State Of The Internet

State of the Internet Initiative

At Whistler All Hands (June 2019), Mitchell Baker spoke of the challenges people face in their digital lives. Digital life is in crisis. What more might Mozilla do -- independently or with partners -- in order to have the positive, game-changing impact our mission calls us to?

Through a series of quick, iterative analyses of the systemic issues surrounding digital life, the State of the Internet project will define product and technology-focused ‘Explorations’ to help us test assumptions around how we can make a bolder, broader, and bigger impact. These Explorations will run for varying time periods, with the goal of validating their strategic, mission-driving impact and business value. Validated Explorations will be further developed into longer-term investments and strategy.

The ‘State of the Internet’ problems to be considered at different stages of this project include:

• Surveillance economy (our first series of “Explorations”)
• Content discovery and misinformation
• Privacy, security, and network architecture
• AI
• Decentralized web
• Data commons
• Messaging
• Identity systems

Mozilla hosted several employee and community workshops that looked at some of these problems. These workshops helped us to narrow in on the Surveillance Economy as our first topic.

November 2019 marked the formal launch of this project, with its initial focus on the Surveillance Economy. First explorations will be defined by January All Hands (2020).

Mozilla is working with IDEO during this first phase, which we’re calling the ‘Engage’ phase (see Methodology). IDEO is a global design firm known for popularizing human-centered design thinking. They were chosen for their expertise in systems thinking, ability to quickly conceptualize and prototype ideas, their work for both nonprofits and for profit companies and their support for our mission. IDEO will help Mozilla define a replicable process for activating our communities and expert networks to define new Explorations related to other State of the Internet issues.

In February 2020, we will decide if Mozilla will invest in any of the suggested Surveillance Economy Explorations and how they will be managed (Operating Explorations phase, see Methodology). Evaluation criteria will include feedback from Mozilla employees and NDA'd contributors, as well as:

• User Needs — Is there a clear and compelling user need
• Business Opportunity — Is there reason to believe that Mozilla could create and capture value by developing new solutions (or working with partners on new solutions) here?
• Advancing the Mission — Does this actually advance our mission?
• Mozilla Capabilities — Can Mozilla quickly develop the capabilities, assets, or partnerships to solve for those user needs? Do we already possess them?

The overall project is managed by the Open Innovation team (Katharina Borchert is the DRI) under the executive sponsorship of Mitchell Baker. The project is relying on the expertise and help of many across the organization, from Marketing to the Emerging Technologies, Data Science and People teams. We will also work with our communities as outlined below.

Values

We will adhere to the following values throughout the project:

• Learn by doing. Learn by caring.
• Diverse teams
• Open + transparent

Methodology

The State of the Internet project has three phases.

The goal of the first phase, Engage, is to define and select several product and technology-focused Explorations. These Explorations -- revolving around potentially game-changing ideas to address a particular State of the Internet issue -- will be geared to test our assumptions around ‘what must be true’ for Mozilla to generate the expected mission impact and business value. Again, the Surveillance Economy is only the first issue for the first set of Explorations.

This phase entails deep engagement with a diverse set of external experts to challenge us, as well as continuous engagement with Mozilla employees and communities for new ideas -- and to later vet these ideas and their assumptions.

This phase will take approximately 3-4 months for each issue. Analysis of different issues or geographies can be run in parallel in this phase.

In the second phase of Operating Explorations, we’ll run the Explorations to generate empirical evidence on the validity of their likely impact and business value hypotheses. This phase can last from a few weeks to several months, depending on the Exploration.

The third phase, Expand, will occur only for those Explorations for which we’ve gathered good signals that they’re the right strategic path. These validated Explorations will be further developed and resourced as longer term, strategic investments.

Stay Informed + Get Involved

• Email: state-of-the-internet@mozilla.com
• Join #state-of-the-internet on Slack

We will post updated information on engagement opportunities here, and on our Slack channel.