The vision for our Services products is to bring the power of MDN directly into professional web developers’ daily coding environments. Experiments in this area will take the form of web services built iteratively. Each iteration should either attract enthusiastic users or provide market insight that helps guide the next iteration.
In addition to exploring the market for developer services, these experiments will also explore new architectures, form factors and contribution pathways for MDN’s information products.
Four services have been identified for exploration so far.
1. Compatibility Data service
The compatibility data service (a.k.a. Browsercompat.org) is a read/write API intended to replace the tables of compatibility data that currently accompany many features in MDN’s reference documentation. The project is justified for maintenance reasons alone: Unstructured compatibility data on MDN is very difficult to keep current because it requires editors to maintain every page (in every language) where identical data might appear. It offers a fantastic opportunity to answer several questions likely to recur in MDN’s future evolution:
- Can we maintain so-called “micro-services” without creating significant engineering overhead?
- Can we build reasonable contribution pathways and monitoring processes around structured data residing in a separate data store?
- Is the effort involved in “decomposing” MDN’s wiki content into structured APIs justified by the improvement in reusability such services provide?
These questions are essential to understand as we move toward a future where data are increasingly structured and delivered contextually.
Status of this experiment: Underway and progressing. Must achieve several major milestones before it can be assessed.
2. Security scanning service
In surveys run in Q4 2014 and Q1 2015, a large number of MDN visitors said they currently do not use a security scanning service but are motivated to do so. This experiment will give many more web developers access to security scanning tools. It will answer these questions:
- Can we disrupt the security scanning space with tools aimed at individual web developers?
- Can we help more web developers make their web sites more secure by providing services in a more familiar form factor?
- Is there value in releasing services for web developers under the MDN brand?
Status of this experiment: Underway and progressing toward an MVP release. Must achieve several major milestones before it can be assessed.
3. Compatibility scanning service
In the surveys mentioned above, a large number of MDN visitors said they currently do not use a compatibility scanning tool but are motivated to do so. This experiment will build such a tool using a variety of existing libraries. It will answer these questions:
- Are web developers enthusiastic about using a tool that promises to make their web sites more compatible across devices?
- What form factor is most effective?
- Can we successfully create automation from MDN’s information products and contribution workflows?
Status of this experiment: MVP planned for Q2/Q3 2015.
4. Accessibility scanning service
Also in the surveys mentioned above, a large number of MDN visitors said they currently do not scan for accessibility but are motivated to do so. This experiment will build an accessibility scanning service that helps answer the questions above, as well as:
- If the tool fits into their workflow, will more developers make their web sites more accessible?
Status of this experiment: MVP planned for Q2/Q3 2015.
The market success of any of the latter three services would make possible an additional experiment:
5. Revenue
Professional web developers are accustomed to paying for services that increase their capacity to deliver high-quality professional results. The success of such services as Github, Heroku, NewRelic and many others is evidence of this.
MDN services that bring the high quality of MDN into professional web developers’ workflows may be valuable enough to generate revenue for Mozilla. This possibility depends on a number of important milestones before it is feasible, such as…
- Market demand for services built
- Community discussion about paid services under the MDN banner
- Analysis of appropriate pricing and terms
- Integration with payment systems
In other words, this cannot happen until services prove themselves valuable. Meanwhile, simply discussing it is an experiment: Is the possibility of MDN generating revenue with valuable developer-facing services conceivable?
Hoosteeno 