For page engagements just over 1% of those viewers clicked on the “Get Involved” button, taking them to the Mozilla Activate page.

We wanted to change that.

We began this redesign project with a discovery phase. As a result of the strict environment the page would live in, all of our assumption testing had to be carried out through upfront discovery research as opposed to evaluative A/B testing post design.

We started to collate previous findings and analysis, drawing conclusions from past efforts like the Contribute Survey Analysis carried out in 2019.

With a broad idea of what visitors are looking for we looked internally with stakeholder interviews. A series of one to one remote meetings with Mozilla community staff were scheduled to uncover their hopes for a redesign and what they felt the current offering lacked. From this, two themes emerged:

• A need to describe what the community and contribution look like.
• Illustrating the breadth of volunteer opportunities.

The next exercise was to address the copy of the page. Using both analytics data and stakeholder feedback a series of “content blocks” were arranged to define what content we needed and the hierarchy it belonged in. A copywriter and marketing team member would review an initial draft however this was sufficient to populate wireframes for testing purposes.

Three wireframe layouts were produced, each putting slightly more emphasis on a different element of the page. One focused on telling a story, another focused on providing the widest volunteer entry points and the final layout was tasked with being direct and minimal.

The Mozilla All Hands Event in Berlin was the perfect opportunity to gather some feedback from existing contributors. Both volunteers and staff were asked upfront questions about their expectations of a volunteer page before being presented with large printouts of each wireframe for review.

The community feedback was overwhelming with an emerging trend. “Story” was appreciated, however it was sufficient to know it was there “somewhere”. Conversely, volunteer opportunities needed to be clear and relatively upfront.

There was one additional research method we could utilise before casting some of our findings into design, remote unmoderated usability testing. With the ability to target participants with existing volunteer experience, we presented three wireframes to separate groups, again asking upfront questions on their expectations before revealing each design.

In three key ways the findings echoed the feedback of the All Hands interviews.

1. An appreciation for a little upfront story, but not too much.
2. An explicit, straight-talking tone was a clear preference.
3. Volunteer opportunities should not be buried within the page.

Some additional findings revealed:

• Participants liked to see the opportunities categorised as either Technical or Non Technical.
• Participants were keen to understand the time and travel investment of each opportunity.

The feedback of the following research methods gave the team a shared vision of the final product before it had been designed:

• Stakeholder interviews
• User interviews
• Guerilla usability testing
• Unmoderated remote usability testing

Merging the copy approved content with Mozilla brand guidelines, a selection of designs were delivered and shared with the team for asynchronous feedback. After a final group call and some final tweaks we had our new Contribute page design ready for development.

The page design pays various tributes to the Mozilla Community Portal, fitting, as both projects wish to serve Mozilla’s new and existing volunteer communities.

We will be monitoring the success of the page over time to determine the impact of the research-lead redesign. You can visit the new Contribute page on the Mozilla website, maybe you’ll discover something new about Mozilla when you get there!

Redesigning Mozilla’s Contribute Page: A UX Overview was originally published in Mozilla Open Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Mozilla, we believe in the power of our communities.

Contributors translate our products, answer support questions and make thousands of code contributions a year. Mozilla communities are a critical resource for making the internet a more open, diverse and accessible resource for all.

Over the last few years, we’ve started to look at how these contributors begin with Mozilla. How does someone initially get involved as a volunteer? How do they connect to our projects? Are they contributing to the projects that are ready and able to effectively appreciate their contributions?

Early incremental improvements

The start of the contributor journey has long been a challenge for Mozilla. Since 2015, Open Innovation has been thinking about how the Contribute page could be improved. Teams who were represented on the previous iteration of the page were passionate about what the page represented. They were overwhelmed, however, by the volume of people who wanted to contribute.

In 2016, we launched an experiment that fundamentally changed the purpose of the page. Visitors would be shown a variety of simple or challenging tasks they could participate in. All of the tasks were self-contained (tweet, donate, watch a video) and none of them provided pathways for participation with any Mozilla teams or projects.

Engagement on the page increased as the options for participation became simpler and more accessible. Staff teams were no longer overwhelmed by a deluge of requests from people discovering their projects from the site. But the Contribute page remained imperfect. It felt disconnected from our mission. We were still not being intentional about being open. We weren’t designing for the greatest impact or a rewarding experience.

The goal for the newest version of the page was that it would truly embody the principles of Open by Design.

Everything new: from on boarding to project curation

“Being Open by Design” for us means “developing an understanding of how our products and technologies deliver value within an ecosystem. It means intentionally designing how we work with external collaborators and contributors to optimize that value.”

Often enough “openness by default” reflects an absence of strategic intent. Acting without clarity about why you’re doing something, or what the intended outcomes are, means your commitment to openness is likely to diminish over time. This is what we were seeing in the previous versions of the Contribute page.

The new version of the Contribute page that launched this week is based on extensive research into what page visitors wanted. It builds on the previous experiment with feedback gathered through interviews with users, staff and community members.

“There’s a mission here, a manifesto, so I’d be pretty much interested in a better way of getting involved with Mozilla. As a front end developer this is something I strongly believe in, an open and accessible web.” (usertesting.com quote)

The new page doesn’t send people directly to every Mozilla project. Instead it drives people through highly curated opportunities that are ready for high-volume participation like Support, to pages that thoughtfully onboard new contributors such as Localization, and Coding.

By applying the principles of open by design to the Contribute page we’re taking a more intentional approach to our communities. We hope that this page will encourage new visitors to make their first contribution to Mozilla. We hope that existing Mozillians will feel confident directing friends and family who are interested in learning more about contribution to this page.

And we hope this page helps all of our communities find the information they need to learn, explore, and stay involved with Mozilla.

Relaunching Mozilla’s Contribute Page: Applying Open By Design for a Better Volunteer Experience was originally published in Mozilla Open Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Power of the Voice

Voice-enabled products are in rapid ascent in both consumer and enterprise markets. The expectations are that in the near future voice interaction will become a key interface for people’s internet-connected lives.

Unfortunately, the current voice product market is heavily dominated by a few giant tech companies. This is unhealthy as it stifles the competition and prevents entry of smaller companies with new and innovative products. Mozilla wants to change that. We want to help opening up the ecosystem. So far there have been two major components in Mozilla’s open source voice tech efforts outside the Firefox browser:

(1) To solve for the lack of available training data for machine-learning algorithms that can power new voice-enabled applications, we launched the Common Voice project. The current release already represents the largest public domain transcribed voice dataset, with more than 2,400 hours of voice data and 28 languages represented.

(2) In addition to the data collection, Mozilla’s Machine Learning Group has applied sophisticated machine learning techniques and a variety of innovations to build an open-source speech-to-text engine that approaches human accuracy, as well as a text-to-speech engine. Together with the growing Common Voice dataset Mozilla believes this technology can and will enable a wave of innovative products and services, and that it should be available to everyone.

And this is exactly where this new “Mozilla Voice Challenge” fits in: Its objective is to better define the voice technology space by creating a “stack” of open source technologies to support the development of new voice-enabled products.

Stacking the Odds

For the purpose of this competition, we define voice-enabled technologies as technologies that use voice as an interface, allowing people to interact with various connected devices through verbal means — both when speaking and listening.

We envision that some elements of this stack would be the following technologies:

• Speech-to-text (STT)
• Text-to-speech (TSS)
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Voice-signal processing
• Keyword spotting
• Keyword alignment
• Intent parsing
• Language parsing: stemming, entity recognition, dialog management, and summation.

We want to improve this list by adding more relevant technologies and also identify any “gaps” in the stack where quality open source projects are not available (see the Challenge description for more details). We’ll then place the updated list in a public repository for open access — and to achieve this, all proposed technologies in the stack need to be open source licensed.

How to Participate

The competition was posted to the HeroX platform. The competition will run until August 20, 2019 and the submitted proposals will be evaluated by the members of Mozilla’s Voice team. Up to $6,000 in prizes will be awarded to the best proposals.

The challenge is open to everyone (except for Mozilla employees and their families), and we especially encourage members of Mozilla’s Common Voice community to take part in it.

Mozilla Voice Challenge: Defining The Voice Technology Space was originally published in Mozilla Open Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Problems Plaguing the Internet of Today

Imagine the internet that is a place where meaningful and credible content is easily found. A place where everyone feels safe, empowered, and accurately informed.

Is this the internet we’re having today? Unfortunately, not. Today’s internet is unsavory mix of intrusive advertising, misinformation, and toxic social media full of offensive language, harassment, and harmful content. The problems plaguing the web are magnified by the economy that benefits from engagement of the most extreme and attention-grabbing material. Instead of improving a civil, informed online discourse, the internet of today is degrading it.

Solutions to the internet problems exist. Interestingly enough, they are owned by the large tech companies that allowed the problems grow and fester. However, the tech giants are reluctant to implement these solutions because doing so may negatively affect their bottom lines.

Mozilla is a recognized leader in the field of online Privacy & Security. Our commitment to the open and human internet anchored in the Mozilla Manifesto is solidified by our unwavering desire to put people before profits. This commitment was on display again recently with Mozilla’s launch of Enhanced Tracking Protection that blocks third-party tracking cookies by default.

Removing “Bad” Content or Promoting a Quality One?

Ensuring safe internet browsing is only part of Mozilla’s efforts to protect its users; equally important is fighting online harassment. Two general approaches can be considered here. The first is to design online tools to remove or filter “bad” content. However, serious doubts have been expressed whether this approach is technically feasible at all. Besides, this approach is also threatening free expression and the open internet ecosystem.

Instead of asking how we can filter hateful and misleading content, we’re asking: How can browser technology amplify credible and quality content and conversations?

As part of this new paradigm, we’ve launched a crowdsourcing challenge to identify approaches to using Firefox extensions or other browser technology solutions to find and promote credible sources of information online. (For a primer to technological approaches to access credibility online, see this report.)

How to Participate

The challenge was posted to the MindSumo platform, the world’s largest crowdsourcing community of Millennial and GenZ solvers. The competition will run until July 7 and the submitted proposals will be evaluated by the members of Mozilla’s Privacy & Security and Product Management teams. Up to $1,600 in prizes will be awarded to the best proposals.

The challenge is open to everyone (except for Mozilla employees and their families), and we especially encourage members of Mozilla’s communities to take part in it.

A Firefox browser extension promoting quality online content? was originally published in Mozilla Open Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From the onset, our vision for Common Voice has been to build the world’s most diverse voice dataset, optimized for building voice technologies. We also made a promise of openness: we would make the high quality, transcribed voice data that was collected publicly available to startups, researchers, and anyone interested in voice-enabled technologies.

Today, we’re excited to share our first multi-language dataset with 18 languages represented, including English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese (Traditional), but also for example Welsh and Kabyle. Altogether, the new dataset includes approximately 1,400 hours of voice clips from more than 42,000 people.

With this release, the continuously growing Common Voice dataset is now the largest ever of its kind, with tens of thousands of people contributing their voices and original written sentences to the public domain (CC0). Moving forward, the full dataset will be available for download on the Common Voice site.

Data Qualities

The Common Voice dataset is unique not only in its size and licence model but also in its diversity, representing a global community of voice contributors. Contributors can opt-in to provide metadata like their age, sex, and accent so that their voice clips are tagged with information useful in training speech engines.

This is a different approach than for other publicly available datasets, which are either hand-crafted to be diverse (i.e. equal number of men and women) or the corpus is as diverse as the “found” data (e.g. the TEDLIUM corpus from TED talks is ~3x men to women).

More Common Voices: from 3 to 22 languages in 8 months

Since we enabled multi-language support in June 2018, Common Voice has grown to be more global and more inclusive. This has surpassed our expectations: Over the last eight months, communities have enthusiastically rallied around the project, launching data collection efforts in 22 languages with an incredible 70 more in progress on the Common Voice site.

As a community-driven project, people around the world who care about having a voice dataset in their language have been responsible for each new launch — some are passionate volunteers, some are doing this as part of their day jobs as linguists or technologists. Each of these efforts require translating the website to allow contributions and adding sentences to be read.

Our latest additions include Dutch, Hakha-Chin, Esperanto, Farsi, Basque, and Spanish. In some cases, a new language launch on Common Voice is the beginning of that language’s internet presence. These community efforts are proof that all languages — not just ones that can generate high revenue for technology companies — are worthy of representation.

We’ll continue working with these communities to ensure their voices are represented and even help make voice technology for themselves. In this spirit, we recently joined forces with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and co-hosted an ideation hackathon in Kigali to create a speech corpus for Kinyarwanda, laying the foundation for local technologists in Rwanda to develop open source voice technologies in their own language.

Improvements in the contribution experience, including optional profiles

The Common Voice Website is one of our main vehicles for building voice data sets that are useful for voice-interaction technology. The way it looks today is the result of an ongoing process of iteration. We listened to community feedback about the pain points of contributing while also conducting usability research to make contribution easier, more engaging, and fun.

People who contribute not only see progress per language in recording and validation, but also have improved prompts that vary from clip to clip; new functionality to review, re-record, and skip clips as an integrated part of the experience; the ability to move quickly between speak and listen; as well as a function to opt-out of speaking for a session.

We also added the option to create a saved profile, which allows contributors to keep track of their progress and metrics across multiple languages. Providing some optional demographic profile information also improves the audio data used in training speech recognition accuracy.

Empower decentralized product innovation: a marathon rather than a sprint

Mozilla aims to contribute to a more diverse and innovative voice technology ecosystem. Our goal is to both release voice-enabled products ourselves, while also supporting researchers and smaller players. Providing data through Common Voice is one part of this, as are the open source Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech engines and trained models through project DeepSpeech, driven by our Machine Learning Group.

We know this will take time, and we believe releasing early and working in the open can attract the involvement and feedback of technologists, organisations, and companies that will make these projects more relevant and robust. The current reality for both projects is that they are still in their research phase, with DeepSpeech making strong progress toward productization.

To date, with data from Common Voice and other sources, DeepSpeech is technically capable to convert speech to text with human accuracy and “live”, i.e. in realtime as the audio is being streamed. This allows transcription of lectures, phone conversations, television programs, radio shows, and and other live streams all as they are happening.

The DeepSpeech engine is already being used by a variety of non-Mozilla projects: For example in Mycroft, an open source voice based assistant; in Leon, an open-source personal assistant; in FusionPBX, a telephone switching system installed at and serving a private organization to transcribe phone messages. In the future Deep Speech will target smaller platform devices, such as smartphones and in-car systems, unlocking product innovation in and outside of Mozilla.

For Common Voice, our focus in 2018 was to build out the concept, make it a tool for any language community to use, optimise the website, and build a robust backend (for example, the accounts system). Over the coming months we will focus efforts on experimenting with different approaches to increase the quantity and quality of data we are able to collect, both through community efforts as well as new partnerships.

Our overall aim remains: Providing more and better data to everyone in the world who seeks to build and use voice technology. Because competition and openness are healthy for innovation. Because smaller languages are an issue of access and equity. Because privacy and control matters, especially over your voice.

Sharing our Common Voices was originally published in Mozilla Open Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Developers, researchers and startups around the globe working on voice-recognition technology face one problem alike: A lack of freely available voice data in their respective language to train AI-powered Speech-to-Text engines.

Although machine-learning algorithms like Mozilla’s Deep Speech are in the public domain, training data is limited. Most of the voice data used by large corporations is not available to the majority of people, expensive to obtain or simply non-existent for languages not globally spread. The innovative potential of this technology is widely untapped. In providing open datasets, we aim to take away the onerous tasks of collecting and annotating data, which eventually reduces one of the main barriers to voice-based technologies and makes front-runner innovations accessible to more entrepreneurs. This is one of the major drivers behind our project Common Voice.

Common Voice is our crowdsourcing initiative and platform to collect and verify voice data and to make it publicly available. But to get more people involved from around the world and to speed up the process of getting to data sets large enough for training purposes, we rely on partners — like-minded commercial and non-commercial organizations with an interest to make technology available and useful to all.

Complementary expertise and shared innovation goals

In GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) we are fortunate to have found an ally who, like us, believes that having access to voice data opens up a space for an infinite number of new applications. Voice recognition is well suited to reach people living in oral cultures and those who do not master a widespread language such as English or French. With voice interaction available in their own language we may provide millions of people access to information and ultimately make technology more inclusive.

When we learned about GIZ’s “Team V” which brings together digital enthusiasts from GIZ and Mainlevel Consulting to explore voice interaction and mechanisms for collecting voice data in local languages — an effort supported by GIZ’s internal innovation fund — the opportunity to leverage complementary strengths became just too obvious.

Eventually we started working on a concrete collaboration that would combine Mozilla’s expertise in voice-enabled technology and data collection with GIZ’s immense regional experience and reach working with local organizations, public authorities and private businesses across various sectors. This resulted in an initial hackathon in Kigali, Rwanda, with the goal of unleashing the participants creativity to unlock novel means of collecting speech corpora for Kinyarwanda, a language spoken by at least 12 million people in Rwanda and surrounding regions.

Sustainable technology development needs local solutions

The hackathon took place on 12–13 February at kLab, a local innovation hub supported by the Rwandan government. 40 teams had applied with their novel incentive mechanisms for voice data collection, proving that AI and machine learning are of great interest to the Rwandan tech community. We invited 5 teams with the most promising approaches that took into account local opportunities not foreseen by the Common Voice team.

The event began with a rousing call to action for the participants by Antoine Sebera, Chief Government Innovation Officer of the Rwanda Information Society Association, a governmental agency responsible for putting Rwanda’s ambitious digital strategy into practice. GIZ then outlined the goals and evaluation criteria* of the hackathon, which was critical in setting the direction of the entire process. (*The developed solutions were evaluated against the following criteria: user centricity, incentive mechanism, feasibility, ease-of-use, potential to scale and sustainability.)

Kelly Davis, Head of Mozilla’s Machine Learning Group followed giving an overview of the design and motivations behind Deep Speech and Common Voice, that could quickly be adapted to Kinyarwanda.During the two-day event, the selected teams refined their initial ideas and took them to the street, fine-tuning them through interviews with potential contributors and partners. By visiting universities, language institutions, and even the city’s public transit providers (really!) they put their solutions to the test.

Winner of the hackathon was an idea uniquely Rwandese: With Umuganda 2.0 the team updated the concept of “Umuganda”, a regular national community work day taking place every last Saturday of the month, to the digital age. Building on the Common Voice website, the participants would collect voice data during monthly Umuganda sessions at universities, tech hubs or community spaces. The idea also taps into the language pride of Rwandans. User research led by GIZ with students, help workers and young Rwandan working on language or technology has shown that speaking and preserving Kinyarwanda in a digital context is seen as very important and a great motivation to contribute to the collection of voice data.

For jury members Olaf Seidel, Head of the GIZ project “Digital Solutions for Sustainable Development” in Rwanda, George Roter, Director Mozilla Open Innovation Programs, Kelly Davis, and Gilles Richard Mulihano, Chief Innovation Officer at the local software developer ComzAfrica, the idea also resonated because of its easy scalability throughout Rwanda. Moreover, it could be adapted to other projects and regions relying on collective efforts to build common infrastructures of the digital world — something GIZ is keenly interested in. Umuganda 2.0 shows that we need culturally appropriate solutions to lower barriers to make front-runner innovations accessible to more entrepreneurs.

Next steps

GIZ and the winning team are now working towards a first real-life test at a local university during next month’s Umuganda on March 30. It is the aim of this session to test if the spirit of Umuganda and the collection of voice data really go well together, what motivates people to take part and how we can make voice data collection during the community event fun and interesting. And last but not least, how many hours of voice data can be collected during such an event to determine if the outcome justifies the means.

GIZ, with its deep connections to local communities in numerous countries, was a perfect partner for Mozilla in this endeavor, and we hope to — in fact look forward to — repeat this success elsewhere. In a long-term vision, Mozilla and GIZ aim to continue this promising cooperation building on our shared visions and objectives for a positive digital future. Allowing access to a wide range of services no matter which language you speak, is no doubt a powerful first step.

Alex Klepel, Kelly Davis (Mozilla) and Lea Gimpel (GIZ)

Sustainable tech development needs local solutions: Voice tech ideation in Kigali was originally published in Mozilla Open Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Be Open to Change

At the start of any project our Open Innovation team concepts with the intention that things will change. Whether it be wireframe prototypes or coded experiments, iteration is inevitable. First ideas are often far from perfect… it’s with help from new or returning contributors and collaborating project teams that we’re able to refine initial ideas more readily and efficiently. How? Through feedback loops designed with tools such as Discourse, GitHub, contact forms, on-site surveys and remote testing. Our overall goal being: Release assumptions early and learn from those engaging with the concept. In this way we set our experiences up for incremental, data influenced iteration.

To continue with our example of Common Voice, we see that this approach was applied in moving from paper prototype to first production prototype. The learnings and feedback from the design sprint exercises helped us realize the need for storytelling and a human interaction experience that would resonate with, well, humans. To achieve this we set out over a 6 week phase to create the experience via wireframes, basic UI design and code implementation. With the help of our community members we were gratefully able to QA the experience as we released it.

Iterate Consistently and Incrementally

With a working prototype out in the wild our team sets their focus on observing and gathering info about performance and usability. In addition to 250+ technical contributors that file issues with feature requests and bug fixes, for Common Voice, our team made time to evaluate the prototype from a usability perspective.

About three months in we performed a UX assessment reviewing initial prototype designs against what actually made it to production code. Comparing this against feature requests from product stakeholders and contributors, our experience design goal was to understand changes most needed to improve usability and engagement across the site.

This assessment information, combined with usability testing, supported decisions for improvements such as:

1. Adding keyboard shortcuts to the contribution experience
2. Improving prompts and progress counters when recording and listening to sentences
3. Site navigation layout from sidebar to top header
4. Optimization for responsiveness across viewports
5. Providing clear calls to action for contribution on the homepage

Workshop New Questions

Completing the incremental work allows us to find our way to new questions and needs as a product or service evolves. Along with the feature requests and smaller production needs required of a live prototype, there are larger project strategy queries that can come to light. These are the types of queries you can only learn from experimenting.

Releasing our first dataset for Common Voice was the result of one such experiment. An achievement in itself, it also proved that our concept had merit. The prototype was working! Despite this, in equal measure it also highlighted quality gaps in our data: it could be more spontaneous, such as two humans naturally conversing would allow. It also reaffirmed something we already knew: our data could be far more diverse. Meaning more gender, accent, dialect and overall language diversity. There is an increasing need for a large, publicly open multi-language voice dataset. This has been clear from the start of this project. True to our desire to think and act prototypically we had to choose a single language to focus resources and first prove out the concept. With the successful release of the first dataset we were ready to take on some new questions and keep iterating:

1. How might we enable a multi-language experience?
2. How might we increase the quantity and quality of our contributions?

Having already gained integral insights for Common Voice via an experience workshop, we planned another. In January of 2018 we brought together commercial and academic partners to join Mozilla team members, including various expert influencers, to help brainstorm and ideate potential solutions for these questions. The common interest of the attendees? Seeing this unique project succeed. Many had come up against these types of questions in different contexts across their work and were keen to ideate on ways to improve the site.

Workshopping the first question meant determining requirements (what does success look like) and mapping experience journeys to achieve those requirements (see the above image). What resulted was this realization: we have big, multi-feature dreams for the overall Common Voice multi-language experience. To make those dreams a reality we first focused on what was most needed first, providing people a way to contribute in their desired language(s). Other features, like building dedicated language pages and creating a community dashboard, are built into our roadmap. This feature prioritization enabled us to deliver a multi-language experience in May of this year. Reaching this milestone has made the second Common Voice dataset release — which will be our first multi-language dataset release — achievable by the end of 2018.

In the area of increasing quantity and quality of contributions, the workshop introduced concepts for improving spontaneous speech capture through potential, future experiments. Some examples include enabling spontaneous, conversational style recording sessions on the website; integrations with existing wearables for set session lengths; and a roaming event pop-up with recording booths. This ideation session even lingered in our minds well past the workshop and has prompted thoughts around an opt-in style recording space in collaboration with Hubs, a virtual spaces experiment by Mozilla’s Mixed Reality team.

For the current online experience we solidified user journeys that enabled immediate impact of the website and began laying foundation that would enable more robust future experiments. Some of these, such as the new contribution experience and homepage, we’ve already seen land in production as iterations of the Common Voice MVP prototype. Other feature enhancements, like a new profile login experience — which enables contributors to save their progress across multiple languages and view that progress via a new dashboard — have launched this week and are undergoing collaborative QA with our communities. The goal of these features being to improve the human experience while increasing the quality and quantity of voice contributions.

With Common Voice we see through incremental, open iteration that our team has been able to intentionally grow from the early prototype. In doing so we are actively working to create more avenues for contribution regardless of language, device or location. Our next post will take a deeper look at how we’re empowering contributions of all sizes, in Common Voice and elsewhere, for Open Innovation.

Prototyping with Intention was originally published in Mozilla Open Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What’s Hubs by Mozilla?

Mozilla’s mission is to make the Internet a global public resource, open and accessible to all, including innovators, content creators, and builders on the web. VR is changing the very future of web interaction, so advancing it is crucial to Mozilla’s mission. That was the initial idea behind Hubs by Mozilla, a VR interaction platform launched in April 2018 that lets you meet and talk to your friends, colleagues, partners, and customers in a shared 360-environment using just a browser, on any device from head-mounted displays like HTC Vive to 2D devices like laptops and mobile phones.

Since then, the Mozilla VR team has kept integrating new and exciting features to the Hubs experience: the ability bring videos, images, documents, and even 3D models into Hubs by simply pasting a link. In early October, two more useful features were added: drawing and photo uploads.

A challenge for Sketchfab’s content-creating community

The work to make the Hubs more comfortable to its denizens has only begun, and to spur creativity in this new area of Mozilla’s Mixed Reality program, Mozilla is partnering (again) with Sketchfab, a one-million-strong community of creators of 3D content, for a new VR Design Challenge: Mozilla Hubs Clubhouse.

We chose “Clubhouse” as the competition theme, because we want you to imagine and build the places you like to hang out and meet with your pals, family or colleagues. This can be any VR space from a treehouse to a luxury penthouse suite, a hobbit hole, the garage you used to jam back in the days or a super-secret gathering space at the bottom of the ocean. But it doesn’t stop with just the rooms. We challenge you to design all the props to be placed in these: decorations on the wall, furniture, artwork, machinery, or even objects that users could move around, such as coffee cups, and food bins. You totally own the place!

How to participate

The competition will run until Tuesday, November 27th (23:59 New York time — EDT), and the submitted assets will be evaluated by a four-judge panel composed of the members of Mozilla Hub and Sketchfab Community teams. Prizes will include Amazon Gift Cards, Oculus Go headsets, and Sketchfab PRO.

In order to participate in the competition you should have a Sketchfab account. If you don’t already have a Sketchfab account, you can sign up for free here.

Dreaming of hosting a virtual holiday party with your buddies in your own Clubhouse? Thinking of having a poster of your favorite band on the wall? An entire aquarium wall? Create them!

Virtual meeting rooms don’t have to be boring. We challenge you to design better ones! was originally published in Mozilla Open Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mozilla is committed to the next wave of creativity in the open Web, in which people can access, create and share immersive VR and AR experiences across platforms and devices. What it takes though is an enthusiastic, skilled and growing community of creators, artists, and also businesses forming a healthy ecosystem, as well as tool support for web developers who build content for it. To overcome a fragmented environment and to allow for broad adoption, we need the leading content format to be open, and frameworks and toolsets to be efficient and interoperable. Ensuring that tools for creation, modification and viewing are open to the entire community and that there aren’t gatekeepers to creativity is one of the main working areas for Mozilla’s Mixed Reality (WebXR) Team. Building on its “Open by Design” strategy Open Innovation partnered with that team around Lars Bergstrom to find neat, yet impactful ways to stimulate external collaboration, co-development and co-funding of technology.

In this case: together with the Khronos Group and developers of existing open source Blender tools, we are providing a complete GL Transmission Format (glTF) import AND export add-on for Blender, offering a powerful and free round-trip workflow for WebXR creators. This effort builds on the work of existing open source tools, and adds support for the newest Blender and glTF features. The tool itself along with further technical details will be available in the coming weeks. The blueprint for the collaboration model that allowed us to get there already exists. This article will explain how we got there, how this model works, and why it can accelerate the ecosystem.

Where do we start? Understand the ecosystem!

The glTF format, the “JPEG of 3D”, is a cornerstone for interoperable 3D tools and services. It is royalty free and coordinated by the Khronos consortium. It not only finds uses in consumer products, such as games, or social VR tools like Mozilla Hubs, but also in industrial contexts. This means that there is a complex ecosystem with very diverse parties, different motivations and business models. If we wanted to align interests to maximise impact we needed to better understand the value creation and value capture across this ecosystem. In order to identify the best leverage points for our efforts we started an analysis focusing on the content creators, their motivations, their current pain points, and the expected impact of tools that could empower them.

The initial analysis was shared with the Khronos glTF working group. This working group brings together ecosystem stakeholders “to cooperate in the creation of open standards that deliver on the promise of cross-platform technology”. Several partners participated in the next iteration analysis of the tools for content creators, the contributions of Don McCurdy from Google, Patrick Cozzi from Cesium and our own Fernando Serrano García were particularly helpful. The result was a clear recommendation to support the development of Blender tools for glTF.

Leveraging Common Interests

Blender holds a unique place among 3D content creation tools — it is free, open source, popular, and available to anyone. We are especially excited by the timing, as the upcoming release of Blender 2.8 promises powerful physically-based rendering (PBR) and a greatly-improved user interface. Round-trip glTF import and export in Blender raises the baseline for WebXR developers, designers, and creators. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can create, edit, and remix glTF models without having to purchase specialized software.

Blender is not only used by professional filmmakers (think Wonder Woman!) but also by organizations like NASA, and Airbus, who is also one of our partners in the development of the Blender glTF tools. They are using the glTF format internally to visualize their Blender created mock-ups both in VR and AR. Since their internal solution has gotten more and more traction and is to be used group wide on helicopters and aircrafts for realistic renderings and light analysis, they commissioned the independent developer Julien Duroure to build some of the foundational pieces of the Blender tools.

After the joint ecosystem analysis Khronos, UX3D, and Mozilla decided to co-fund the development of the Blender importer and exporter tool. UX3D, a Munich based GPU software solution provider, has been doing most of the development work, building on top of the previous work for the Blender importer by Julien.

And because this is open source, he has kept contributing his time outside of his engagement with Airbus to further develop these tools. Adding to existing contributors, having a strong open source community that is able to maintain these tools makes the project sustainable in the long term.

A Model for Future Developments

This model of collaboration — first jointly identifying priorities and then co-funding the development of specific features of software for the benefit of all parties — enables the ecosystem to move faster while at the same time allowing partners to share the investment. With the Blender glTF tools we created the blueprint: the working group members agreed on the scope of work, Khronos collected the funds from the co-funding partners, and managed the engagement with the developers. We hope that other ecosystem partners will follow this model in the future and that we can together accelerate the advancement of the glTF standard and the WebXR ecosystem.

With Firefox Reality and soon with support for Blender we see how the potential of the open Web is made tangible in emerging technologies such as VR and AR. As these technologies start being used to create different types of content, such as art, educational, and professional resources, the tools to both create and access experiences should be open and accessible for everyone.

With the glTF Blender import and export tool being released and ready for beta testers around the time of the Blender conference in late October, we hope that the Blender tools will unleash the creativity of the global community. We’ll share a deep dive on the tool on Mozilla’s Hacks blog in the coming weeks.

If you build it (together), they will come… was originally published in Mozilla Open Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are excited to announce the launch of the Bugzilla Automatic Bug Triaging Challenge, a crowdsourcing competition sponsored by Mozilla and hosted by Topcoder, the world’s largest network of software designers, developers, testers, and data scientists. The goal of the competition is to automate triaging (categorization by products and software components) of new bugs submitted to Bugzilla, Mozilla’s web-based bug tracking system. By cooperating with Topcoder, Mozilla is expanding its open innovation capabilities to include specialized crowdsourcing communities and competition mechanisms.

Mozilla’s Open Innovation strategy is guided by the principle of being Open by Design derived from a comprehensive 2017 review of how Mozilla works with open communities. The strategy sets forth a direction of expanding the organisation’s external outreach beyond its traditional base of core contributors: open source software developers, lead users, and Mozilla volunteers. Our cooperation with Topcoder is an example of reaching out to a global community of data scientists.

Why Bugs?

Mozilla is using crowdsourcing to scale the effort we can bring to our product and technology development through collaborative crowds. Such a “capacity crowdsourcing” has already been successfully applied to the Common Voice project, Mozilla’s initiative to crowdsource a large dataset of human voices for use in speech technology.

However, we know that engaging crowds can have positive impact on other areas of Mozilla product and technology development. In particular, we focus our attention on processes that require large amounts of manual engineering work; automating these processes can result in significant lowering of development and operating cost.

Take, for example, bug triaging in Bugzilla, a manual process of categorization (by products and software components) of hundreds of bugs submitted each month to Mozilla’s web-based bug tracking system. Although the accuracy of the manual bug triaging is very high, it consumes valuable time of experienced engineers, which may otherwise be spent on other high-priority projects.

Why Topcoder?

Over years, the Firefox Test Engineering team responsible for bug triaging has accumulated a lot of data that could potentially be used to automate the process. Working together with the Open Innovation team, the engineers have engaged Topcoder, the world’s largest network of software designers, developers, testers, and data scientists, which many organizations, including NASA, use as a platform to solve complex algorithmic problems.

The result of this collaboration has been the Bugzilla Automatic Bug Triaging Challenge whose objective is to create an algorithm allowing automated bug triaging in Bugzilla with the accuracy comparable to that for the manual process. To select the winners of the competition, the Topcoder architect team has developed a scoring mechanism; to qualify for a prize (ranging between $1,000 and $8,000), any algorithm must reach a certain minimal score. Refer to the Challenge description for more detail.

The Challenge will be open for submissions until October 26. Although Mozilla employees are not allowed to participate, we do encourage all members of Mozilla’s communities to take part in the competition.

Taming triage: Partnering with Topcoder to harness the power of the crowd was originally published in Mozilla Open Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.