Raindrop is an experiment in designing for today’s messaging habits by collecting conversations from important messaging sources (email, twitter, …), understanding them, and organizing them for the user based on this understanding.  Raindrop is an effort in promoting the values of the Mozilla Manifesto.

Design driven

• Strong user experience and design ownership must lead the way. Community feedback on the user experience is important, but the experience will not be designed by committee.  Others are welcome to build differing products on our code.
• Elegance and simplicity of design are key goals.  In the face of emerging complexity, we will rethink the interaction or design a new one rather than overload an existing one.

User-centric

• Users should be able to customize their experience through easily shareable extensions.
• Raindrop aims to give users secure ownership of their own data and control over how they share it.

Participatory

• We strive to build a healthy community of participation, based on mutual respect, positive contribution, and recognition of differences in experience and interests.  We want to explicitly define the social contract that binds this community.
• As an experimental project, the default configuration of a Raindrop installation will request that users contribute their anonymized usage data back to the Mozilla design community.  It will be easy for users to opt-out; we are committed to the Mozilla Privacy Policy.  We will revisit this setting if/when Raindrop leaves the experimental stage.
• We must continue to experiment with appropriate channels for the various kinds of community participation (user feedback, support, bugs, design work, enhancements) as the Raindrop community evolves.

A Platform for Innovation

• It is critical that Raindrop be easy and fast to develop, extend and mash-up using open web technologies.
• To encourage innovation outside of the core, Raindrop must offer built-in extension mechanisms for a variety of important messaging concepts (people, conversations, relationships, tasks, events, …).
• The platform’s extensibility should not get in the way of supporting innovation in the core product — we will break APIs if we have to.

Focused

• We are not trying to make Raindrop into a general personal information manager (PIM), feed reader, or social network. Raindrop’s focus is on organizing messages, and it will work with other systems that store messages, contacts, tasks, feeds, etc.