Speaker Series

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Overview

Mozilla hosts speakers from tech, non-profit and other related industries to address topics tied to our mission, our strategy and to our nearer-term business objectives.

Upcoming Speakers

No currently scheduled upcoming speakers.

Previous Speakers

2020

Thursday, 28 May 2020: Bias on the Web with Ricardo Baeza-Yates

  • Time: 10am PT / 1:00pm ET / 7:00pm CET
  • Location: Broadcast and archived for Mozillians and the public on Airmo, on Youtube, and in Hubs in VR.
  • Topic

The Web is the most powerful communication medium and the largest public data repository that humankind has created. Its content ranges from great reference sources such as Wikipedia to ugly fake news. Indeed, social (digital) media is just an amplifying mirror of ourselves. Hence, the main challenge of search engines and other websites that rely on web data is to assess the quality of such data. However, as all people has their own biases, web content as well as our web interactions are tainted with many biases. Data bias includes redundancy and spam, while interaction bias includes activity and presentation bias. In addition, sometimes algorithms add bias, particularly in the context of search and recommendation systems. As bias generates bias, we stress the importance of debiasing data as well as using the context and other techniques such as explore & exploit, to break the filter bubble. The main goal of this talk is to make people aware of the different biases that affect all of us on the Web. Awareness is the first step to be able to fight and reduce the vicious cycle of web bias. For more details see the article of same title in Communications of ACM, June 2018.

  • Speaker:

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company based in California, since 2016. Since 2017, he is also part-time director of CS programs in Northeastern University at Silicon Valley. Before, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs from 2006 to 2016. He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook, that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. He has been member of the ACM Council and the Board of the IEEE Computer Society. He is an ACM & IEEE Fellow.

  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series;
    • Or join us on Twitter; please use our hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers and mention @jofish.

Thursday, 30 April 2020: Ghost Work in Pandemic Times with Mary L. Gray

  • Time: 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET / 7:30pm CET
  • Location: Broadcast and archived on Youtube for Mozillians and the public, and on Airmo for NDAd Mozillians. We'll take questions on Slack on #speaker-series and on Twitter through @jofish.
  • Topic

Gray will draw from Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (her 2019 book, coauthored with computer scientist Siddharth Suri), to argue that public health and economic recovery hinge on reckoning with the value of on-demand workers. The talk will outline the rise of on-demand services and the labor conditions and market flows that organize it. She will connect the global shift away from a shared worksite, co-present colleagues, and secure employment status many are experiencing today to the lessons learned from people who have been navigating ghost work conditions for more than a decade. Gray will end with a warning about another form of ghost work on the horizon: If not stopped now, the drive to develop automated contact tracing could reinforce ‘the paradox of automation’s last mile’—a relentless tech optimism that draws our attention to tech innovation as it elides the value of contingent human labor. Weathering the COVID-19 pandemic will require building technologies that assist and amplify rather than erase trusted healthcare workers.

  • Speaker:

Mary L. Gray is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Edward J. Safra Center for Ethics Fellow at Harvard University. Gray also maintains a faculty position in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering with affiliations in Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Gray, an anthropologist and media scholar by training, focuses on how everyday uses of technologies transform people’s lives. She is the co-author of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a Global Underclass. Gray chairs the Microsoft Research Ethics Review Program—the only federally-registered review board of its kind in the tech industry. She is recognized as a leading expert in the emerging field of AI and ethics, particularly research at the intersections of computer and social sciences. She currently sits on the California Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors and the board of Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R), the nation’s oldest organization advancing ethics in the social and biomedical sciences.

  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, 16 April 2020: Rethinking Trust and Well-Being in this Strange New World with Jeff Hancock

  • Time: 10am PT / 1:00pm ET / 7:00pm CET
  • Location: Broadcast and archived for Mozillians and the public on Airmo, on Youtube, and in Hubs in VR.
  • Topic

A new trust framework is emerging – fueled by social, economic and technological forces that will profoundly alter how we trust, not only what we see and read online, but also one another. At the same time, technology is now crucial for staying distant socializing while we must keep our social distance. These changes have profound implications for our psychological well-being. In this talk we will discuss how principles from psychology and communication intersect deception, trust and well-being with technology. We will discuss several studies that reveal key principles to guide how we think about truth and trust on the internet, and I will report on a new meta-analysis examining every study examining social media and well-being.

  • Speaker:

Jeff Hancock is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University and the Founding Director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. A leading expert in social media behavior and the psychology of online interaction, Professor Hancock studies the impact of social media and technology on well-being, relationships, deception and trust, identity, and more.

His research has been published in over 100 journal articles and conference proceedings and has been supported by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense. Professor Hancock’s TED Talk on deception has been seen over 1 million times and his research has been frequently featured in the popular press, including the New York Times, CNN, NPR, CBS and the BBC.

Professor Hancock worked for Canada Customs before earning his PhD in Psychology at Dalhousie University, Canada. He was a Professor of Information Science (and co-Chair) and Communication at Cornell University prior to joining Stanford in 2015. He currently lives in Palo Alto with his wife and daughter, and he regularly gets shot at on the ice as a hockey goalie.

Thursday, 26 March 2020: Three waves of open source voice: how do we shape the voice landscape over the next 5 years?, with Kathy Reid

  • Time: Noon PT / 3:00pm ET / 10:00pm UT (and 6:00 AM Friday AEDT)
  • Location: Broadcast and archived for Mozillians and the public on Airmo, on Youtube, and in Hubs in VR.
  • Topic

When we investigate the evolution of open source voice technologies, two 'waves' become evident. We sit on the cusp of a "third wave" of open source voice - an inflection point of technologies, communities, business models, drivers, stakeholders and languages. In this presentation, Kathy Reid outlines the three-wave approach to open source voice, highlighting where it has come from, the current state of play, and outlines several possible arcs that it could follow. Each of these trajectories has an associated set of conditions - and actions that need to be taken to see the trajectory materialise into reality.

While this talk focuses on Voice, the research approach, the understandings of the ecosystem and the process of open source project assessment have relevance across Mozilla.

  • Speaker:

After two decades bringing emerging technologies into the mainstream, Kathy Reid has gone back to further study and is a Master of Applied Cybernetics student at the 3A Institute at Australian National University. Long an open source advocate, her Master's capstone explores how we can assess open source voice products. Kathy is the former President of Linux Australia Inc. and former Director of Developer Relations at Mycroft AI.

  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, 5 March 2020: Social Media and Well-Being: Moving Beyond "Active" vs "Passive" Activities, with Nicole Ellison

  • Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 8:00pm UT
  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + broadcast on Airmo, on Youtube, and in Hubs in VR and archived for later watching by NDAd Mozillians on Airmo.
  • Topic

In this talk, I’ll describe my current project: a co-authored book on social media and well-being broadly construed. Our goal is to shift public narratives about social media from one focusing on moral panics and negative outcomes to one that highlights what science can actually tell us about the implications of our use and highlights more positive and under-recognized aspects of use. I’ll also share findings from a recent empirical project on the “non-click.” This work was inspired by scholarship on well-being outcomes that often characterizes browsing (but not clicking) activities as passive use, contrasting it with more desirable active use. In this talk, I’ll report on a study investigating the non-click—instances where people intentionally and thoughtfully withhold from clicking on content they do pay close attention to—in order to interrogate assumptions that browsing is always passive and devoid of authentic attention. Employing a combination of eye tracking, survey, and interview methods (N=42), we found that there was no difference in attention (as measured by eye gaze duration) to clicked versus non-clicked Facebook content. Our interview data reveal that non-clicked content is often imported into other channels, where it serves as a stronger signal of relational investment than one-click “likes,” and highlight three audience-related concerns that contribute to active non-clicking.

  • Speaker:

Nicole B. Ellison is the Karl E. Weick Collegiate Professor of Information in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in Communication Theory and Research in 1999 from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. Nicole's research has explored social and interpersonal aspects of online technologies and computer-mediated communication, including research on self-presentational strategies used by online dating participants; the role of social media in reshaping college access patterns for low-income and first-generation college students; and the ways in which users employ the communication affordances of Facebook to receive and give social and informational support to members of their network. This research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Academies of Science. This year she is at Stanford University as a recipient of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where she is currently writing a book on social media and well-being.

  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, 21 February 2020: Dark Elegies: The Choreographics of Surveillance and National Defense, with Sydney Skybetter, Brown University

  • Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 8:00pm UT
  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + broadcast on Airmo, on Youtube, and in Hubs in VR and archived for later watching on Airmo and Youtube.
  • Topic

Choreographer and Brown University Professor, Sydney Skybetter, will present his research on the intersections of gesture, robotics, dance history and homeland security. With case studies of the Snowden leaks, military surveillance drones, the film Minority Report, and early motion capture research conducted with choreographers Merce Cunningham and Bill T. Jones, Skybetter will sketch a vision of the evolution of contemporary surveillance technologies undergirded by dance theory and choreographic method.

  • Speaker:

Hailed by Dance Magazine as “One of the most influential people in dance today,” his work has been performed at such venues as The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Jacob’s Pillow and The Joyce Theater. He has consulted on issues of change and technology for The National Ballet of Canada, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Hasbro, New York University and The University of Southern California, among others. A sought-after speaker, he has lectured on the relationship of dance history to emerging technologies at such institutions as Harvard University, South by Southwest Interactive, Yale, TEDx, and Stanford. He is a Public Humanities Fellow and Lecturer at Brown University, where he researches the problematics of human computer interfaces and mixed reality systems. He has served as a Grant Panelist for the National Endowment of the Arts, is a founding member of the Guild of Future Architects, and is the winner of a RISCA Fellowship in Choreography from the State of Rhode Island. He received his MFA in Choreography from New York University. www.skybetter.org

  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

2019

Wednesday, 11 December 2019: "Just Opt Out?": The Hidden Trade-Offs in Personal Data Ownership, with Janet Vertesi

  • Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 8:00pm UT
  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + broadcast on [ Airmo] and archived for later watching by NDAd Mozillians on Airmo.
  • Topic

This talk reviews seven years’ worth of personal experiments aimed at opting out of data detection and platforms associated with the personal data economy online -- from keeping a pregnancy hidden from the internet to building your own cell phone. As technology companies shrug that if we don’t like their data policies we can “just opt out,” I question how realistic this assumption truly is. Can anyone just opt out and yet maintain an active digital lifestyle? And which hidden tradeoffs must we make in order to simply evade detection? As the experiments range from inconvenient to ridiculous to potentially dangerous, I present design and ethical implications for the next generation of tools that support radical data ownership online. The fact that most people stay on these platforms despite their discontent reveals that opting out is much more difficult than it seems.

  • Speaker:

Dubbed “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet” in the Times Literary Supplement, Janet Vertesi is assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, where she specializes in the sociology of science, technology, and organizations. Her past decade of research, funded by the National Science Foundation, examines how distributed robotic spacecraft teams work together effectively to produce scientific and technical results. Outside of academia, Vertesi is best known for keeping all information about a pregnancy away from data detection, and other experiments in radical data ownership. Vertesi is an active member of the Human-Computer Interaction research community, with publications at ACM CHI, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Ubiquitous Computing, and prior collaborations with Intel and Yahoo. Vertesi holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and M.Phil from University of Cambridge; she is a Fellow of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy and an advisory board member of the Data & Society Institute. She is the author of Seeing Like a Rover: How robots, teams and images craft knowledge of Mars (Chicago, 2015), co-editor with David Ribes and others of digitalSTS (Princeton, 2019) and author of the forthcoming Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams (Chicago, 2020).

  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, 21 November 2019: The Stark Future of Trust Online, with Mor Naaman

  • Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 8:00pm UT
  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + broadcast on [ Airmo] and [YouTube] and archived for later watching by NDAd Mozillians on Airmo.
  • Topic

Trust is what enables our society to function, from supporting interpersonal transactions to providing the very foundation of our democracy. How trust is established online is therefore a key question for HCI to understand and address, especially as the landscape is rapidly changing with AI and algorithms increasingly mediating our online experiences. This talk will cover two different and critical aspects of online trust. In the first part of the talk, I will present work on trust in the news media. Most people consume online news on platforms where algorithms present content from a mixed set of sources, for example news aggregators and news feeds. It is important, then, to evaluate the factors that contribute to how people evaluate the veracity of content in these environments. In this work, we follow on a body of research showing higher reported trust in politically aligned news sources. We investigate the determinants of the increased trust to distinguish between source evaluation and confirmation bias effects.

It is more than recommendations algorithms that mediate our online experiences. In the second part of the talk, I will outline a near-future where our personal communications are mediated by AI agents, or as we termed it: AI Mediated Communication (AI-MC). I will lay out the various ways in which AI-MC might impact our interpersonal communications, and describe a study where we examined the potential impact of AI-generated profile text on the perceived trustworthiness of Airbnb hosts. Taken together, the findings point to a bleak future of trust in our society, and offer a set of significant challenges for the future of HCI.

The studies I will present were led by PhD student Maurice Jakesch at Cornell, and are joint work with Jeff Hancock, Xiao Ma, and Karen Levy among others.

  • Speaker:
Mor Naaman is an associate professor of Information Science at the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech. Mor leads a research group focused on topics related to the intersection of technology, media and democracy. The group applies multidisciplinary techniques — from machine learning to qualitative social science — to study our information ecosystem and its challenges. Previously, Mor was on the faculty at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, led a research team at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Stanford University InfoLab, and played professional basketball for Hapoel Tel Aviv. He is also a former startup co-founder, and advises startup companies in social computing and related areas. His research is widely recognized, including with an NSF Early Faculty CAREER Award, research awards and grants from numerous corporations, and multiple best paper awards.
  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, October 17, 2019: When Users Control the Algorithms: Values Expressed in Practices on the Twitter Platform, with Jenna Burrell

  • Topic

Recent interest in ethical AI has brought a slew of values, including fairness, into conversations about technology design. Research in the area of algorithmic fairness tends to be rooted in questions of distribution that can be subject to precise formalism and technical implementation. We seek to expand this conversation to include the experiences of people subject to algorithmic classification and decision-making. By examining tweets about the “Twitter algorithm” we consider the wide range of concerns and desires Twitter users express. We find a concern with fairness (narrowly construed) is present, particularly in the ways users complain that the platform enacts a political bias against conservatives. However, we find another important category of concern, evident in attempts to exert control over the algorithm. Twitter users who seek control do so for a variety of reasons and their strategies often produce considerable social utility. Beyond the experiences on any single platform, we argue for better and clearer definitions of what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate control over algorithmic processes.

  • Speaker:
Jenna Burrell is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on how marginalized communities adapt digital technologies to meet their needs and to pursue their goals and ideals. She is the co-director of the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group. She is currently working on a book about rural communities that host critical Internet infrastructure such as fiber optic cables and data centers. Her first book Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana (The MIT Press) came out in May 2012. She earned a PhD in Sociology at the London School of Economics.
  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, October 10, 2019: Beyond “Bots and Trolls” — Understanding Disinformation as Collaborative Work, with Kate Starbird

  • Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 8:00pm UT
  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + broadcast on Airmo and YouTube
  • Topic

Strategic information operations (e.g. disinformation, political propaganda, and other forms of online manipulation) are a critical concern for democratic societies—as they destabilize the “common ground” that we need to stand upon to govern ourselves. In this talk, Kate Starbird argues that defending against strategic information operations will require a more nuanced understanding of the problem. In particular, we will need to move beyond focusing on “bots” and “trolls” to looking at the collaborative nature of disinformation campaigns that target, infiltrate, shape, and leverage online communities. Drawing from three distinct case studies, Starbird describes how orchestrated campaigns can become deeply entangled within “organic” online crowds and highlights a persistent challenge for researchers, platform designers, and policy makers—distinguishing between orchestrated, explicitly-coordinated information operations and the emergent, organic behaviors of an online crowd.

  • Speaker:
Kate Starbird is an Associate Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). Starbird’s research is situated within human-computer interaction (HCI) and the emerging field of crisis informatics—the study of the how information-communication technologies (ICTs) are used during crisis events. One aspect of her research focuses on how online rumors spread during natural disasters and man-made crisis events. More recently, she has begun to focus on disinformation and other forms of strategic information operations online. She is a co-founder and executive council member of the UW Center for an Informed Public. Starbird earned her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Technology, Media and Society and holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.
  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, September 5, 2019: Digital Patronage: A New Media Ecosystem Supporting Creative Content, with Yvette Wohn

  • Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 8:00pm UT
  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + broadcast on Airmo and YouTube
  • Topic

Digital patronage is the act of delivering recurring direct support to content creators online. In this talk I define digital patronage as a form of social support and examine why patrons engage in this behavior in the context of the live streaming platform Twitch. This mixed method research illustrates patrons’ motivations, how patronage motivations differ from that of donations, and the motivational factors that are associated with higher levels of patronage. I will also highlight different approaches of how content creators manage patronage and discuss what this means for the design of patronage platforms and emergence of a new creative content economy.

  • Speaker:
Yvette Wohn is an assistant professor of Informatics at New Jersey Institute of Technology and director of the Social Interaction Lab (socialinteractionlab.com). Her research is in the area of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) where she studies the role of algorithms and social interactions in livestreaming, esports, gaming, and social media.
  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, August 1, 2019: Where Did This $^@#$ Autonomous Car Learn to Drive? Addressing Cross-cultural differences in Autonomous Car Design, with Wendy Ju

  • Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 8:00pm UT
  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + broadcast on AirMo and YouTube
  • Topic

The importance of understanding differences in culture have long been known to designers. Interactive technology enables new ways to localize products, but it also moves products into aspects of daily life where the subtle differences in culture become more important and more profound. Today's autonomous cars, for example, are designed to follow the letter of the local law, but do not adapt to regional variations in driving behavior. At scale, this lack of adaptation can cause accidents and cost lives.

I will discuss recent research looking at cross-cultural experiments in people's interactions with autonomous driving that were conducted between the US and the Netherlands, Mexico, Japan, and Israel and outline an emerging framework for designers to examine cultural differences.

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  • Speaker:
Wendy Ju is an Assistant Professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and in the Information Science field at Cornell University. Dr. Ju comes to Cornell Tech from the Center for Design Research at Stanford University, where she was Executive Director of Interaction Design Research, and from the California College of the Arts, where she was an Associate Professor of Interaction Design in the Design MFA program. Her work in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces highlights the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without interrupting or intruding. Dr. Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. She has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, and a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.


  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Wednesday, July 17, 2019: Growing Their Own: What We Can Learn from the Community-Driven Development of Archive of Our Own, with Casey Fiesler

  • Date: Wednesday, July 17, 2019
  • Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 8:00pm UT
  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + broadcast on AirMo and Youtube
  • Topic

The fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own hosts almost 5 million works and 2 million users. It is also an open source project that was designed and developed entirely by the community it serves—which consists largely of women and LGBTQ people—and relies on a small army of volunteers who maintain a value-driven search and tagging system. This talk traces the history, growth, and features of the archive, which include grassroots development, design for inclusivity and empowerment, the benefits and challenges of maintaining a volunteer development team, and how a number of these volunteers from groups traditionally underrepresented in computing picked up computational skills along the way.

  • Speaker:
Casey Fiesler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Science at University of Colorado Boulder. She holds a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a JD from Vanderbilt University Law School. Her research focuses on creating more positive networked spaces, which includes work on technology ethics, online governance, social norms, and designing to support marginalized groups. She is a member of the legal committee for the Organization for Transformative Works, which is behind the open source fanfiction site Archive of Our Own. Her ethics research is funded by the National Science Foundation PERVADE project, dedicated to empirical studies of research ethics for pervasive human data, and Mozilla and partners' Responsible Computer Science challenge.
  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, July 11, 2019: How Privilege Defines Performance, with Tatiana Mac

  • Date: Thursday, July 11, 2019
  • Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 8:00pm UT
  • Location: Mozilla Portland + broadcast on | AirMo
  • Topic

In theory, web performance, accessibility, and inclusive design all have similar goals: provide the best, most consistent experience to all people using the minimal amount of resources. In practice, this often falls apart. Product creators define what it means to be performant from where they stand, which is typically from places of privilege with unseen biases, struggling to find true empathy with their users. Through this talk, we'll examine how to build conscientiously, looking within to resist systematic problems in order to create more truly performant, accessible, and inclusive systems for our users.

  • Speaker:
Tatiana Mac is an independent American designer who works directly with organizations to build clear and coherent products and design systems. She believes the trifecta of performance, accessibility, and inclusion can work symbiotically to improve our social landscape digitally and physically. When ethically-minded, she thinks technologists can dismantle exclusionary systems in favor of community-focused, inclusive ones. Never totally pleased with design tools, she designs in browser to bring performant, semantic, and accessible visual narratives into the web. Her current obsessions are optimizing variable fonts, converting raster images into to SVGs, and recreating modernist paintings in CSS grid. When she can successfully escape vim, she finds new countries to explore (33 and counting).
  • Host: Tara Robertson
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, June 6, 2019: Shaping Pro-Social Interaction in Virtual Reality, with Katherine Isbister and Joshua McVeigh-Schultz

  • Date: Thursday, June 6, 2019
  • Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 8:00pm UT
  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla + YouTube
  • Topic

With support from Mozilla, the research team at UC Santa Cruz's Social Emotional Technology Lab has been studying design factors that lead to positive social encounters and engagement in Virtual Reality. Today we present results and insights from conducting interviews with designers from major and nascent Social VR platforms, toward shaping a broadly accessible and inviting platform for the future. We also discuss ongoing studies and research-through-design prototyping activities.

  • Speakers:
Katherine Isbister is a full professor in the University of California, Santa Cruz's Department of Computational Media, where she directs the Social Emotional Technology Lab, and the Center for Computational Experience. Her research combines technical prototyping and evaluative research to advance the state of the art in human computer interaction. Recent projects include hand-held objects (tangible computing) designed to help regulate mood and attention, wearables to augment feelings of connection and co-presence, and a gesture-based door entry authentication system that uses biometrics, among others. She is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. Isbister’s most recent book from MIT Press is How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. Her research has been covered in Wired, Scientific American, and many other venues. She was a recipient of MIT Technology Review's Young Innovator Award, and is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
Joshua McVeigh-Schulz is an Assistant Professor in the School of Design at San Francisco State University. He an interactive media designer and researcher with a PhD from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, where his dissertation explored the intersection between ritual and speculative design. His hybrid background intersects fields of HCI, anthropology, media studies, and design research. Recent projects and publications include topics of social VR, immersive design fiction, speculative ritual design, and vernacular accordance theory. He is the recipient of an Intel PhD fellowship, and he has conducted research at MSR and Intel Labs. The work presented was conducted while he was a postdoctoral researcher at UCSC's Social Emotional Technology Lab.
  • Host: Jofish Kaye
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #et
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Wednesday, May 29, 2019: User-Centered Privacy in Third-Party Online Tracking and Private Browsing, with Blase Ur

  • Date: Wednesday, May 29, 2019
  • Time: 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 8:00pm UT
  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla
  • Transcript
  • Topic

In this talk, Blase will discuss our group's recent and ongoing efforts in user-centered privacy on the web. He will focus on our work related to third-party online tracking. He will first discuss two online user studies (CHI 2018) involving a total of 543 participants. They evaluated how the particular types of inferences ad networks can make about users, as well as their process for doing so, impacted participants' comfort with targeting based on these inferences and their perceptions of its usefulness.

Blase will then discuss our ongoing work designing a new style of privacy-protective browser extension that aims to help users better understand third-party tracking. The extension visualizes examples of long-term, longitudinal information that third-party trackers could have inferred from the user's browsing. He will discuss our recent longitudinal field study in which 425 participants used one of six variants of our extension for a week. He will also briefly discuss our prior work (WWW 2018) evaluating how users' misconceptions about what private browsing mode does are impacted by browsers' disclosures about this mode. In a 460-participant online study, the team found that browsers' disclosures fail to correct the majority of the misconceptions we tested; results varied across browsers.

Through the talk, Blase hopes to connect with interested Mozilla researchers, designers, and engineers for potential collaborations and feedback regarding our future work in these directions.

  • Speaker:
Blase Ur is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, where he researches security, privacy, and human-computer interaction. As the UChicago SUPERgroup, he and his students use data-driven methods to help users make better security and privacy decisions, as well as to improve the usability of complex computer systems. He has received three best paper awards (CHI 2017, USENIX Security 2016, and UbiComp 2014), as well as honorable mentions at CHI 2016 and CHI 2012. He received the 2018 SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award, a 2018 IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice, the 2016 John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Student Research Award, an NDSEG fellowship, and a Fulbright scholarship. He holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University (PhD and MS) and Harvard University (AB). https://www.blaseur.com/.
  • Host: Janice Tsai
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Wednesday, February 20, 2019: FIBER - Internet infrastructure and openness, with Susan Crawford

  • Location: Mozilla San Francisco + Air Mozilla + YouTube
  • Time: 2:00pm PT / 5:00pm ET / 10:00pm UT
  • Topic
Author Susan Crawford will join Wikimedia's Jorge Vargas and Mozilla's Ferras Vinh and Chris Riley to talk about internet infrastructure, and barriers and opportunities to increasing fiber availability in the U.S. Internet access and openness is one of Mozilla's top three priority public policy issues for 2019, and working to connect more people to an open internet complements our net neutrality leadership. Fiber is a big part of that long-term solution, and so we are excited to welcome Susan back to Mozilla, as she literally wrote the book on the subject.
  • Speaker:
Susan Crawford is a professor at Harvard Law School, the author of "Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age" and co-author of "The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance", and a former special advisor to President Obama. Her most recent book is "Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution―and Why America Might Miss It".
  • Host: Chris Riley
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #policydiscussion
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, February 7, 2019: The Ethical OS Toolkit, with Jane McGonigal

  • Topic
The EthicalOS toolkit was developed by IFTF with the support of the Omidiyar Network, and offers a range of approaches for safeguarding ethics and turning ethical opinions into strategic assets in the product development process. Many of these approaches are much more common at Mozilla than other companies. Others we could yet learn from. Since the toolkit's release in August there's been a demand for concrete tools and examples in the wild. We have many such tools and examples at Mozilla, and this conversation is one forum in which we can highlight them.
  • Speaker:
Jane McGonigal is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games — or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She believes game designers are on a humanitarian mission — and her #1 goal in life is to see a game developer win a Nobel Peace Prize.

She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, and is the inventor and co-founder of SuperBetter, a game that has helped nearly half a million players tackle real-life health challenges such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury.

  • Host: Miriam Avery
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #et
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Friday, February 1, 2019: Deep Breath, Folks: Using Bots to De-escalate Conflict in Social Media, with Libby Hemphill

  • Topic
Harassment, insults, trolling, threats, and many other anti-social behaviors are toxic to conversations online. Reporting and addressing these behaviors requires a lot of time, labor, and emotional strain, and they're often ineffective. To move toward more effective methods to curb problematic behaviors such as harassment and hostility, I propose that we think about the problem differently in two ways. First, we must be more specific and explicit about the behaviors and content that are unacceptable in particular contexts so that we can design targeted mechanisms for addressing them and recognize the potential unintended impacts of our interventions. Second, we must treat problematic behavior as a social problem, not just an individual one, which demands that we address the contexts in which behavior occurs. To ground this discussion, I'll provide an example of a targeted mechanism for addressing personal insults and an experiment designed to reduce their prevalence in existing online communities.
  • Speaker:
Libby Hemphill

Libby Hemphill, PhD, is an associate professor of information at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Resource Center for Minority Data at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Her recent work focuses on political discussions in social media and automated techniques for detecting and addressing problematic behaviors online. She is especially interested in issues of access and power and how they impact behaviors online and how we study those behaviors.

  • Host: Jofish
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on Slack #et
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Tuesday, January 15, 2019: Creating Value from Intangibles, with Baruch Lev

  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla + YouTube
  • Time: 10am PT / 1:00pm ET / 6pm CET
  • Topic
Not all investments yield measurable revenues. For example we at Mozilla invest in our community relationships, in educational efforts, and in policy work. When we do this, we're building intangible assets.
  • Speaker:
Baruch Lev will share about intangible assets: their special attributes, the problems they create for measurement systems (at all levels), and the considerable economic value they create. Baruch will help us begin to understand how to think about these kinds of resource allocation decisions.

Professor Lev has been with NYU over 20 years. His primary research areas of interest include corporate governance; earnings management; financial accounting; financial statement analysis; intangible assets/intellectual capital; capital markets; and mergers and acquisitions. Professor Lev is the author of six books including Intangibles: Management, Measurement, and Reporting; Winning Investors Over (2012); and, most recently: The End of Accounting and The Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley, 2016). Lev has published over 100 research studies in the leading accounting, finance and economic journals and received numerous awards and honorary doctorates.

  • Host: Jessica Margolin
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

2018

Thursday, 29 November 2018: Talk Emoji to me: How digital visual language impacts communication, culture and inclusion [Panel]

  • Topic
"Emoji has achieved what Esperanto was originally supposed to: becoming a truly international language basically everyone is able to understand. Emoji has its own movie and even ‘Moby Dick’ has been translated to the visual vocabulary. Just like any other language in the world Emoji is evolving continually. And like any other language, Emoji has to consider how inclusive it truly is.” -- enorm Magazin, 2018

Not everyone might love emojis or give a lot of thought or meaning to them, still most people use them in their everyday digital communication to express themselves and underline their written words. They are unquestionably a participatory element of the web that can leverage inclusiveness and diversity so everybody feels welcome and represented on the web, without being subjected to stereotypes — and therefore an important indicator of a healthy web, as this year’s Internet Health Report from Mozilla suggests. And there’s even another integrative element to Emoji with everyone being able to contribute ideas.

Still we also face some risks; for example, strengthening new stereotypes through Emoji (e.g. Muslim women are now seen as represented with the Hijab but what about those who don’t wear it?). Also, a big tech player committee -- the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee -- first needs to evaluate which emojis will be included, which might restrict diversity (or: how diverse is the committee in fact?). At the same time the question remains how and to which extend emojis really help to include people and the understanding across borders.

We will discuss these and other questions at our Mozilla speaker series in Berlin on 29 November, which will be structured as some lightning talks followed by a panel discussion with experts from different areas.

  • Panelists:
  • Host: Alice Fleischmann
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Friday, 2 November 2018: Revealing Data: Creepy or Curious? with Yvonne Rogers

  • Speaker
Yvonne Rogers is Professor and Director of the University College London's Interaction Centre.

Monday Oct 1, 2018: Free Speech: What is it, and Who’s Responsible? [Panel]

“Roughly a decade ago, social media turned everyone into a content creator, giving them the tools to not only say their piece but to amplify it, to grow an audience with little to no budget. Citizen journalists, bloggers, and grassroots activists bypassed the editorial old guard, gaining so much influence that they were elevated to an estate of the realm: The Fifth Estate.

The social networks facilitated and enabled this new guard, simultaneously providing a captive user base, a virality engine infrastructure, no editorial oversight, and fairly limited rules.”

-- Renee diResta (Wired, March 2018)

We know where things went from here. But despite heightened awareness of the issue, the problem of misinformation online is a thorny one. In the U.S., the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but what happens when terms of service trump how we express ourselves? And in an ecosystem where misinformation (often accompanied by toxic trolling) traverses platforms, who is responsible when the platforms are gamed and abused, pushing false information to its users or worse, threatening their security. Is it the platforms? The government? Users? And is it censorship if a platform changes its algorithms? How much human vs. machine intervention (if any) should happen?

Join us at Mozilla’s San Francisco offices on October 1 at noon, when Mozilla Fellow Renée DiResta will host a panel representing technology, social media, policy and government to look at these and many more questions.

  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Tuesday, September 18, 2018: Inclusive Design: Unlearning to Include and Innovate, with Jutta Treviranus

Jutta will present two assumptions that have become so central to our daily practice that we are no longer conscious of them. These two assumptions — tied to research methods, design, data analytics, AI and even our world views — have scaled and infused all of our thinking and practices, especially our foundational ideas about design, innovation and business. Every dilemma we are facing today can be traced back to these assumptions. She proposes turning these assumptions upside-down.

Jutta will briefly trace the history of these foundational assumptions and the impact on our work. She will propose counter notions and give examples showing how these counter notions may accomplish many of the goals that have evaded us. Her examples will include UX design and research, data analytics, and AR and VR.</p>
  • Speaker
Jutta Treviranus is the Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) and professor at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD) in Toronto. The IDRC conducts research and development in the inclusive design of emerging information and communication technology and practices. Jutta also heads the Inclusive Design Institute, a multi-university regional centre of expertise on inclusive design. Jutta is the Co-Director of Raising the Floor International, whose mission is to “To make the web and mobile technologies accessible to everyone with disability, literacy and aging-related barriers, regardless of their economic status.” She also established and directs a graduate program in Inclusive Design. Jutta has led many international multi-partner research networks that have created broadly implemented technical innovations that support inclusion. She has played a leading role in developing accessibility legislation, standards and specifications internationally.</p>
  • Hosts: David Bolter and Tara Robertson
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, July 26, 2018: Authoring for Mixed and Augmented Reality, with Timoni West

This year Mozilla’s Emerging Technologies group has two core objectives: (1) prove product-market fit for end users and creators with experimental products; and (2) increase Mozilla’s active engagement with developers, and their adoption of our core web technologies.

As part of Emerging Tech, the Mixed Reality team specifically wants to empower developers and users to build rich interfaces and experiences — whether in AR, VR, or both — and is looking at things like spatial computing, gestural interfaces and new input paradigms, and other ways to support the growth of the open web.

At our July Speaker Series, we’ll hear how others are addressing these needs, and how this work ties to Mozilla. Specifically, Timoni West, who leads XR Research at Unity Labs, will share about the latest tools that her team has created to create new and immersive online experiences.

This includes an exploration of the challenges — both hardware and software — posed by spatial computing (the way we interact with computers in our surroundings -- whether devices in the physical world, or to virtual reality settings). Spatial computing expands how we experience computing, from single, rigid LCD/screen interfaces out into the wider, physical world. She’ll share how her team is creating tools that match how people already think and operate (apperception).

Timoni will also share ways her team is helping non-technical creators to experiment and make new things in Mixed and Augmented Reality, drawing off of widely accessible data sets. And she’ll touch on how these new tools can provide privacy and freedom, in the spirit of Mozilla.

  • Speaker. Timoni West leads XR Research at Unity Labs, managing a team of cross-disciplinary artists and engineers. Specifically, the immersive Authoring Tools Group that Timoni leads in Unity’s labs team is focused on how people will build worlds in the future. Their first public project, EditorVR, was released in December 2016. Labs works closely with partners, cheerlead indies making awesome experiences, and stays closely involved with the AR/VR/MR community.
  • Host Anselm Hook
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Wednesday, May 23, 2018: Tracking in the Open, with Arvind Narayanan

  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla + YouTube
  • Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET / 7pm CET
  • Topic:

Since Q1 2015, the percentage of people using ad blockers on the web rose nine percentage points, from 27% to 36% per the Global Web Index. The research points to two major motivations for using ad blockers: user experience e.g. cluttered pages, longer page load times, workflow interruptions; and privacy e.g. intrusiveness and unwanted personalization based on browsing history.

Both Apple and Google have announced plans to address some of these ad problems, and of course, Mozilla has already implemented an optional Tracking Protection feature. But are these solutions best adopt our content blocking principles of transparency & control, content neutrality and openness? In short, are these the the right solutions for users, or can we do better?

It’s highly unlikely Mozilla will solve this alone. On May 23, Arvind Narayanan of Princeton will share what Firefox (and other browser makers) can do to protect users from risky data collection practices on the web in ways that align with Mozilla's values, facilitate responsible advertising, and increase user trust in the web.

Specifically, Arvind will draw from his Web Census research, a measurement & analysis of one million websites and the largest and most detailed measurement of online tracking so far. Arvind will discuss ideas for how Firefox can move forward with content blocking while minimizing breakage of websites. Steve Englehardt, the lead Ph.D. student behind the Web Census research, and a new Mozillian, will be present; Arvind and Steve will answer questions during the Q&A section.
  • Speaker:
Arvind Narayanan is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He leads the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project to uncover how companies collect and use our personal information. Narayanan also leads a research team investigating the security, anonymity, and stability of cryptocurrencies as well as novel applications of blockchains.

He co-created a Massive Open Online Course as well as a textbook on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies. His doctoral research showed the fundamental limits of de-identification, for which he received the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Award.

Narayanan is an affiliated faculty member at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton and an affiliate scholar at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. You can follow him on Twitter at @random_walker.
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, 12 April 2018: Data Protection in the EU: What's Changing with GDPR? [Panel Discussion]

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was formally adopted by the EU Parliament in the spring of 2016. It will come into force across all 28 EU Member States on May 25, 2018 upleveling data protection to a more harmonised and digitally fit regulatory framework. While the adoption of GDPR has been widely celebrated and the date is fast approaching, few fully understand its exact scope and it seems hard to grasp what is really going to change -- questions that are not only raised by consumers, but by companies alike.

This is hardly surprising, as GDPR will introduce a number of changes to existing data protection rules and practices. For instance, the framework strengthens users’ rights, introduces procedural requirements for data-processing companies, as well as new legal principles that will also need to be tackled and implemented on a technical level - such as ‘data portability’. While the implications are barely known among Internet users, the increasing bureaucratic demands are deterring many companies from taking necessary or appropriate action.

This expert panel hosted by Mozilla in our Berlin office will help to clarify some of the existing and upcoming issues around GDPR, shed light on the implications of European data protection to global businesses and attempt share best practice examples for achieving compliance that puts users first and is privacy-protecting.

  • Panelists
    • Léa Steinacker, Chief Innovation Officer at WirtschaftsWoche and expert on digital topics that move users and companies (moderator).
    • Dirk Heitepriem, Director Government Relations at BlackBerry EMEA, responsible for relations with governments, parliaments and authorities in Europe.
    • Stefan Lampe, Federal Agency for Civic Education, expert on net policy and in charge of the data protection dossier at bpb.de.
    • Dr. Nikolaus Lindner, Director Government Relations DE & EEC at eBay, who takes care of all legal and sociopolitical issues of the online marketplace in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
    • Katharina Nocun, net activist, writer and expert on data privacy.
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Wednesday, March 7, 2018: Computer Security In The Past, Present and Future, with Mikko Hypponen

Computer security researcher Mikko Hypponen has been hunting hackers since 1991. Join us to hear his insights and stories on computer security history. Mikko will also tell us where we are today, and where we will be going in the future. But the real question is: how are we ever going to secure ten billion new devices that will be going online over the next decade?

Finland-based Mikko Hypponen is a well-respected, global security expert who once tracked down the authors of the 1st computer virus (Brain) that spawned the entire anti-virus industry. He has worked at F-Secure since 1991, and has written on his research for the New York Times, Wired and Scientific American. A 5+ time TED speaker, he has lectured at the universities of Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge, dissected the infamous stuxnet and reverse engineered many, many computer viruses including ones targeting Olympic games of the past.

He was selected among the 50 most important people on the web by the PC World magazine and was included in the FP Global 100 Thinkers list.

Mr. Hypponen is a member of the board of the Nordic Business Forum. He sits in the advisory boards of t2, Social Safeguard and Hoxhunt, and in the advisory panel for the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Tuesday, February 13, 2018: Bored & Brilliant: Finding Digital Equilibrium, with Manoush Zomorodi

  • Location: Mozilla San Francisco + Air Mozilla + YouTube
  • Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET / 5pm UT
  • Topic:

Manoush Zomorodi never lacked for interesting ideas. As a journalist and podcaster covering technology and its impact on society, she found inspiration all around her: in parks and on walks as well as in the proverbial coffee shop.

But as she spent more time on her smartphone, she gradually saw her ideas and her inspiration decline. Hypothesizing a connection between her own digital habits and her creativity, Manoush created a week-long series of experiments for her listeners to help them reassess their technology habits, unplug for part of each week and jump-start their creativity.

The challenge, which is being adapted by therapists, teachers and office managers, showed why greater emphasis on “doing nothing” is vital in an age of constant notifications and digital distractions. Manoush consulted further with neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists about the possibilities of “mind wandering”—what our brains do when we're doing nothing at all, and the link between boredom and creativity.

Technology isn’t going anywhere, and that’s just fine. Manoush will share about how we can align our gadget use with what we hold dear and true to find equilibrium in our digital ecosystem. We’ll also have copies of Bored and Brilliant for those at the live event in San Francisco, and Manoush will stay on to sign them after her talk.

Manoush is a podcast host, author, and relentless examiner of the modern human condition.

As host of Note to Self, the podcast from WNYC Studios, she unpacks the forces shaping our accelerating world and guides listeners through its challenges. Her book, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self is based on her 2015 interactive project with tens of thousands of listeners. It empowers the reader to transform their digital anxiety into self-knowledge, autonomy, and action.

Note to Self was named 2017’s Best Tech Podcast by the Academy of Podcasters. Manoush has won numerous awards for her work including four from the New York Press Club. In 2014, the Alliance for Women in Media named her Outstanding Host.

In spare moments, Manoush tweets @manoushz and takes deep cleansing breaths.

  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Wednesday, January 31, 2018: Open by Design: How NASA Innovates to Take on the Universe, with Steven Rader

  • Location: Mozilla San Francisco + Air Mozilla + YouTube
  • Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET / 5pm UT / 6pm BST
  • Topic:

In 2007, the Space Life Sciences group at U.S.-based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) crafted a strategy: it would go “outside” its own walls to build a balanced research & development portfolio.

Or put another way: NASA adopted an open innovation strategy for human space flights, refining its research and technology problems into challenge statements open to a variety of disciplines and technical backgrounds beyond NASA. They’re working with their staff to better define (and own) business and technology problems and connect with various communities (some commercial, some not) to improve solutions.

As Mozilla rethinks how we do open, thinking strategically about how we work with contributors and others throughout the product lifecycle (and sharing some of our approaches, well, openly), we thought it would be good to take a look at how NASA engineers use open innovation as a valuable tool.

On January 31, we’ll hear from Steve Rader, the Deputy Manager for NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI). We’ll learn how a large, bureaucratic organization tasked with the wildest innovation goals became more nimble and innovative by identifying and effectively working with outside collaborators, and what lessons might apply to us as we innovate in the open at Mozilla.

Steve Rader currently serves as the Deputy Manager of NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI), which is working to infuse challenge and crowdsourcing innovation approaches at NASA and across the federal government. CoECI focuses on the study and use of curated, crowd-sourcing communities that utilize prize and challenge based methods to deliver innovative solutions for NASA and the US government.

Steve has a Mechanical Engineering degree from Rice University and has worked at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX for 25 years. He started his career as an environmental control and life support systems flight controller for Space Station Operations. He moved into flight software engineering where he developed delay tolerant communications software for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station as wells as ground and flight command & control systems for the X-38 emergency crew return vehicle.

Steve led the development of NASA’s Constellation Program’s interoperable Command, Control, Communications & Information (C3I) architecture. After the Constellation program, Mr. Rader supported the Mars design reference mission definition and a number of analog missions studying space mission operations and design.

Steve began studying crowdsourcing communities in 2011 and joined the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation as the deputy manager in 2013.

  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, 25 January, 2018: Net Neutrality in Europe: What’s Next? With Thomas Lohninger

Net neutrality: the notion that all data on the Internet should be treated the same, without discrimination or differential pricing -- is at risk in the United States but protected by law in Europe. But is it really being enforced?

Our January speaker Thomas Lohninger calls for citizens and technologists to join forces to make sure regulators enforce net neutrality as telcos and cable providers are not doing it on their own.

Thomas will share what the EU is doing: who are the decisionmakers, what is their process, what influences them, what has happened to date and what can we expect in the near future.

He’ll also share key differences among the EU and the U.S. - not only legally, but culturally, politically and institutionally - and how these will impact the future of the Web, for all of us.

Thomas Lohninger is a digital rights advocate in Europe mainly focused on net neutrality and surveillance. Together with the SaveTheInternet.eu campaign, he coordinated the civil society efforts to push pro net neutrality safeguards within the European telecom single market regulation. He is an expert in the field of net neutrality and worked as Policy Analyst for European Digital Rights. His current employment as executive director is with the Austrian privacy NGO Working Group on Data Retention where he fights state surveillance and develops scientific concepts for surveillance footprint evaluation to asses the danger or surveillance to fundamental rights.

He has a degree in Cultural and Social Anthropology, used to work as a system administrator and programmer for eight years, works since 2012 as a trainer for cyber security and has done several podcasts and radio shows in the past.

  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

2017

Tuesday, 5 December, 2017: When an Online Community Hits the Big Time, with Col Needham

  • Location: Mozilla London + Air Mozilla
  • Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET / 5pm UT / 6pm BST
  • Topic:

Col Needham loves movies. So much so that he wanted others to be able to learn about movies, so in 1990 he published a series of scripts to search a lists of credits collected by a USENET group. Moonlighting while working for Hewlett-Packard during the day, Needham assembled a community from around the world to build what grew into one the most popular movie sites, IMDb.

Popular enough that, in 1998, Amazon purchased IMDb and the site now attracts over 250 million unique visitors each month on the web and its mobile app.

In December, Col will come to Mozilla’s London office to share how he built up a part-time hobby with several unknown volunteers around the world into being one of the foremost expert movie sites. What worked well? What did he change along the way?

Col will also talk about how working on a community site in 1990 was different from how IMDb operates today, and will share lessons for those of us working with global communities to build consumer products today.

Col Needham is the founder and CEO of IMDb, one of the world’s top movie websites. Born and living in the UK, Col has had a lifelong interest in both technology and movies. After starting a computer games software business at the age of 14, he went on to complete a computer science degree at Leeds University before commencing a career in technology research in Bristol, England.

IMDb grew out of a personal database of movie information (which Col created as a teenager) combined with similar data collected on the Internet in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Col published the first version of IMDb online in October 1990 and co-ordinated IMDb as a worldwide volunteer effort from 1990-1996. IMDb incorporated in January 1996 with the volunteers as shareholders and IMDb became a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com in April 1998. Col continues in his original role to this day, working from an office in Bristol with IMDb staff members in countries around the world.

  • Transcript
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Friday, December 1, 2017: The Power of Virtual Reality and Storytelling with Nonny de la Peña

  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla
  • Time: 12:30pm PT / 3:30pm ET
  • Topic:

From the comforts of our couches, we hear about natural disasters, wars and genocides. This discordance between actual events and our own personal experience leads to an empathy gap.

But advances in technology - specifically, immersive technology like Virtual and Augmented Reality - makes it possible to learn of these types of events in unprecedented ways: we can actually experience them.

Inspired by World War II investigative journalist Martha Gellhorn’s desire to present an authentic, “on the ground” view of world events, Nonny de la Peña founded Emblematic Group ten years ago to develop socially impactful virtual reality content with an emphasis on linear storytelling. The poignant social topics she’s addressed include hunger, incarceration, sexuality and immigration (partial list).

As the world becomes increasingly global and our online and offline lives increasingly integrated, it’s critical to convey stories that create empathy and preserve our humanity, and we’ll hear how Nonny is doing this, and what opportunities this technology offers to tell better stories.

Nonny de la Peña was selected by Wired Magazine as a #MakeTechHuman Agent of Change and has been called “The Godmother of Virtual Reality” by Engadget and The Guardian. Additionally, Fast Company named her “One of the People Who Made the World More Creative.” for her pioneering work in immersive storytelling.

As CEO of Emblematic Group, a digital reality media company, Nonny uses cutting edge technologies to tell stories that create intense, empathic engagement on the part of viewers. Emblematic is also pushing the envelope with branded content, and an experiential volumetric search platform. From positional goggles to hand controllers, Emblematic has constantly innovated in this field.

A Yale Poynter Media Fellow and a former correspondent for Newsweek, de la Peña is widely credited with creating the genre of immersive journalism and her virtual reality work has been featured by the New York Times, BBC, Mashable, Vice, Wired and many others. Showcases around the globe include the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals, The World Economic Forum in Davos, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and Games For Change. She has more than 20 years of award-winning experience in print, film and TV and has used her broad knowledge to innovate in this burgeoning field, and her spatial narratives are regularly met with critical acclaim.

  • Transcript
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Wednesday, 18 October 2017: Privacy as a Competitive Advantage with Gry Hasselbalch

  • Location: Mozilla Paris + Air Mozilla
  • Time: Noon GMT / 2pm CET
  • Topic:

Discussions of privacy are often framed in terms of struggling against those who threaten it: governments, corporations or other authorities. But it’s not just an ‘activist’ fight to make the case for privacy: it’s just better business.

Today it’s a competitive edge for companies to respect user privacy and their right to control their own data. The organizations who view data ethics as a social responsibility - who place similar importance on data as they do environmental awareness and respect for human rights - will win in the market.

Data ethics expert Gry Hasselbalch will share both broad industry trends as well as specific case studies of companies employing data ethics. She’ll also show how citizens and consumers are no longer just concerned about lack of control over their data, but are starting to act - demonstrating the importance of digital trust to growth and prosperity. She’ll also explore how new business models, advances in technology and a new European data protection regulation support a growing market for data-ethical products and services.

Gry is an expert on data ethics and the social implications of technologies. She is co-founder of the ThinkDoTank DataEthics and co-author of the book Data Ethics – The New Competitive Advantage (Hasselbalch, Tranberg, 2016).

Gry serves as independent expert for the European Commission’s Horizon2020 and the European Research Council ERC and previously worked in the pan-EU network Insafe raising awareness on youth and tech. She started the ’privacy as innovation’ series of debates and network at the UN Internet Governance Forum and has authored several studies, articles and reports on digital challenges and citizen awareness.

She is a contributor to TechCrunch, Dailydot and OpenDemocracy and is a long term member of the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in the Design of Autonomous Systems. Her work is hosted at Mediamocracy and gryhasselbalch.com.

  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla Slack #speaker-series
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, 14 September 2017: Measuring the Subjective: The Performance Dashboard with Estelle Weyl

Firefox 57: a new look, a new engine. And fast. Because performance is critical.

But what does that mean? While performance is often seen a table stakes for software - it must be the best, and must continually improve - amazingly, no objective universal metric for performance exists.

In fact, performance varies quite a bit depending on the site, the environment and yes, the user. And users don’t check your performance metrics. Instead, they perceive how fast your site or app is. So what metrics currently exist that best reflect human perception?

Drawing on results from a speed perception study and years of teaching & following web development best practices, Estelle Weyl will help us craft a useful definition of performance, unpack the difference between Speed Performance and Perceived Speed Performance, and show how we can leverage available performance tools to improve the user experience, ultimately getting the best ROI of our performance efforts.

Estelle Weyl is an Open Web and performance evangelist, most recently at Instart Logic. A web developer, trainer, author, blogger and speaker, she has consulted for Kodak Gallery, SurveyMonkey, Samsung, Yahoo, Visa, and Apple, among others. While not coding, Estelle works in construction, dehippifying her 1960s throwback abode.

  • Questions:
    • During the event join us in the #speaker-series Slack & on IRC #AirMozilla; direct questions to @diane
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Thursday, 20 July 2017: Working Across Personality Types: The Introvert-Extravert Survival Guide with Jennifer Selby-Long

If I attend that event, I'll have to talk to people. All. Day.

Over the past year nearly half of Mozilla staff have used the Insights Discovery tool to better learn about their individual personality temperaments, and to be more effective on their teams.

But can these tests really help us? What’s the real science behind them? Can they be abused? Or are there ways they can help us work together better?

On July 20, Jennifer Selby Long, an expert in the ethical use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®), will lead us in an interactive session on this material. She’ll help us explore these frameworks and the science behind them, with a focus specifically on their Introversion / Extraversion dimensions and workplace collaboration.

Importantly, we’ll make it personal, rolling up our sleeves with some exercises to help us explore how our (and our team’s) MBTI preferences can help us work together better, regardless of job description, culture, or demographics.

Jennifer Selby Long is an executive coach, management consultant, and MBTI® expert who helps technology leaders navigate the challenges of seismic change to achieve their highest potential. She also advises on the impact of personality and gender on financial behavior.

Jennifer is the past president of the Association for Psychological Type. She has been quoted by business and technology writers in the Fast Company, Information World, Dice.com, Univision, and the Bulletin of Psychological Type.

She is an award-winning business writer and the author of Traveling Light, a blog helping leaders skyrocket their impact and lighten the load in their lives.

  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla and direct questions to @diane
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Tuesday, 13 June 2017: Selling Your Attention: The Web and Advertising with Tim Wu

You don’t need cash to search Google or to use Facebook, but they’re not free. We pay for these services with our attention and with our data.

While advertising-supported media was once confined to a small part of our lives like newspapers and radio, our work and lives are increasingly online and ads take the front row in our daily lives. This business model can have a democratizing effect: it makes products and information accessible to many more people, who might otherwise be priced out. But it also means that the main audience for these companies is not you - the person using their services - but rather, advertisers who keep the lights on.

History is punctuated by acts of refusal and outright revolt against this model, from the invention of the remote control, to the more recent rise of cord-cutting and ad-blocking software. Yet, whenever the attention merchants have seemed to lose their charm, they’ve always found a way to reinvent themselves and to recapture us.

What does this mean for the future of the open Internet? What can we, as Mozillians who ourselves live largely off of advertising revenues today, do? This is especially relevant to Mozilla, as we consider different ways we could shift ourselves and the web industry from being overwhelmingly advertising-supported.

Join us for a conversation with Tim Wu, historian, policy advocate and professor who coined the term “net neutrality," as he traces the history of the dynamics between advertisers, media and audiences, and calls on us to reevaluate what we are getting (or giving up) in exchange for our attention, especially in today’s always-on Internet.

Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate, and professor at Columbia Law School who coined the term "net neutrality." Wu's best known work is the development of Net Neutrality theory, but he also writes about private power, free speech, copyright, and antitrust. His books The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants have won wide recognition and awards.

Wu has worked in academia, federal and state governments. He worked at the White House for the National Economic Council; at the Federal Trade Commission, for the New York Attorney General’ as a fellow at Google, and for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry. He was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc.), and Harvard Law School.

Wu is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and was formerly a contributing writer at NewYorker.com and contributing editor at the New Republic. He has been named to the Politico 50 twice, to America’s 100 most influential lawyers, and also won awards from Scientific American magazine, National Law Journal, 02138 Magazine. He has twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing and in 2017 he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  • Questions:
    • During the event join us live on (1) IRC #AirMozilla and (2) Slack #speaker-series - be sure to direct questions to @samb
    • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Wednesday, 10 May 2017: When Surveillance Goes Private: A 2027 Retrospective from Adrian Hon

It’s 2027. In the UK, 8 out of 10 homes host a range of microphones, cameras and motion detectors. They help users secure their homes, find lost items, assist with cleaning, keep an eye out for accidents and falls, and a hundred other everyday tasks. They're integrated so seamlessly into daily life that they're considered indispensable – and they're cheap.

Of course, consumption habits ranging from entertainment, clothing and food are not only known, but anticipated by intelligent systems. These habits are also owned, captured, analyzed and used by the corporations that run them.

Interestingly, just a few decades ago in the 1990s, the UK’s introduction of Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) met with significant public outcry over concerns of privacy abuses. Yet now, less than half a century later, we’ve not only abandoned such talks: we’ve opted in to 24/7 surveillance of our homes.

In our May 10 “future retrospective,” we’ll look at how we - in 2027 - became so collectively compliant to others owning data about our personal habits and lives. What factors led to us to give so much of our lives to corporations, with so little transparency or accountability? Why were we more open to private surveillance than public surveillance? And when we return to 2017, what can we learn from this evolution to map a different future?

Adrian Hon is CEO and founder at Six to Start, co-creators of the most successful smartphone fitness game in the world, Zombies, Run!. The game has won awards for its stories and storylike games, and the team’s work has been displayed at the MOMA and Design Museum in London.

He’s the author of A History of the Future in 100 Objects, and he used to write about technology for The Telegraph.

Previously, Adrian was Executive Producer and Director of Play at Mind Candy from 2004 to 2007, where he designed and produced the Perplex City alternate reality game (ARG). Adrian’s interest in ARGs began with the genre itself in 2001, when as a moderator for the Cloudmakers community for ‘The Beast’ (an ARG for Steven Spielberg’s A.I.), he wrote a detailed walkthrough for the game, called ‘The Guide.'

During that time, Adrian studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, specialising in experimental psychology and neuroscience. In 2003, he began a neuroscience DPhil at Oxford, but left after a year to join Mind Candy.

Adrian has also spoken at the main TED conference in Monterey in 2001 (about the human colonisation of Mars), as well as various SXSW, GDC, Economist, and other such tech and gaming conferences.

  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla and direct questions to @diane
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Wednesday, April 26, 2017: American Spies: Jennifer Granick on U.S. Surveillance and its Global Implications

  • Location: Mozilla San Francisco + Air Mozilla
  • Presentation
  • Transcript
  • Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm UT
  • Topic: American Spies: U.S. Surveillance and its Global Implications

Intelligence agencies in the U.S. (aka the American Spies) are exceedingly aggressive, pushing and sometimes bursting through the technological, legal and political boundaries of lawful surveillance.

Because surveillance law has fallen behind surveillance technology, the U.S. government has unprecedented new powers. At our April Speaker Series, Jennifer Granick will address how Cold War programs led by J. Edgar Hoover and initiatives sparked by the September 11, 2001 tragedy have led us to today’s fusion centers and mosque infiltrators. She will also show how our current state of mass surveillance is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy democracy.

A teacher, practitioner and expert in surveillance and security law, Granick will share how the reality of modern surveillance in the U.S. differs from popular understanding, and what U.S. - and global - citizens can do to minimize its negative impact both for Americans and non-Americans around the world.

Jennifer Stisa Granick is the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (CIS) and author of American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What To Do About It (2017).

From 2001 to 2007, Granick was Executive Director of CIS and taught Cyberlaw, Computer Crime Law, Internet intermediary liability, and Internet law and policy. From 2007 to 2010 she served as the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Granick practices, speaks, and writes about computer crime and security, electronic surveillance, security vulnerability disclosure, encryption policy, and the Fourth Amendment. In March of 2016, she received Duo Security’s Women in Security Academic Award for her expertise in the field as well as her direction and guidance for young women in the security industry. Before teaching at Stanford, Granick spent almost a decade practicing criminal defense law in California.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017: Building Habit-Forming Products with Nir Eyal

  • Location: Mozilla San Francisco + Air Mozilla
  • Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET / 5pm UT
  • Topic: Building Habit-Forming Products

Hundreds of millions of people use Firefox every day. But they don’t have to. They can - very easily - switch to another browser. But we know Firefox rocks and we want them to use it.

Enter habits. Those human behaviors that become regular, ongoing actions that don’t require thought or intention. Or, per Merriam-Webster, “an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary.”

Creating software that is habit-forming entails tapping into key human psychological drivers such as rewards, social validation and personal fulfillment. These drivers are at the foundation of developing experiences that drive product growth. Perhaps the biggest benefit is to software makers is significantly lower costs to acquire and maintain active users.

But what about the user? Is it manipulative to create habits for people so they can use your products without giving it a conscious thought? To “get in their heads” to ensure they use our software? Do we want people to use our products involuntarily?

Nir Eyal has built and invested in products reaching hundreds of millions of users including AdNectar, Product Hunt and EventBrite. He’ll draw on core psychological tenets to show how we can create products for users that are habit-forming. And he’ll show us how we can do this in a way that we feel good about - to “build the change we see.”

For most of his career Nir worked in the video gaming and advertising industries where he learned, applied (and at times rejected) the techniques used to motivate and manipulate users. He writes to help companies create behaviors that benefit their users, while educating people on how to build healthful habits in their own lives.

As an active angel investor Nir makes it personal, investing his own funds in habit-forming products he believes improves lives. His past investments include Eventbrite, Product Hunt, Refresh.io (acquired by LinkedIn), Worklife (acquired by Cisco), Marco Polo, Presence Learning, 7 Cups, Pana, and Symphony Commerce.

Nir is the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Design School. He’s sold two technology companies since 2003 and now helps teams design more engaging products.

Nir talks of his advanced degree from the The School of Hard Knocks, but also received an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

  • Host: Chris More
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla and direct questions to @diane
  • Hashtag: #MozillaSpeakers

Wednesday, February 22, 2017: Inclusive Design: The Intersection of Product and Behavior (Panel Discussion)

  • Location: Mozilla San Francisco + Air Mozilla
  • Time: 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm UT
  • Topic: Inclusive Design: The Intersection of Product and Behavior (Panel Discussion)

The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible. Its effectiveness as a public resource depends upon decentralized participation worldwide. — Excerpt, Mozilla Manifesto

Mozilla cares not only about a functioning web, but a healthy one; a web where all people can both access and participate, resulting in an Internet that reflects the broad the diversity of its users.

But the Internet isn’t always like this.

Sometimes it's a place where groups of people are excluded. When Airbnb hosts deny service to guests based on their race, the web is no longer accessible. When neighbors make destructive assumptions based on race on local community site Nextdoor, or Twitter conversations devolve into trolling, the web is no longer a place of constructive participation.

These companies want to make the web better too. Approaches include hashtag viewing controls on Twitter & filters for abusive comments on Instagram; Airbnb’s Instant Book that prevents harmful stereotyping; and Nextdoor’s reporting system designed to create more thoughtfulness around neighborhood conversations.

Mozilla builds products and platforms directly for developers, communities and publishers worldwide. How can we create and sustain experiences that are open, accessible and participatory? And what measures of success can we advocate to support positive experiences for users, communities and publishers?

At our Speaker Series panel, we’ll address these questions with product leaders representing consumer, developer, business and gaming audiences as part of a conversation around "ethical design” with community, product and engineering professionals charting new territory in this area.

  • Panelists:
    • Angel Steger (Product Design Lead, Pinterest) is an entrepreneur and product designer developing award-winning products that empower people to get things done. Passionate about complex problems and human behavior, she’s worked in spaces as varied as genetic research, relationship management, and language learning. She currently leads the User State Machine team at Pinterest. On the side, you’ll find her practicing yoga, exploring food in SF, and gardening.
    • Randi Lee Harper (Founder, Online Abuse Prevention Initiative). Randi is founded the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative to fight harassment with technical solutions. This includes the Good Game Auto Blocker tool, built after a long career in tech (KIXEYE, Amazon, IronPort Systems). While Randi believes long term solutions involves cultural changes, but until that happens we can work develop shorter-term solutions to help targets of harassment. Current interests include tracking the way that certain communities interact, and helping define predictive behavior for outbreaks of online abuse.
    • Moderator & Host: Andrew Losowsky, Lead, Mozilla Coral Project. Andrew has turned a street into a museum, a volcano into a magazine, and academic research into a life-sized board game. A John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 2013, he now runs Mozilla’s Coral Project, which helps news organizations build better communities around their work. Because journalism needs everyone.
  • Questions:
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla and direct questions to @diane
  • Hashtag: #InclusiveDesign + #MozillaSpeakers

Wednesday, January 18, 2017: Data and People: A Discussion with Laszlo Bock, Sr Advisor and former SVP of People Operations, Google

  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Wednesday, January 18 @ 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 6:00pm UTC
  • Topic: Data and People: A Discussion with Google’s former SVP of People Operations Laszlo Bock

When Google’s head of People came out with the bestselling book Work Rules! last year, he debunked many myths. Adopting an experiments-based approach with their people, his team was able to gather data challenging commonly accepted assumptions about hiring, compensation, performance evaluations, training and more.

For example, in 2010 Google's research showed that junior, female software engineers were not getting promoted at the same rate as their male counterparts. Digging deeper, the team discovered differing self-nomination rates. Men, who in many cultures are typically more comfortable self-promoting, were nominating themselves at higher rates than their equally qualified but, on average, less self-promoting female peers.

To address this, a senior leader shared the data with Googlers and encouraged all engineers to self-nominate when ready, and told managers to keep their eyes open for promo-ready Googlers. Eventually, promotion rates equaled out.

Of course, Google isn’t Mozilla. For one thing, Google has over 60,000 staff in over 70 offices in 40 countries around the world. But the work and findings from Google - whose staff typically provide statistically-significant and rich data sets - can be useful references as we strive to create a Mozilla that is diverse, innovative and, at our core, puts people first.

On January 18, Mozilla's Larissa Shapiro will interview Laszlo. She’ll dig deeper into the approaches and learnings Google has taken with people and data, and help us uncover how these types of approaches apply to the science and art of people management at mozilla.

  • Speaker:

From 2006 to 2016, Laszlo Bock served as SVP of People Operations, leading Google's people function responsible for attracting, developing, retaining, and delighting "Googlers.” He believes that giving people freedom and supplementing our instincts with hard science are steps on the path to making work meaningful and people happy.

During Bock's tenure, Google was named the Best Company to Work more than 30 times around the world and received over 100 awards as an employer of choice. In 2010, Laszlo was named "Human Resources Executive of the Year" by HR Executive Magazine.

He is the author of "WORK RULES! Insights from Inside Google to Transform How You Live and Lead," which has been named one of the top 15 business books of 2015. He has testified before Congress on immigration reform and labor issues and been featured in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the PBS Newshour and on the Today Show.

Bock's earlier experience spans executive roles at the General Electric Company, management consulting at McKinsey & Company, start-ups, non-profits, and acting. He (briefly) held the world record for Greek Syrtaki dance (along with 1,620 others).

* Note: Laszlo dedicates all proceeds of his book to charities relating to education and veterans, the former mainly focused on giving disadvantaged kids better access e.g. Peninsula Bridge.
  • Host: Larissa Shapiro
  • Questions:
    • In advance submit questions here
    • During the event join us on IRC #AirMozilla and direct questions to @diane
  • Hashtag: #mozSS
  • Transcript

2016

November 16: Failure: The Hard Part about Innovation, with Ashley Good, Fail Forward

  • Location: Mozilla SF + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Wednesday, November 16 @ 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 5:00pm UTC
  • Topic: Failure: The Hard Part about Innovation

When you start a new job or project, you envision exciting things you and your team will accomplish together. When you do your planning, you state what you'll achieve and measure those achievements. And when you are rewarded, it's typically for a job "well done.”

Why even set goals, objectives or KPIs if you aren’t planning on succeeding?

Because the best, most innovative organizations do more than set and achieve goals. They also fail. Failure is actually a by-product of innovation. It's the "risk" element of the "risk - reward” equation. Cue the emergence of global failure events and meet ups.

As humans conditioned to win and succeed since birth, navigating how to “fail well" is hardly intuitive. What constitutes a "good failure"? And at what point do you decide you’ve failed, rather than persevere? Or change your direction e.g. the notorious ‘pivot’? In a world where success is rewarded and everyone is in the game to “win,” what does it mean to “fail well”?

At our November speaker series, we will explore how Mozilla can be a place where failure is not minimized, denied, or shunned, but instead treated as a valuable source of learning and insight to set us up for future successes.

Specifically, Ashley Good of Fail Forward will get us started with very practical insights into how we can:

  • Craft a language of failure
  • Communicate failure for learning
  • Develop the gift of feedback

  • Speaker:

Working in Cairo with the United Nations Environment Programme and as a management consultant in Vancouver, Ashley Good saw how fear of failure inhibits innovation, adaptation, and performance. In response, she launched Fail Forward to spark a shift in how we perceive and talk about failure, and to help organizations learn, innovate and build resilience.

Since 2010 Ashley has worked with organizations – from grantmakers and nonprofits to government and private sector companies – to use failure as a learning tool and culture driver to support and foster innovation. She is well known for building the Organizational Learning Team at Engineers Without Borders Canada, and she continues to lead their annual Failure Report.

Ashley is a contributor to the Globe and Mail Leadership Lab, Public Sector Digest, and World Economic Forum Agenda. Her work has received coverage in a wide range of media and news outlets, including National Post, The Globe and Mail, CBC Radio and Television, The New York Times, and Fast Company.

She is recognized by Harvard Business Review and McKinsey as the recipient of the Innovating Innovation Award, hosted Canada’s first ever conference dedicated to intelligent failure, and is a half-ironman triathlete. She earned her Bachelor of Science from the University of British Columbia with honours.

  • Mozilla Host: George Roter
  • Deck
  • Questions: Submit questions during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.
  • Hashtag: #mozSS

October 12: Metadata is the new data... and why that (really) matters, with Harlo Holmes, Freedom of the Press Foundation

  • Location: Mozilla Toronto + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Wednesday, October 12 @ 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 5:00pm UTC
  • Topic: Metadata is the new data ... and why that (really) matters

Maybe it’s when the person you had a bad date with on Tinder shows up in your “people you may know” feed in Facebook. Or when you accept the default settings on your Android phone and share all of your transit habits with Google. Those moments might lead you to suspect considerable information about you and your behavior (aka “metadata”) is being harvested, shared and saved.

But you had no reason to predict that. Nobody told you what was being gathered, or who it was being shared with. Or maybe they did, in a long, detailed unread terms of service. Today’s proliferation of mobile devices and platforms such as Google and Facebook has exacerbated this extensive, prolific sharing about users and their behaviors in ways most do not understand.

Announcements about Facebook encrypting Messenger and WhatsApp appear to be encouraging ways of protecting your data... but they belie a different story of splintered approaches to metadata collection and silos among major platform providers. Similar disparities exist among how browsers treat metadata. So while the actual content of our messages may be encrypted, dangerous legal, financial, political and even medical implications to metadata remain. The impact of information about what you do (and when you do it) has yet to be explored or defined, let alone systematized.

Fortunately mozilla is in a position to advocate for practices and policies that serve users first. We’ll hear specifically how from Harlo Holmes, Director of Newsroom Digital Security for the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

  • Speaker: Harlo is the Director of Newsroom Digital Security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. She strives to help individual journalists in various media organizations become confident and effective in securing their communications within their newsrooms, with their sources, and with the public at large. She is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist; and contributes to the open source mobile security collective The Guardian Project. She has helped journalists use tools to preserve their privacy and do their jobs better; is a member of Deep Lab, a collaborative group of cyberfeminist researchers, artists, writers, engineers, and more addressing issues such as privacy, surveillance, code and art; and was a Mozilla Knight Open News Fellow in 2014.

September 1: Being Human in a Data-Filled World with Genevieve Bell, Intel

  • Location: Mozilla Portland + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Thursday, September 1 @ 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 5:00pm UTC
  • Topic: Being Human in a Data-Filled World

In May, Kevin Kelly shared the possibilities that technology will offer us over the next 30 years. Not addressed were some of the unintended consequences of this progress. Facebook Live, Snapchat and Pokemon Go provide a few examples of how tech is outpacing our ability to socially (and legally) master it. Innovation unchecked can pose serious challenges to our very humanity. Best practices for user research and focusing on specific use cases have limited impact on our ability to shape the future we want.

Dr. Genevieve Bell is responsible for corporate sensing and insights at Intel. She leads a cross-discipline foresights community that delivers insights into significant societal, technical and global trends. At Mozilla she’ll deliver what she terms “more of a meditation and conversation than a talk” on what it means to proactively preserve our humanity in a world that is increasingly digital.

This sounds high level but it's also practical: we’ll learn about five things that don’t change and five things that do, and how paying close attention to them will help us be successful.

  • Speaker:

An accomplished anthropologist and researcher, Genevieve Bell joined Intel in 1998. During that time, she has helped drive Intel’s focus on user experiences and led various teams of social scientists and designers. She has been granted a number of patents for consumer electronics innovations throughout her career, with additional patents in the user experience space. She is the author of numerous journal papers and articles. She was named an Intel Fellow in 2008, a vice president in 2013 and a Senior Fellow in 2016.

In addition to her position at Intel, Bell is a highly regarded industry expert and frequent commentator on the intersection of culture and technology. She has been featured in publications such as Wired, Forbes, The Atlantic, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She is also a sought-after public speaker and panelist at technology conferences worldwide for the insights she has gained from extensive international field work and research.

  • Mozillian Host: Dietrich Ayala
  • Deck
  • Questions: Submit questions during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.
  • Hashtag: #mozSS

July 20, 2016: The Invention Cycle with Tina Seelig, Stanford University

  • Location: Mozilla MV + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Wednesday, July 20 @ 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 6:00pm UTC
  • Topic: The Invention Cycle: Going From Inspiration to Implementation

Are you stuck on where to go with your product and need an infusion of creativity? Do you struggle with brainstorming new ideas? Coming up with new solutions?

Bringing fresh ideas to life and ultimately to market is not a well charted course. In July, our guest Tina Seelig will share a new model, the Invention Cycle, that taps into our innate capabilities of imagination and creativity to help us innovate better. Tina’s framework captures the attitudes and actions necessary to foster innovation and to bring breakthrough ideas to the world.

We’ll learn:

    - Crisp definitions for imagination, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship
    - Clear roadmap for progressing from the seed of an idea through implementation
    - Concrete attitudes and actions needed to bring ideas to fruition

We’ll also be joined by a group of mozillians(1) who recently spent a half day working with Tina; they'll share how these learnings have translated directly into their roles at mozilla.

(1) David Bialer, David Bryant, Greg Jost, Jean Gong, Jet Villegas, Martin Best, Rosana Ardila, Tim Murray, Jen Bertsch and Rina Jensen

  • Speaker:

Tina Seelig is passionate about creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. As Professor of the Practice in the department of Management Science and Engineering, faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and a founding member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford's School of Engineering, she works with others who embrace the idea that entrepreneurs do much more than imaginable with much less than seems possible.

After earning her Ph.D. from Stanford University Medical School in Neuroscience, Tina has worked as a management consultant, multimedia producer, and was the founder of a multimedia company. She’s also written 17 books and educational games, including The Epicurean Laboratory and Incredible Edible Science, published by Scientific American; and a series of card games, called Games for Your Brain, published by Chronicle Books. Her newest books, published by HarperCollins are What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (2009), inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity (2012), and Insight Out (2015).

She’s been honored to receive significant recognition of her work, including the Gordon Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the National Olympus Innovation Award, the SVForum Visionary Award, and several university teaching awards.

  • Host: Rina Jensen
  • Questions: Submit questions during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.
  • Hashtag: #mozSS
  • Deck materials also in this post

May 26, 2016: Twelve Technology Forces Shaping the Next 30 Years with Kevin Kelly, Wired

  • Location: Mozilla SF + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Thursday, May 26 @ Mozilla SF - 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET / 6:30pm UTC
  • Topic: Twelve Technology Forces Shaping the Next 30 Years

Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends already in motion. Wired founder Kevin Kelly has an optimistic roadmap for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives—from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture—can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces.

These deep trends—flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning—overlap and are codependent on one another. And they will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate. By understanding and embracing them, it will be easier for us to remain on top of the coming wave of changes and to arrange our day-to-day relationships with technology in ways that bring forth maximum benefits.

Join us as mozilla's John Jensen interviews Kevin on these trends: what exactly are they, how are they playing out in our world, and what can we do as technologists ourselves to ensure they contribute to the future we want.

  • Speaker:

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His new book for Viking/Penguin The Inevitable will be released in early June 2016. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003.

From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. His books include the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy; the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control; a graphic novel about robots and angels, The Silver Cord; an oversize catalog of the best of Cool Tools; and his summary theory of technology in What Technology Wants (2010).

  • Host Interviewer: John Jensen
  • Questions: Submit questions for Kevin & John during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.
  • Hashtag: #mozSS #theinevitable

April 27, 2016: When Change is the Only Constant, with Kirsten Wolberg, PayPal

  • Location: Mozilla SF + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Wednesday, April 27 @ Mozilla SF - 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 6:00pm UTC
  • Topic: When Change is the Only Constant, Org Structure Doesn’t Matter

While it may be true in tech that “change is the only constant,” some changes are bigger than others.

Things like…deciding to develop an OS as well as a browser. And an app. Focusing on devices beyond phones. Changing our approach to advertising and content. Instilling an entire culture of experimentation and measurement across functions.

These types of shifts can impact job roles, titles, tools - in short, they impact all the stuff of our daily work. Whether an organization is decentralized or command & control, these kinds of changes are never simple nor straightforward. There’s no silver bullets. And yet, when done thoughtfully and holistically, significant change management can make the difference between life and death of a product, an organization and its community.

As a leader of major change efforts at PayPal, Salesforce and Charles Schwab, Kirsten Wolberg has moved a global organization to agile development and helped change the overall ownership of her organization. She'll draw off these experiences and share we might manage the changes happening at Mozilla.

  • Speaker:

Kirsten Wolberg currently serves as Vice President, Talent at PayPal, leading the talent acquisition, performance and learning teams. She also holds the role as Separation Executive for PayPal leading the PayPal separation program as part of the eBay/PayPal tax-free split. Kirsten was selected to lead the newly created Talent organization for PayPal to bring her deep background in technology, operations and transformational change leadership to the talent function. She is leading the innovation to reimagine Talent for the newly independent PayPal.

Prior to her current roles she led the chief operating functions for PayPal Technology including technology strategy, planning, M&A, quality, transformation, employee engagement and the PayPal Open Source Office. Previously, she was Chief Information Officer (CIO) at salesforce.com and divisional CIO for Corporate Technology at Charles Schwab. Kirsten is on the Board of Silicon Graphics International. She is also Trustees for. Additionally she is a Board Member of the Greater Bay Area chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Year Up Bay Area, and Jewish Vocational Services. Kirsten holds a BS degree in Finance from USC and an MBA from J.L. Kellogg School of Management.

  • Host: David Slater
  • Questions: Submit questions for Kirsten during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.
  • Hashtag: #mozSS

March 24, 2016: The Role of a Product Manager with Josh Elman, Greylock Partners

  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Thursday, March 24 @ Mozilla MV - 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 5:00pm UTC
  • Topic: The Role of a Product Manager - and Everyone Else

"The job of a product manager is to help your team (and company) ship the right product to your users.” Seems simple - but anyone who has worked on a product knows it’s not. At what point are you ready to ship? What is the right product? How do you know when you’ve built it? And often more complicated than it sounds: who are your users?

The best PMs are less product thought leaders and visionaries (though they certainly may be), but moreso shepherds of stakeholders and builders of processes to sort through these critical challenges. While they typically don’t produce tangible artifacts such as code or mockups, the ultimate success of the team and product can hinge on the effectiveness of the product manager. In short, product management done well helps make companies and products much better. But when done badly, it can significantly hurt a company and team.

  • Speaker:

As an investment partner at Greylock, Josh Elman invests in entrepreneurs building social networks and platforms, mobile apps, new media, and connected devices. Josh specializes in designing, building, and scaling consumer products, having been part of multiple companies that have grown to more than 100 million users.

Before joining Greylock, Josh spent 15 years in product and engineering roles at leading companies in social, commerce, and media. Josh was the product lead for growth and relevance at Twitter, growing Twitter’s active user base by nearly 10x. Prior to Twitter, Josh worked on the platform at Facebook and led the launch of Facebook Connect. Josh was an early employee at LinkedIn and helped establish early models for user growth and launched v1 of LinkedIn Jobs. Josh also held roles leading product management for Zazzle, and product and engineering for RealJukebox and RealPlayer at RealNetworks.

Josh currently serves on the boards of Medium, Meerkat, Operator, and Super. Josh also works closely with our investments in Nextdoor and Whosay. Josh led Greylock’s investment in SmartThings, which was acquired by Samsung in 2014. Josh holds a BS in Symbolic Systems with a focus on Human Computer Interaction from Stanford University.

  • Deck
  • Host: Justin Crawford
  • Questions: Submit questions for Josh during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.
  • Hashtag: #brantina, #mozSS

February 25, 2016: Building Product with Partners - Interview with April Underwood, Slack

  • Location: Mozilla SF + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Thursday, February 25 @ Mozilla SF - 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 6:00pm UTC
  • Topic: Building Products with Partners: Interview with Slack's April Underwood

Building products is complex. Building products with partners, considerably moreso. Varying resources, goals, strategies and cultures pose challenges. But partnering well on products is often worth the effort. This month April Underwood, head of all product & partnerships at Slack, will draw from her experiences at Google, Twitter, Travelocity and more to help us navigate the complexities of marrying products and partnerships. She'll be interviewed by our very own Bertrand Neveux, who has built products with partners for most of his career at and leading up to Mozilla.

  • Speaker: April Underwood is head of Platform at Slack, a messaging platform that has evolved into a diverse ecosystem of partners. There, she drives key growth initiatives and oversees platform products, partnerships, API integrations and developer relations. She previously worked on products for Travelocity, Apple, Google, Climate Corp (Weatherbill). Just before joining Slack, April led teams of Product Managers as Director of Product on Twitter’s fast-growing Advertising (Ads API, ads.twitter.com) and Data (Firehose, Gnip) products. She was also a PM for the Tweet Button and Twitter API, and built Twitter's Business Development team from the ground up to strike strategic partnerships with firms including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, EA, Salesforce and Adobe. And while she used to write code (and sometimes writes term sheets as an angel investor), her first love is building and leading product teams and working with engineers and designers to build and launch great products that people want to use.
  • Host: Bertrand Neveux
  • Questions: Submit questions for April during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.
  • Hashtags: #mozSS #brantina

January 27, 2016: The Right Way to Build Software with Jocelyn Goldfein, ex-Facebook

  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Wednesday, January 27 @ Mozilla MV - 10:00am PT / 1:00pm ET / 6:00pm UTC
  • Topic: The Right Way to Build Software: Ideals Over Ideology

Add-ons. Advertising. Dogfooding. Email clients. Mozillians form strong opinions on all sides of these (and other) topics, often for legitimate reasons.

We’re not alone. Leading software firms such as VMWare and Facebook also grapple with contentious technology and process issues, and Jocelyn Goldfein has firsthand experience of this. She's led engineering teams building software for both consumers and the enterprise; apps and the web; and for license fees and for free. These teams are like us: they debate how to best release software - and a host of other issues. Drawing from these experiences, Jocelyn will provide frameworks for how Mozilla can navigate these discussions effectively to drive better outcomes.

  • Speaker: Jocelyn Goldfein has held senior engineering leadership roles spanning from high-growth companies like VMware and Facebook to small startups. She is a widely recognized industry spokesperson on scaling engineering operations, mobile engineering, and diversity in tech. Goldfein currently is an independent angel investor and advisor to startups. As Director of Engineering at Facebook she led Facebook’s push on mobile infrastructure and quality, initiating major new investments in architecture and tooling and helped guide Facebook’s transition to “mobile first.” She launched new product initiatives in search, news feed, and photos. She also drove strategic engineering operational initiatives, including overhauling Facebook’s approach to technical recruiting. More on Jocelyn at her website.
  • Deck
  • Host: Nick Nguyen
  • Questions: Submit questions for Jocelyn during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.
  • Hashtag: #brantina

2015

December 3, 2015: Optimizing for Uncertainty with Mike Arauz, August

  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Thursday, December 3 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC
  • Topic: Optimizing for Uncertainty: Deciding and Moving Quickly

The web is increasingly complex and dynamic. How can larger software organizations keep up with this rapid, perpetual change? In the natural realm, 'complex adaptive systems’ allow for flux and change in tumultuous environments. Our December speaker will draw on these models to illustrate how modern organizations can decide and move quickly.

Mike will share how leading tech and product organizations are not simply adapting to increased change, but innovating and thriving in these dynamic environments by:

  • operating around networks vs hierarchies
  • distributing authority
  • processing information effectively
  • embracing structured and facilitated methods for collecting feedback and gaining consent on group action.
  • Speaker: Mike Arauz is a Founding Member and Acting President at August, a New York based consulting firm that builds high-performing teams for the world’s most meaningful missions. Previously, Mike was a Partner at Undercurrent, where he worked with leaders of global companies to transform how their organizations work and thrive in the 21st century, including GE, Pearson, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Mike is also a co-author of the Responsive.org manifesto and a leading contributor to the global self-management and future of work movement.
  • Deck
  • Host: Jim Cook, CFO, Mozilla
  • Recommended pre-watch: Mitchell’s 2nd Portland Keynote on Decisionmaking

October 22, 2015: Data as Empathy with Frances Haugen, Yelp

  • Location: Mozilla Mountain View + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Thursday, October 22 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC
  • Topic: Data As Empathy

To build products people love, you must understand those people. User research and user-centered design help get us there, but once we have a sense of how our audiences think and behave, how can we go beyond the anecdotal to extrapolate to the macro? What ways can we better understand the needs of millions of users who think, act and operate differently than us?

Our October speaker Frances Haugen will share from her product management and software engineering experiences with products used by millions of Google and Yelp customers. She'll help us understand how data - done 'right' - connects us to millions of users we don't know personally. And she'll outline what doing data right means for product development, and how product owners can build things their users love.

  • Speaker: As both a Senior Product Manager, Software Engineer and Data Scientist for companies including Yelp and Google, Frances has worked at the intersection of data, design and humans throughout her career. An Electrical and Computer Engineering undergrad, Frances says she sees the world as comprised of hi and low cast filters.
  • Host: Matt Grimes, User Advocacy
  • Deck
  • Questions: Submit questions for Frances during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.

September 24, 2015: Should I Put it on Yammer? The Neuroscience of Online Communications with Deanna Zandt

  • Location: Mountain View + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Thursday, September 24 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC
  • Topic: “Should I put it on Yammer?”

How do you respond when people at Mozilla ask you this? Do you sigh, roll your eyes, let out a small resigned laugh? Most of us know that many seemingly-benign posts (this one now the stuff of legends) can sometimes devolve into a debate nobody expected, necessarily wanted or knows what to do with. Not always, but enough to cause some communications platforms to be feared by some and occasionally counterproductive.


This outcome, of course, is not confined to Yammer, nor is the behavior confined to Mozilla. Our September Brantina speaker, Deanna Zandt, has generously volunteered to speak with us about the neuroscientific dynamics of online communications. She’ll provide a deeper understanding of how our brains work when we’re engaged in online discussions which can help us communicate better, make better decisions, be more productive, and ultimately engage with more people driving richer, more dynamic outcomes.

  • Speaker: Deanna Zandt creates and implements web strategies supporting civic engagement and cultural agency, drawing off her background in linguistics, advertising, telecommunications and finance. She’s worked with The Ford Foundation, Deutsche Telekom, Planned Parenthood, and Jim Hightower’s Hightower Lowdown; and has also advised the White House on digital strategy and public engagement. Deanna has been a regular contributor to Forbes.com, as well as NPR’s flagship news program, “All Things Considered” and is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN International, BBC Radio and Fox News.
  • Host: Doug Turner
  • Deck
  • Questions: Submit questions for Deanna during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.

August 13, 2015: Build, Measure, Learn: Being a Growth Organization with Hiten Shah, KISSMetrics

  • Location: San Francisco + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Thursday, August 13 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC
  • Topic:
Hiten Shah will share his ideas and experience with growth hacking, a scrappy marketing technique developed by technology startups, and how it specifically applies to Mozilla. Larger companies that embrace this approach (examples include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Airbnb and Dropbox) use creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to gain product exposure and grow their market share quickly.
  • Speaker: Hiten Shah is cofounder and president of analytics companies KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg; he also advises startups.
  • Host: Jascha Kaykas-Wolff
  • Deck
  • Questions: Submit your questions for Hiten in advance here, or during the event on IRC #AirMozilla.

July 23, 2015: Rapid Prototyping with Tom Chi, GoogleX

  • Location: San Francisco + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Thursday, July 23 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC
  • Speaker:
Tom Chi has worked in disciplines ranging from astrophysical research to Fortune 500 consulting to developing new hardware and software (web & client) products and services. He’s worked on large projects of global scale (Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Search), and scaled new projects from conception to significance (Yahoo! Answers from 0 to 90 million users). He also co-founded GoogleX, the semi-secret group responsible for cutting edge projects including the autonomous driving vehicles, contact lenses that monitor glucose through tears and balloons in the stratosphere that provide Internet access.
  • Topic:
Tom will talk about his approach to rapid prototyping using 'native' materials like paper and foam core to create and test experiences. Using this method, he has led teams to work more effectively and quickly, building state of the art (see above for examples) products as part of an ongoing innovation process.

May 21, 2015: Onboarding and Team Debt with Kate Heddleston

  • Location: Mountain View + Air Mozilla
  • Day, Date & Time: Thursday, May 21 @ 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET / 4:00pm UTC
  • Speaker:
Kate Heddleston, a software engineer in San Francisco, does a lot of speaking on the people-dimensions of software development and engineering management best practices. Her focus is on how software gets made, as well as on what it does.
  • Topic:
Kate shares her thoughts on the topic of onboarding new hires - what it takes to do that well, particularly in an engineering environment - and the 'team debt' that results when we do it poorly. Kate also shared some of the fairly immediate things individual teams can do to reduce the debt.
  • Deck.
  • Questions submitted to Kate in advance are here.

Testimonials

  • "I'd never thought about representation of people with disabilities in emoji and how emojis can be interpreted differently in different cultures. My job is diversity and inclusion, and it was cool to think about this." --November 2018
  • "I never knew that most mobile OS's freeze the set of emojis they provide. It's as if you only had Comic Sans font to write with." --November 2018
  • "Yvonne's talk really opened my eyes about some 'creepy' technology that is under development or already exists out in the world, like facial expression analysis/tracking for example. Wow." --November 2018
  • "I learned how technology to identify your facial recognition and analyze what you may be feeling exists/is being developed." --November 2018
  • "It's difficult to get consensus on how to balance free speech with minimizing online harassment and hate speech. I could see good arguments both for and against regulation. I was hoping that we'd made more progress in weeding out bad actors." --October 2018
  • "I learned how inclusive design makes all products better and ultimately more successful." --September 2018
  • "Designing for the norm can result in quicker end-of-life for a solution, and that designing for inclusion not only degrades less quickly, but also more gracefully." --September 2018
  • "There are unique challenges and things creatively being applied to authoring in augmented reality. Also - engaging and hyper intelligent speaker was awesome!" --July 2018
  • "About the various unique challenges involved with creating a VR world and what needs to be addressed going into the future. Fantastic presentation, by the way!" --July 2018
  • "Fascinating information on fingerprinting and dark patterns." --May 2018
  • "I appreciated the concrete suggestions for Mozilla to improve privacy in Firefox and also becoming "a moral user-agent." --May 2018
  • "It was interesting to hear the detailed implications of the GDPR – how companies will have struggle to implement it, that 100% compliance is not realistic, how it will force global companies to it, it keeps privacy in the conversation, etc." --April 2018
  • "I learned that political speech needs to be protected on the level as medical data. Don't panic, it's impossible to be compliant by May 25, but we should have our plan decided upon by then." --April 2018
  • "Mikko shared about the history of computer viruses, and although I had previous knowledge of this, it was interesting hearing the perspective of a computer security expert. His speculations about the future of viruses/malware were particularly interesting." --March 2018
  • "Mikko was one of the best talks I have watched in this series. Very well prepared and executed." --March 2018
  • "That speaker was AWESOME! Her energy is infectious. She left our room on a high!!! Vancouver loves her!!!" --February 2018
  • "Steve helped me understand how to structure projects as challenges to make solutions meaningful, and to collect input from varied sources." --January 2018
  • "By far one of the *best* speaker series we’ve had. Awesome!!!" --January 2018
  • "One of my favourite perks of working at @mozilla is the amazing monthly speakers series. Today it's @socialhack speaking on 'Net Neutrality in Europe: What's Next?' Thanks for arranging this!" --January 2018
  • "Thomas gave us an EU perspective on a world-wide issue. That's relevant for us Europeans. More of this, please! :D." --January 2018
  • "It was awesome to hear the origin story of a site I love. Col was an interesting and engaging speaker." --December 2017
  • "IMDb still collects and curates information from the community - nice bit of co-creation and networking shared interests." --December 2017
  • "Nonny gave an amazing talk and these talks are an awesome perk of working at Mozilla." --December 2017
  • "Nonny's talk was fantastic — well done!! --December 2017
  • "I loved hearing Gry's perspective on how being privacy compliant/having high digital security products are now being used as a business development tool." --October 2017
  • "I learned a lot about the GDPR and this talk clarified the law in a way I hadn't heard before." --October 2017
  • "It's counterintuitive but "non-visual" metrics can be just as useful, if not more so, than visual ones." --September 2017
  • "From a docs standpoint, being able to help people figure out the best way to implement stuff is amazing." --September 2017
  • "Jennifer showed how extraversion/introversion is not a determinant for being a good leader/worker. This is important because a different communication/energy style should not limit your opportunities or what you are considered for." --July 2017
  • "I now understand more about introversion and extraversion and learned very useful tips. I am a manager and this is very helpful for me to have more effective meetings." --July 2017
  • "Tim drove home the history of advertising and how newspapers altered content for financial gain! It's crazy!" --May 2017
  • "In the same way that we've long hit the point of no return with global warming, it is still imperative that we intervene on behalf of the web; we need to mitigate the damage." --May 2017
  • "Adrian's vision of the future and the presentation of the incentives that would cause people to buy these devices was pretty insightful." --May 2017
  • "The talk was entertaining because of the way that it was presented, where a garden path of wonder, highlighting the myriad of useful things with a very subtle undercurrent of what the implications were." --May 2017
  • "These events add real value to me as an employee, and as a citizen of the net." --April 2017
  • "I now have a much better understanding of the controversy surrounding the Snowden leaks and have an idea of what I can do as a private citizen to combat the government's use of mass surveillance." --April 2017
  • "The topic was compelling and the level of expertise of the speaker made the information received very credible and thus easy to find relevant to my work." --April 2017
  • "Today's speaker challenged my expectations of the internet and of corporate behavior and stimulated good office discussion." --March 2017
  • "I dislike most presentations. This was among the best I have ever watched." --March 2017
  • "SUPER INTERESTING talk!!! Glad I had the opportunity to hear Nir speak!" --March 2017
  • "Today's panel helped me focus on the core problem, which is NOT technology but rather what technology is enabling -- people being jerks and why the technology makes it seem to be OK." --February 2017
  • "Diversification of inputs makes design more inclusive and helps avoid problems like being wrongly bucketed in a certain demographic. Interesting modes of UX design include the unintuitive slowing down of user interactions, to prevent hasty life decisions based on a heightened emotional response. This is valuable because it is a well thought out piece of a design process - something that I feel like I can take away!" --February 2017
  • "Laszlo's points were made with enthusiasm, rigor and data. He didn't shy away from the fact the some of the problems are difficult." --January 2017
  • "AWESOME TOPIC AND ELEGANT SPEAKER, well done!!" --January 2017
  • "It's rare for companies to be really good at learning from that failure and being diligent in discussing it. Hearing that part of the talk was really valuable to me. I'll try to make a conscious effort to learn from failure." --November 2016
  • "The concept of reframing failure so others can learn and de-personalizing the sense of responsibility we feel was helpful." --November 2016
  • "Before Harlo's talk, I also hadn't thought much about the role of freelance journalists and the complexities of protecting people and data who don't necessarily have the shelter of large news organizations. I think there are some implications for Mozilla community there." --October 2016
  • "Genevieve showed us how designing data-rich experiences for humans often ignores important nuances and dualities that are present in life." --September 2016
  • "There are human choices built in to the design of our technology systems, and Genevieve provided some examples of this (e.g. turning off mail servers) that I will use." --September 2016
  • "The opportunity to reflect on the unchanging constants of human behaviour and contrast them with the technology-driven product decisions we often make was illuminating." --September 2016
  • "When building the next technologies of services, data sets, etc we need to ask ourselves if it plays into what is meaningful to the human race of family/friends, secrets/lies, community. Or we need to solve the challenges that have plagued us, time/reputation/forgetfulness. This is a great basis for Mozilla to start from when "prototyping the future." --September 2016
  • "The most important thing I learned from Tina was about framing the question, because I often assume that solving the 'function' is solving the problem, when it is not. Zoom out to fall in love with the problem." --July 2016
  • "Kevin was my favorite speaker yet! Thank you! It was very apropos to the direction we're going with Firefox being the 'personal browser.'" --May 2016
  • "Please keep it running as long as possible - it's an excellent forum!" --May 2016
  • "Kirsten was GREAT. I don't think the lessons folks learned as mid-level managers in explosively growing social companies apply to Mozilla. But I do think Wohlberg's lessons apply to us." --April 2016
  • "This series is really great. Focus on Product seems to be the theme and is a much necessary one for us now. Thanks for bringing them. It really helps." --March 2016
  • "April addressed some questions that were particularly apropos to a project I'm working on. It was interesting to see how Slack faced the same problem!" --February 2016
  • "Jocelyn's talk was brilliant. She presented a very insightful and productive way to reframe the conversation about release management. Just what we needed right now. Great choice!" --January 2016
  • "The speaker was very good, had thought-provoking ideas, yet delivered those ideas in a tasteful and relaxed way. I am likely to share and recommend my friends to go watch the video recording later." --December 2015
  • "This speaker was especially relevant and valuable because she provided tangible and actionable information in addition to being thought-provoking." -- October 2015
  • "Seeing speakers like this are really heartening to see at Mozilla. I think it will drive some really impactful change." -- September 2015
  • "Bringing in subject matter experts from the outside help us push our sometimes-bubble-like thinking. It's very easy to get caught up in our own 'laws' and constraints but hearing best practices such as Hitten will help us open our eyes a bit more. I'm excited because his presentation was spot on and hopefully expanded our horizons a bit." -- August 2015
  • "Really learned to think differently about a lot of things and also 'argument' differently when discussing new features or ideas. Always think about the user value, and how what you are working on will hinder or improve the user experience." -- July 2015
  • "This felt like the most interesting speaker so far, perhaps because it was directly relevant to our day-to-day work. He was also quite a good speaker, which helps. Getting people to talk about areas where we think we could do better or use a different perspective seems like a good general strategy." -- July 2015
  • "I love getting an outside perspective from an expert in an area. We spend a lot of time talking to ourselves so that outside perspective is awesome." -- May 2015
  • "The talk was engaging and the Paris employees loved the 'Brantina' idea and felt more a part of the conversation." -- May 2015


2015-2018 Program

Topic Areas

We host topics that support our strategy:

  • Grow Firefox & From Firefox e.g. product-related content such as user-centered design; user acquisition and retention; metrics & data.
  • Grow New Areas e.g. Internet of Things; Artificial Intelligence; virtual, augmented and mixed reality; blockchain
  • Grow Mozilla topics tied to our Issues Agenda including Internet Health and community initiatives
  • People Development & Support. Collaboration, communication and all the human stuffs.

Speaker Criteria

We prefer speakers who:

  • Have practical hands-on experience in their area of expertise (vs. just academic or consulting)
  • Have significant experience public speaking and/or teaching, as well as in their domain of expertise
  • Are willing to customize their material to Mozilla’s specific needs
  • Motivate audiences to both learn and act (as distinguished from purely inspirational “TED”-like talks)
  • Encompass diverse and underrepresented backgrounds, perspectives and geographies
  • Are recommended by other Mozillians
  • Do not promote a commercial or personal agenda

The speaker(s) share live from a Mozilla office and are publicly streamed to Mozilla's other offices via Air Mozilla and archived for subsequent viewing. We encourage speakers to allot at least 15-20 minutes for Q&A. Typical in-person attendance at each office is 20-30; additionally roughly 100-200 other attendees tune in live remotely. Follow-on views are available to our thousands of community members and the public.

Objectives

We seek outside speakers to:

  • Expose Mozilla staff to outside ideas, practices and technologies
  • Facilitate learning, skill-building and professional development
  • Connect Mozilla to outside influencers

See Also

Retrieved from "https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Speaker_Series&oldid=1230225"