All Hands/Berlin2020/Demos

Overview

On Wednesday, January 29, 2019 from 16:00 - 18:00 (4pm - 6pm) we'll host 35 demos at the Intercontinental. Here's who and what you can expect (we listed them alphabetically):

Demo Title (Contact) & Description

Browser Interop Visualisation (James Graham)

A healthy internet requires multiple browser engines that are able to work with all web sites and applications. When content is only accessible in some engines it causes compatibility issues leading users to switch to the browser which works with most sites, almost always the market leader. Left unchecked, this eventually leads to a web entirely controlled by a single vendor; one which is indistinguishable from a proprietary platform.

Even smaller levels of interop difference can lead to the web being hard to develop for; a recent MDN survey showed that 4/5 of the top frustrations for site authors were related to browser incompatibilities. These failings increase the chance that authors will develop sites that only support a subset of engines, or abandon the web for native app development.

This demo will focus on the work to visualise interoperability failures in the web platform. In particular it will showcase the data we get from the web-platform-tests project and how Gecko engineers can use this to find areas where we are incompatible with other implementations before they appear as site compatibility bugs.

Building User Agency via Personal AIs (Richard Whitt)

Advanced AI systems need not be the sole provenance of large, non-fiduciary plaforms motivated solely by their own financial or political gain. Each human being should have the ability to possess her own highly-individualized virtual intelligence, to provide both online and offline support. These computational agents would exist on one’s personal devices, managed for us by trustworthy mediators such as MoCo. This Personal AI, or "PAI," concept has the potential to evolve into an entirely new support system within the paradigm — the essential trusted digital agent.

The demo will show how the PAI interacts directly with the client’s digital “screens, scenes, and unseens” to, among other tasks:

(1) manage and protect their clients’ online and offline data flows, and other digital interactions with third parties; (2) ensure that online recommendation engines are serving relevant information, and not harmful content such as “deep fakes” or addictive videos; (3) challenge the efficacy of financial, healthcare, law enforcement, and other impactful algorithms for bias and other flaws that would harm its client; and (4) actively prevent environmental devices -- smart speakers, facial recognition cameras, biometric sensors -- from needlessly surveilling and extracting our data.

In all such cases, the demo will show how the PAI occupies a critical agential interface, between the ordinary human being it serves, and the vast range of Institutional AIs spanning our digital world. The various core PAI functions and dependencies, and the ways they mediate with the data extraction/influence lifecycle, also will be demonstrated.

Personal AIs are a natural fit for the Mozilla longer-term strategy, and a truly open Web. Simply put, the PAI can become the ultimate locus of human agency in the digital era. By developing and introducing PAIs to consumers, MoCo can become the leading provider of user agency online. Human beings then would be empowered to take greater control over their digital lives, with the PAI acting as the trusted virtual agent, and MoCo acting as the trusted institutional agent. Finally, a healthy Internet puts people first. The PAI can shift the current dominant platforms paradigm, from one where humans are the mere objects of data extraction and influence, to one where humans can become the empowered subjects and authors of their own digital experiences.

Campaigning for a Better Internet (Jessie Keating, Jon Lloyd)

The Mozilla Foundation advocacy team is where the Mozilla manifesto is put into action. We actively campaign for policies and products that make our internet a better place for all of us, sometimes facing some of the biggest and best resourced companies in the world. Recent campaigns have included calling for more transparency around political ads, insights into Youtube's recommendation engine, and for popular consumer products and services like Venmo to put user privacy first.

Common Voice (Megan Branson + Lindsay Saunders)

Common Voice is part of Mozilla's efforts to bridge the digital speech divide, through making voice recognition better and available for everyone (e.g. Mozilla strategy/vision). Voice recognition technologies bring a human dimension to our devices, but developers need an enormous amount of voice data to build them. Currently, most of that data is expensive and proprietary. Mozilla is working to make voice data freely and publicly available (e.g. Mozilla mission), and make sure the data represents the diversity of real people (e.g. Mozilla vision).

Fathom-ing User Tasks (Erik Rose)

In a collection of hands-on demos and animated mockups, see how a Fathom-powered Firefox improves web pages, massaging them to better serve the user. By inferring the meaning of page elements, Fathom lets us take our goal of user agency beyond matters of protocol and into the viewport.

Fenix! (Betty Fleming)

The new and enhanced Firefox for Android (aka Fenix) is launching in Q2 2020; all interested in mobile development, come see our focus on building a highly usable and performant product that's aligned with Mozilla's values of protecting user privacy and user choice.

Firefox Lite 2.0 (Wesly "One E" Huang)

Firefox Lite 2.0 is a one-stop browser platform providing beyond-browser experiences for Emerging Markets users. It supports the exploration of growth market opportunities.

Firefox Private Network VPN and Secure Proxy Demo (Chris More)

The Firefox Private Network VPN and Secure Proxy support Mozilla's goals for financial resilience. Come check 'em out!

Firefox Reality (Josh Matthews)

Firefox Reality aka "FxR" contributes to Mozilla's broader Resilience KPI to diversify our products and revenue.

Firefox Reality AR (Josh Matthews)

Bringing Firefox's values to augmented reality-based platforms to ensure the web remains open on these new platforms.

Firefox Voice (Jofish Kaye)

Leaning into privacy-first voice experiences.

Firefox's Fantastic Developer Tools (Harald Kirschner)

DevTools help Firefox's engineers and support developers to build a web that works excellent for Firefox's users.

GLAM! (Rob Miller)

GLAM is the new "Glean Aggregated Metrics dashboard", a major new tool for Firefox (and Fenix, and Lockwise, and ...) product managers and engineers to use to understand performance and to see how telemetry probes are behaving for various user populations.

Glean SDK: Telemetry for Humans (Alessio Placitelli)

The Glean SDK is the future of the telemetry collection at Mozilla: it was build to support Fenix, and it recently expanded to support platforms other than Android (iOS, Python, Rust). The cross-platform Glean SDK is the future: our 2020 will be about bringing Firefox on Glean, boosting data as a service and reducing the cost and frustration of adding new telemetry instrumentation.

Hello, WebXR (Fernando Serrano García + Diego Fernandez Goberna)

This is a WebXR experience to introduce people to the medium and let them try different activities and environments.

How Lockwise and Monitor Work Across Platforms to Keep you Safe (Sandy Sage)

Lockwise and Monitor support the Reach KPI as well as the Privacy and Security features. We are driving towards a cross-platform, personal data protection suite that integrates with desktop to encourage good security hygiene and expanded use of Mozilla products.

Jira-Bugzilla Integration (Marina Milshtein)

Jira-Bugzilla integration that allows developers to collaborate on issue while using two different bug tracking systems. Jira tickets are created based on Bugzilla information, and afterwards users can sync both systems in real-time, or as a bulk operation.

Mozilla & Data Stewardship: Why, How, and You! (Alicia Gray)

At Mozilla, like at many other organizations, we rely on data to make product decisions. But here, unlike many other organizations, we balance our goal of collecting useful, high-quality data with our goal to give users meaningful choice and control over their own data. The Firefox data collection program was created to ensure we achieve both goals whenever we make a change to how we collect data in our products. This program supports product needs and provides transparency for our users, directly driven by our data privacy principles and making us a more trusted user agent.

Mozilla Accessibility: Making the internet "accessible to all" (James Teh)

We are demoing features which make Firefox and the web delightfully accessible to people with disabilities and thus more inclusive of all. Accessibility and inclusion are fundamental values enshrined in the Mozilla Manifesto, specifically in our commitment "to an internet that includes all the peoples of the earth - where a person's demographic characteristics do not determine their online access, opportunities, or quality of experience."

Mozilla Growth & Usage Dashboard aka "GUD" (Hamilton Ulmer, Jeff Klukas and Jesse McCrosky)

Provides a standardized and accessible view supporting data democratization around our reach and relationship KPIs. Empowers everyone to answer metric questions.

Mozilla WebThings (David Bryant + Michael Stegeman)

IoT - everyone talks about security, but privacy and interoperability are rarely mentioned. We protect users with an open source implementation that does all three!

Performance Tools: Optimize memory usage and performance with the Firefox Profiler (Julien Wajsberg)

We want to show the tooling we develop so that mozillians know how to optimize their app. This is good because we want all our products and websites to work better and faster and consume less energy.

"*Privacy Not Included" Buyer’s Guide and Raffle (Jen Caltrider, Solana Larsen)

The *Privacy Not Included buyers guide and special edition Internet Health Report on “Rethinking the Smart Home” encourages consumers and companies to adopt higher standards for privacy and security. We’ll highlight MoCo/MoFo collaborations on these projects, and include other calls to action or ways to get involved in future editions.

Privacy-Preserving Sponsored Content (Mathijs Miermans and Sumita Sami)

We show how we deliver targeted sponsored content to the Firefox New Tab, while preserving the privacy of our users and being transparent about our work.

Puppetize Firefox - Firefoxify Puppeteer (Henrik Skupin)

The internet is not healthy if popular web automation or testing tools only work in Chrome. Until recently, that was the case with Puppeteer, a node.js library developed by Google on top of the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP).

The Web Compatibility team has implemented a subset of CDP in Firefox, and we're working with Google toward cross-browser support in Puppeteer. At the same time, this work is the first step toward bidirectional communication in the WebDriver standard for browser remote control: someday it will be easy to write event-driven browser automation that works across all browsers.

Our demo will showcase the current state of the project, how it relates to WebDriver, and how Puppeteer can currently be used with Firefox, e.g. by running the Gutenberg editor tests for Wordpress.

RecIt Ralph: Content Recommendations from Pocket (Ian Wesley-Smith)

Our work directly deals with exploring high quality content and helping users find content that is worth their time, not just the content advertisers want them to see. We think this aligns with Mozilla's mission of shaping an internet that puts people first. You can see an early demo of our work at http://recit.readitlater.com

Skyline Marketing (Maciej Pluta)

See how Mozilla showed up in the North America & EU markets, and what we've learned from this campaign.

Social Mixed Reality with Hubs & Spoke (Robert Long)

Hubs is a project that supports Mozilla's mission in making the internet accessible and open - it provides a safe, private way for people to connect from around the world in shared 3D spaces to exchange conversation, ideals, and ideas. It is part of the resilience KPI, in exploring product opportunities that reach new markets and allow us to develop relationships with new audiences.

Subscription Platform (Stephen Hood)

The Subscription Platform is a critical component of Mozilla's push to develop new business models and Revenue opportunities, and to expand our Relationships with customers.

Taskcluster: Open Source CI for Developers and Community (Chris Cooper)

There have been several acquisitions in the CI space over the past two years, and, more recently, a few high-profile CI providers have made questionable policy decisions. Consolidation leaves CI customers with fewer, less-appealing choices. An open source CI option from Mozilla could be well positioned to gain traction.

The Machine Learning Menagerie (Kelly Davis)

These demos that are part of The Machine Learning Menagerie will consist of machine learning based speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and translation engines integrated into current products (Firefox, Firefox Reality, WebThings) and into future products such as our Voice Technology Stack.

These demos address our Mission directly by, for example, providing internet access through voice in languages otherwise not supported. They also enable our Vision by, for example, providing the open source tools that give developers the power to create their own safe, voice-based tools independent of FAAMG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google). Our True North is also addressed as, for example, the Voice Technology Stack will allow for Mozilla, and others, to create voice based trusted personal agents, independent of the monopoly on such agents imposed by FAAMG. The Mozilla Strategy is also tied to these demos. The integration of voice and translation into Firefox buoys the agency Firefox provides online. Similarly, the Voice Technology Stack will create an entirely new type of agency that Mozilla has never explored.

In addition, each demo is tied directly to one, or more, KPI for 2020.

Tools for Code Review and Development (Marco Castelluccio)

We will show Firefox developers new tools we are working on, and will deploy soon, to make Firefox development quicker and more reliable, and we will explain them how they can make the best use of the current and future tools. This increases our Resilience, allowing us to deliver features faster and with fewer bugs (one of the best ways to become the leading provider of user agency ;)). Also, there are opportunities for Relationships, as some of these tools are being developed partly in collaboration with other companies (Ubisoft).