Many of my free and open-source software lovin’ colleagues fear Apple’s latest operating system OS X ‘Lion,’ and the slow progress of Apple’s gated community for software distribution, the Apple App Store.

I share some of those fears, indeed.

But I think there’s an equally pressing danger. Perhaps, even a more imminent threat to a diverse ecosystem of software options.

That threat is Dropbox.

Dropbox is an online storage solution used by many, many people. In fact, Dropbox has become almost ubiquitous. So much so that it has almost become a utility, akin to what Twitter and Facebook have become, or like Instapaper is quickly becoming (which is also alarming).

But, unlike Twitter or Facebook, Dropbox appears to be the only option that many iOS app developers are using for untethered online storage and transfer of data from within iOS apps.

It really hit me over the head yesterday when I was trying to find a simple text editing app that would work on the iPad.

Other than editing text files (with extensions like .md or .markdown), my only need was something that could open and save documents on the Internet — say, using an existing standard FTP/sFTP, or Webdav, or something along those lines.

As I flipped through page after page of text editing apps, more often than not the only option to fetch and store documents online was Dropbox. In fact, there’s a whole monoculture of apps — not just text-editing apps — that work only work with Dropbox (well, maybe they provide a ‘e-mail your file’ option too, but you get the drift).

In the text-editing family, there are some apps that I’m really quite surprised about, like the incredible iA Writer — why does this great app not have a simple way to fetch and store files that doesn’t require Dropbox, or a connected PC with iTunes?

This is the early writing on the wall — exactly what any individual who appreciates software innovation should worry about — an entire class of software that throws existing standards out the window, only to support a proprietary service that’s been around for a mere three years.

Have we learned nothing from the failures of services like delicious.com and the many similar tales that came before it?

So what’s the problem with Dropbox, you ask? Well, for starters their record on protecting users is a bit suspect, and that is ultimately led me to ask Dropbox for a refund earlier this year. So, problem number one is that I don’t use Dropbox anymore.

The more pressing issue is that some iOS app developers are using Dropbox like a public utility — which is most certainly is not — which only perpetuates the trend toward seeing these apps that only support one (proprietary and very much not ‘open’) file transfer method.

Quite possibly, this behavior is encouraged by iOS, which — unlike Android — don’t seem to have a global ‘share’ API that enables any application to share data with any other application. (For example, when sharing a photo from my Android phone, I’m able to pass that photo to any application I have installed that supports that file type, for example a Flickr app, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, Google Googles, and so on.)

I really with there were more options.

Something simple like an Etherpad with support to open text files over sFTP, HTTPS, or WebDAV would be fine.

P.S. Ultimately, I found a small handfull of options that theoretically support open standards like FTP/sFTP and WebDAV. I may give them a try. However, it was more than likely that if an app did support something other than Dropbox at all, it was Apple’s iDisk (which, with the new iCloud coming, I’m not clear on the future of).

Here's the 30-second summary of this post:

• It's time to put the pedal to the metal and get the first component of the MoJo initiative really moving
• To do that, we have to narrow down a long list of possible challenges to just three. Those three challenges will be launched publicly in the coming weeks.
• We've spoken to our news partners; we've spoken to many of those working on the front lines of news innovation; Now it's time to ask you -- the MoJo community, and the Mozilla community -- to weigh in.
• There are more than 20 ideas in six categories, so I'll be posting each category over the coming days and asking for input
• If you just want to see the list of ideas discussed today, jump here. If you want the preamble, read on.

Since the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership was announced, the whole team -- Ben, Mark, Nathan, and yours truly -- have been pounding the pavement to gather as much input as possible toward making the challenges relevant for both our initial news partners, and the broader news-producing community.

We've listened on the MoJo community mailing list, reached out through groups like Hacks/Hackers, cornered people at the computer-assisted reporting conference and the Al Jazeera annual forum, and we were on the ground talking to people this week at South by Southwest. To put it simply, we're all ears. (So, if you haven't spoken up, don't say we didn't ask!)

From reporters to news-application developers, from managing editors to news users, we wanted to understand where technology was impacting your experience of news production and consumption -- making it easier, or making it harder; less complex, or more complicated; or providing a glimpse of a possible innovation down the road.

From those conversations, we identified more than twenty reoccurring ideas for possible challenges. Each idea falls roughly into one of six categories of news production:

• Reporting
• Presenting
• Delivering
• Searching & curating
• Listening to news users & enabling news users
• Funding & sustaining news

In the list below, I've done my best to present the essence of the idea that was shared with us, while distilling it down to a couple of sentences. Please keep in mind that these are rough drafts that outline just the kernel of the idea; the selected ideas will be developed into a more comprehensive challenge question.

So, with that said, let's start with "Reporting news."

"Reporting news"

• Working with data: Reporters are more frequently being presented with data, or having to work with data, as a source for stories. Tools for quickly getting raw data into a workable format, or finding stories within large datasets, are often complex to use, or very new. But data in the hands of the right reporter can be like magic. How can this be solved?

• Working with sources: Sources, one of the fundamental building blocks of reporting, are changing with technology. Once just a phone call away, sources today are as often a database, programmable API, or a PDF as they are a real person. What are new approaches for managing sources?

• Crowd-sourced reporting: During the aftermath of events like Hurricane Katrina or the recent earthquake in Japan, aggregating first-hand accounts of the situation on the ground is critical. Once international media attention has subsided, investigations become increasingly challenging. In these situations, gathering data from a network of citizen sources can make all the difference. Tools for this are only starting to exist. What can be developed or improved?

• Verification: In breaking-news situations, there's often a rush to get the scoop. As new types of sources become more relevant, like micro blogs and social networks, new challenges are introduced into the verification process. How can these news sources be verified and fact-checked in real time?

• Semantic markup: In many news organizations content-management systems are still a challenge for reporters; getting data into the system can be tedious and time-consuming. As the Web moves toward an increasingly semantic future, how can interfaces be improved to make the addition of semantically-rich data easier, and to make the benefits of adding it more obvious? (And could this be done in the browser, side-stepping the I.T. hurdles presented by corporate CMSs?)

What grabs you from the above, based on your experiences? How would you prioritize these? What ideas would you add to the "Reporting news" category? Which challenge would you want to solve?

Feel free to comment here, or on the MoJo community mailing list (or via whatever medium suits your fancy).

Next up: Presenting news.

At its core, the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership sets out to do three things:

• Generate great ideas: through design challenges & open conversations;
• Train people: on taking ideas from concept to code;
• Make software: demos & reference implementations of the best ideas and experiments.

We want to encourage experimentation and create the space for new ideas to emerge, and then we want to embed a small number of those experiments -- and the people behind them -- into newsrooms around the globe. Our hope is that some of the experiments take root and grow.

The program is not setting out to solve technology staffing challenges, or to just provide an extra pair of technically-talented hands. That would not be a "fellowship," and it would not have the impact that Mozilla and the Knight Foundation are hoping for. More importantly, the fellowships are only one piece of the larger objective of introducing new thought leadership in the news-technology space.

Mozilla just so happens to have a bit of experience when it comes to great ideas, great people, and great software, and there's a real opportunity here to introduce a bit of the Mozilla MakerCulture into the news-technology space. Specifically, we believe that there are many common "news-technology challenges" that are faced by news organizations of all types and sizes, and it is our belief that successful experiments from this program will result in usable software and ideas that can be implemented almost anywhere.

So, what are those common challenges? That is, indeed, one of the most interesting questions that lies ahead.

One example of the type of challenge that we're hoping to uncover, as well as a powerful illustration of what success could look like, is told in the story of Document Cloud. Looking at the problem of publishing primary-source documents online, a group of programmer-journalists saw an opportunity and set out to solve that challenge. In the process of creating a solution, Document Cloud has engaged a community, built a whole bunch of great open-source software, and -- most importantly -- changed the field. Their software is changing the way news organizations publish primary-source documents, and their thought leadership is changing the way we, as users, interact with, those documents and stories.

We're hoping to bring similar ingredients -- great ideas and great people -- into the Mozilla "Iron Chef" kitchen. Lots of recipes will be tried, lots of messes will be made, and -- in the end -- you will be the judge of what comes out of the oven. If we get it just right, it might be just as tasty as Document Cloud.