Manifesto/1.0 Changes

Note: This list has now been triaged, and Mitchell has blogged about the proposals chosen to be taken forward.

This is a list of possible changes to make to the Mozilla Manifesto to move it from 0.9 to 1.0. It began as an attempt to capture all concrete proposals I could extract from the write-ups of the interactive sessions in 2012, and was then classified into 3 categories by a meeting on 2013-02-21.

The 3 categories are "Recommended", "Requires Further Discussion" and "Not Recommended", which should be self-explanatory.

Recommended

Text

Include explicit reference to privacy

Rationale: this is an oft-commented-upon omission. Originally, we thought "security" would include privacy, but people don't read it that way. And Mozilla is very active on the privacy front.

Proposal: change principle 4):

 Individuals' security on the Internet is fundamental and cannot be treated as optional.

->

 Individuals' security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and cannot be treated as optional.

Against: no good arguments, unless we decide to make no changes at all.

Reduce all principles to < 140 characters

Rationale: it would be good if every principle was tweetable. If we want to promote them in snippets, shorter is also better.

Proposal:

Character counts are as follows:

 1.  157
 2.   78
 3.   64
 4.  100 (including "privacy" change)
 5.   81
 6.  174
 7.   92
 8.   87
 9.  146
 10. 117

So principles 1, 6 and 9 would need shortening. Here are proposals:

 1: The Internet is an integral part ofto modern life – a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole. (119)

 6: The effectiveness of the Internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability  (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide. (139)

 9: Commercial involvement in the development of the Internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial goals and public benefit is critical. (127)

Against: It's unnecessary churn; people will assume we are making semantic changes, or it's a cover for something.

Beef up references to "web literacy"

Rationale: web literacy is very important, and Mozilla wants to promote it. This is what Webmaker is all about. Principle #5 ("Individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences on the Internet") sounds a bit like "web apps must be skinnable". Can we reword to make stronger?

Proposal: Change to shaping the Internet, not just one's own experiences. Reword principle 5:

 Individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences on the Internet.

->

 Individuals must have the ability to shape the Internet, and their own experiences on it.

This now sounds like it could be a motto for the Webmaker movement.

Against: change does not have significant enough impact to be worth the churn.

Page

Update manifesto page to look more beautiful

Rationale: we're not in 1998 any more; the web has awesome capabilities and we should make use of them.

Proposal: increase font size to something readable; find and use an appropriate web font (like we've done with the MPL 2); convert to the current standard Mozilla styling.

Against: Er... user choice means using the user's font and size settings.

Add social media buttons to page

Rationale: This is how users communicate today; we need to make people more aware of what Mozilla stands for, and allow them to easily share that with their contacts.

Proposal: Add social media buttons of various sorts - Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. It is essential that we use hacked versions which protect privacy. There should be a small link next to them, "protecting your privacy", which leads to a separate page explaining the issue, explaining how we are protecting the reader from it, and commenting that this is Mozilla living out manifesto principle 4.

Against: these services change over time; they are also not all good embodiments of the manifesto principles, even if we manage to link to them in a privacy-respecting manner.

Allow people to pledge support

Rationale: online petitions and statements of principles often allow companies and individuals to pledge support. A list of supporting organizations would be a powerful indication of who the good guys are.

Proposal: High up page in a side column, have an "add your name"/"sign-on" ask, including an email opt-in. Also, provide banners/badges people can add to their own sites, akin to the Internet Defense League. Lastly, provide some sort of visualization of the signers (either scrolling names, something showing geographic breadth & depth, etc.)

Against: requires significant web development; curation of "best of" list is politically sensitive; does it actually achieve anything?

Allow people to sign up for supportive activities

Rationale: if people are inspired by the manifesto, we need to direct them to become contributors and advance it.

Proposal: We want a link to the Get Involved page somewhere, although not as a featured action. The post-pledge page will be a donation page.

Against: None.

Provide teaching resources

Rationale: we need to help Mozillians explain manifesto values to others.

Proposal: Create teaching resource guide for the Manifesto with e.g. slide deck, talking points etc.

Against: Are the manifesto pages themselves the right place for this? Doesn't a presentation need to be made anew for each audience?

Language geolocation

Rationale: We should take people straight to the right text rather than asking them to choose.

Proposal: Using existing mozilla.org language geolocation infrastructure to make the landing page be, as far as possible, in the user's chosen language, with English as the fallback.

Against: Language and location are not 1:1 correlated. Does this need an override in case it gets it wrong? What does the current site do?

External

Add manifesto references and links to our products

Rationale: we want to bring ordinary users into contact with the manifesto principles.

Proposal: Add link to the principles in our product's about: and/or about:rights and/or about:license pages

Against: Why bother? Few people read those pages.

Make principles into snippets or Facebook updates

Rationale: we want to bring ordinary users into contact with the manifesto principles.

Proposal: put the 10 principles in low rotation as snippets, and get the Facebook team to turn 1 a month into statuses for the "Firefox" and/or "Mozilla" pages and monitor feedback.

Against: this sort of communication may not be appropriate for these two channels.

Requires Further Discussion

There was no consensus on these topics, and/or the issues they raise were considered to be "above our pay grade".

Text

Change "the Internet" to "the web" throughout

Rationale: People understand and identify with "the web" more than "the internet". We talk about "the open web" a lot - "Webmaker", "the web is the platform" and so on.

Proposal: Replace all instances of "the Internet" with "the web" (lower-case w).

Against: The Internet is more than the web - email, IM, apps, games and media centres all use the Internet but not necessarily the web, and the wider Mozilla community (and others we want to agree to the manifesto) have interests here. We need these two words to remain distinct, and we should use the right one. Also, switching terms will be read by others as a narrowing of focus by Mozilla, and as abandonment by some parts of our own community. Counter-proposal: use the shorter and snappier "net" instead of "Internet".

The issue here is one of the fundamental purpose of Mozilla, and so the discussion group felt that we were not in a position to resolve it.

Not Recommended

Text

Add reference to "making great products"

Rationale: making something great that people want is central to our impact and a big source of our power.

Proposal: Add an 11th principle covering this.

Against: this is a core tactic and strategy that Mozilla uses to achieve its goals, but making products is not a goal in itself. It's already covered by the "Advancing the Mozilla Manifesto" section below the manifesto itself.

Page

Update manifesto page to be more interactive

Rationale: we're not in 1998 any more; the web has awesome capabilities and we should make use of them.

Proposal: audit the manifesto for places where appropriate, long-lived links to Mozilla activities can be inserted. Brainstorm other options for interactive elements.

Against: The US Constitution was not hyperlinked. It distracts from the gravitas. Also, the manifesto is supposed to be bigger than Mozilla; linking to Mozilla stuff damages that. And interactive elements pulling in content from today's web will be outdated or irrelevant tomorrow.

Allow people to add comments

Rationale: We want people to give feedback on the document.

Proposal: either link to placeholder blog post with comment section, or embed comment section below manifesto (one per language).

Against: the 1.0 manifesto is a static work, not a blog post for discussion; we don't want someone's asinine comment appended below it for ever more; we don't have an embeddable comment solution until the Persona-based one is done.

Bring Mozilla's daily activities to the page

Rationale: we want to show the daily work of the Mozilla project bringing the manifesto principles to bear on the real world.

Proposal: Display Planet or other RSS feed in a sidebar.

Against: the manifesto is supposed to be timeless; having feed content there works against that impression. Also, there isn't a single particularly suitable feed; Planet is too noisy.