical and social issues, and I look forward to more of them in the future. I’m pretty confident that Kim genuinely wants to do the Right Thing, and even more importantly he seems to have the Right Idea about what the Right Thing is — which is to say, in other words, that we agree about many things, much to his credit.
I hope to write more in the coming days about the identity systems I’ve looked at, and what I think the general form of Mozilla’s identity strategy should be, but I wanted to break my blogging fast and talk a little bit about what I’m working on these days. It’s really too exciting to keep to myself!
We’re looking to get a Lightning 0.8 out around the end of this month, in order to start to get user feedback on it, and shift the development model to one that’s a little more conservative in terms of architectural overhauls. We’re also running into decisions with our user interface and behaviours that we would like to make with the benefit of some more actual usage data, and want that coverage as well as exposure to the various kinds of real-world data and operations that will help us robustificate the lower-level components.
We wanted to reach this point with Lightning quite some time ago, or at least I did. I’ve been misestimating software schedules for more than a decade now, and I’m really starting to get good at it.
For one thing, the cost of doing the infrastructural overhauls for a more server-friendly calendar core was greater than we thought, especially as we were trying to keep Sunbird breathing as well as bring up a different calendaring model in Lightning. I think that cost was worth it — the architecture we have in calendar/base is one that we’re pretty proud of, and it’s the result of having to make changes to accomodate actual application code that wants to deal with exceptions, and recurrence, and the ICS standard, and present a decent user experience through all of it.
The usual problems with competition for developers’ time, unpleasant dependency cascades, and the occasional bit of feature creep also caused us to slip. Nothing novel there, we just get to take that pain in public more than some other shops. (Perhaps not as public as we could have been; wiki updates and blog postings have been fewer and farther between than would have been what the kids call “ideal”.)
I’ll post in the future a little more about the details of Lightning 0.8, how we’re framing our goals, and what we expect it to look like. I’m pretty excited about getting it out for the world to see, and even to hear the inevitable criticisms of the choices we’ve made so far. Bring it on!
In the spirit of Jesse’s bookmarklets, I have harnessed roc’s columnar-display support in a simple, easy to use 3col bookmark. Drag it away to your toolbar for later use, though it doesn’t really do so well with my particular blog. (Firefox trunk or Deer Park Alpha required, natch.)
I managed to make it to the RAI Centre a whole 20 minutes before my XTech talk was scheduled to begin, thanks to some perhaps-unwise choices of transport from the hotel. And there were some small snags with the actual projection of the slides I’ve been agonizing over, but I think it went well enough for all that. Early-morning talks, especially early in conferences, are always a little tricky for me mainly because I find it hard to really get a good read on the audience. (I hope Edd is still speaking to me, after the number I must have done to his blood pressure this morning.)
I enjoyed giving the talk, and at least one person enjoyed listening to it, but I will confess that part of me is glad to have it behind me. The rest of the conference looks pretty interesting, and Amsterdam appears to be a fantastic city to wander around in.
I’ll try to get my slides up at some time in the next 7-10 days, probably on some combination of devmo and the XTech conference site.
So, yeah, 28 today. Perfect number!
Beltzner and Madhava have arranged for a location of celebration. (See extended entry.)
If you think you’d like to be there, you should feel welcome to show up. If you bring a gift, you risk having me berate you.
Want to celebrate my birthday in another way? Perhaps you have some sort of neurological damage which makes you want to give incredibly fortunate people like me gifts, just for playing the safe life expectancy odds?
Do something nice today for someone. Go a little out of your way. If it’s someone you don’t usually like that much, all the better. Or maybe a total stranger. Feel free to comment below with stories of such things, but also feel free to just quietly make the world a little nicer today.
If you feel utterly compelled to spend money, Covenant House would love to hear from you.
Party details:
Announcing SHAVERFEST 2005!
We’re happy to announce that the 28th annual festival of all things Mike Shaver, will be taking place starting 6:00pm this Thursday at the Pour House at Dupont and Spadina. Planned activities for this year’s event are:
- Drinking
- Multimedia slideshow: The 28th Year of Shaver
- Eating
- A plenary on the habits of the Cotton Boll Weevil
- “To Be A Shaver”, interpretive dance by PartisanMotion
- More drinking
- Maybe … desert?
The “Party Room” (visible when you first enter) has been reserved under the name “Mike Shaver” (cunning!) for the evening, and we’re happy to announce that the establishment is pulling out all the stops and has said that they’ll have decorated with balloons. Streamers, if we’re very lucky.
COST:
- Free to members of this mailing list!
- Well, you’ll likely shell out for some beer and food
HOW TO GET THERE:
- TTC to Spadina (then walk north) or Dupont (then walk east)
- Park on the street or in the LCBO parking lot … at your peril!
Map lovingly provided by Google.
Yeah, I’ve been slacking pretty hard on this web-log front. Lots of reasons, none of them very good. I’m hoping to get back on the horse a little bit now — I had, in fact, hoped to do so yesterday — so we’ll see if I have any readers left!
Some stuff I’d like to write about over the next week or so:
Or, you know, I could just disappear again, under the weight of my own mounting ambition and inability to manage my time. Were I you, I’d place bets very carefully, if at all.
Congrats to everyone who touched our new baby. I’m proud to have been part of it, and thrilled at the prospect of what’s to come.