The humble blog

I’ve been thinking a lot about markdown, presentation, dashboards, and other frontendy sorts of things lately, partly inspired by my work on Iodide last year, partly inspired by my recent efforts on improving docs.telemetry.mozilla.org. I haven’t fully fleshed out my thoughts on this yet, but in general I think blogs (for some value of “blog”) are still a great way to communicate ideas and concepts to an interested audience.

Like many organizations, Mozilla’s gone down the path of Google Docs, Zoom and Slack which makes me more than a little sad: good ideas disappear down the memory hole super quickly with these tools, not to mention the fact that they are closed-by-default (even to people inside Mozilla!). My view on “open” is a bit more nuanced than it used to be: I no longer think everything need be all-public, all-the-time— but I still think talking about and through our ideas (even if imperfectly formed or stated) with a broad audience builds trust and leads to better outcomes.

Is there some way we can blend some of these old school ideas (blogs, newsgroups, open discussion forums) with better technology and social practices? Let’s find out.