Archive for July, 2009

In case you don’t know, Mozilla is the parent of Firefox, Thunder Bird, and other free open source applications. Mozilla grew out of Netscape and Firefox is now the second most used browser (300 million users) after Internet Explorer.

In this talk at WordCamp in San Francisco, Mozilla CEO John Lilly, talks about 7 insights and 2 problems in Mozilla.

Insights:

  1. Superior products matter
  2. Without excellent experience and utility the rest is meaningless
  3. Communication will happen every possible way, make sure it is reusable
  4. Make it easy for you community to do the important things
  5. Surprise is over rated, it is the opposite of engagement
  6. Communities are not markets, members are citizens
  7. The key is the art of figuring out whether and how to apply each of these ideas

Problems:

  1. Engaged citizens are noisy
  2. At scale there are no maps

So what does this have to do with education? It has everything to do with education because the 18th century model no longer works and we need to look at what is working in the world of open source. Education, like American auto makers, is being forced to change and the transition will not be pretty. So watch John Lilly’s talk and see if you agree.

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