It’s is a good start. We have some momentum. There is potential. Which begs the question: now what?
One thing is clear: we need to turn interest into action and impact. With 2011 on the horizon, I’m asking: how do we best do this? What does Drumbeat do next?
I want to know what you think about this. As comment fodder, here are three + one things I think we should focus on as Drumbeat moves into 2011:
0. Narrow our focus. Pick grokkable, magnetic topics.
Drumbeat started with a very broad call to action: ‘help keep the open web open‘. This didn’t work as well as we’d hoped. Some people responded. Most just stared back blankly.
Recently (and somewhat by accident), we’ve shifted focus to more specific mashups of Mozilla’s mission and other people’s big ideas. Re-invent cinema using the open web. Use the culture of the web to transform education and learning. And so on.
These mash ups have been much more magnetic. People already excited about the big ideas in question have looked up and said: ah, the web people are interested. Cool. How can I join in?
No matter what else we decide to do, one of our next steps should be to consistently use these ‘somebody’s big idea + open web tech and culture’ combos to focus what we’re doing. On the flip side, we should (dramatically) turn down the volume of the generic ‘help the open web’ angle.
1. Follow through on what we’ve started. Amp up participation and impact.
One answer to ‘what’s next for Drumbeat?’ is ‘follow through and help these projects reach these goals’.
There are three primary ways we can do this. Help with the technology side of these projects (e.g. P2PU leveraging Labs’ open social tools). Build fundraising capacity by actually designing and running campaigns with the projects (we’re doing major campaigns this fall and into next year). And, bring more people and profile to the table (e.g. volunteer recruitment in mainstream Mozilla newsletters and more promotion on Mozilla sites).
Helping in these ways will drive participation and impact in the projects we’ve already started. This, for me, is the baseline of what Drumbeat should do next. If that’s all we did in 2011, would it be enough? Personally, I don’t think so.
2. Get get good at open innovation. Find and grow more promising ideas.
We’ve always seen Drumbeat as a way to get many good ideas on the table, and then to back the best. A decent number of people have responded to this aspect of what we’re doing — there are now over 220 projects on drumbeat.org.
We’ve highlighted and helped a handful of these projects in small ways. Promoting them in our newsletter. Setting up peer coaching on our community calls. But, overall, we haven’t yet figured out a good and sustainable way to help these projects evolve, expand and succeed.
What we need is a simple, systematic way to find and grow promising ideas. One approach: combine the Mozilla labs open innovation process with the ‘magnetic topic mashups’ described above. Pick a topic. Run an innovation challenge. Back the best ideas that come out of the challenge.
For example, we might run a challenge around the question: how can the culture and technology drive innovation in the world of journalism? The challenge process would get many ideas on the table, spark collaborations. We’d offer fellowships or grants to the ‘winners’ of the challenge.
If Jetpack for Learning was any indication, this approach is more likely to yield results than the general Drumbeat ‘propose a project that helps the web’ call to action we’ve been using so far. One of our priorities for 2011 should be to put this open innovation model centre stage, pick some awesome topics and see what we learn.
3. Spark people’s imagination. Make it easy for them to connect. Focus on (big) visibility.
While our existing projects are awesome and important, Drumbeat (and Mozilla as a whole) needs another side to it — a side that is lightweight, easy to engage and, well, sexy.
Why? Because part of our goal with Drumbeat is to spark people’s imaginations — to get millions of people excited about how the open web can liberate, empower and delight them.
If you look at this from a ‘what’s next?’ perspective, this is partly a matter of linking what we’re doing already to things people care about. Making Web Made Movies with well loved producers and artists. Connecting Universal Subtitles to widely known content brands. Showcasing robots, lasers and other shiny open tech toys at Drumbeat events. The good news: we’re working on all these things.
However, ‘sparking imaginations’ need not — and probably cannot — be completely tied up in the idea of Drumbeat projects and events. We should embrace anything we can dream up that delights and engages, and the connects people to Mozilla outside of their day to day experience of using our products.
Google showed how you can do this with it’s recent HTML5 Arcade Fire video. It was a lightweight, fun, internet-scale way to demo what HTML5 video can be. And people loved it.
We hope to do something similar with our upcoming Firefox 4 parks campaign with the World Wildlife Fund — using sexy demos to make the link between the forests of the amazon and the web ecosystem that Firefox helps sustain. We’ve got other ideas up our sleeves as well (including some involving cats!)
But, the fact of the matter is, Mozilla isn’t naturally good at this. We’re more often than not too earnest about the web. We need to develop or lighter sexier side. Especially if we want millions of people across the web to join and support our cause. In terms of Drumbeat next steps, this is a major area we need to work on.
–
These are early thoughts that need much shaping and refinement. I’m interested to know: Which sound right? Which sound exciting? Which sound unachievable? You’ve been watching Drumbeat unfold. Where do you think it should go next?
I’ve posted an etherpad version of this content for people to hack on. And you can also make comments below. I’ll feed whatever people post into a Mozilla board discussion mid-September. And, if there is alot of interesting changes, I’ll repost the full etherpad version here.
PS. I know this post is too long. Sorry about that. I really want to see how people react to the whole set of ideas here — so my attempts at chopping it into a bunch of smaller posts didn’t work.
Over the past two years, I’ve given talks on many Mozilla topics. How a massive global community can (and did) make the web better. Threats and challenges ahead for the internet. The importance of ‘the people formerly known as users‘ in keeping the web open (aka Drumbeat). Earlier this summer, I had the chance to pull all these threads together in a talk called How the Web Was Won.
This is the most comprehensive talk I’ve given on Mozilla themes. It owes a great deal to slides and ideas I’ve borrowed from Beltzner, Blizzard, Mitchell, Lilly, Hanson and many others. In that regard, it’s a ‘best of’ talk. Not my best presentation (very long), but hopefully many good bits for other people to borrow and re-purpose.
This week, a Wall Street Journal story on the proposed Comcast/NBCU merger brought concerns about media consolidation back to the fore. The U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly studying how the merger would affect the emerging internet video market.
Critics of the merger—including former Obama adviser and law professor Susan Crawford, a keynote speaker at this year’s Open Video Conference—say that the merger would hurt competition in the online video space.
Combined with anxieties about a shifting landscape for net neutrality, many are convinced that big changes are in store for the Internet as we know it—and by extension, the development of a rich online video medium that encourages user participation, creativity, and innovation.
We sat down with Ms. Crawford this week to hear her thoughts on the proposed merger, the FCC’s role in protecting net neutrality, and much more.
We’ll be releasing the 20-minute interview in three parts starting this week. It really captures the urgency that many are feeling about this critical time for the internet—a sense that we’re deciding new rules for the network and the web, and writing the the next few years of media history.
If you are passionate about the future of the open web and open video, we invite you to join us this October 1 & 2 at the Open Video Conference in New York City. Please register today.
Editor’s note: I wasn’t about to let school start this fall without posting some photos and a writeup from Drumbeat Boston — I had a fantastic time throwing the event, and wheels are already in motion for a potential round II with the lovely guys and gals in NYC.
Drumbeat Boston was fantastic! Thanks to everyone who came, and for those who didn’t, here is a short summary to incentivise you to attend other Drumbeat events.
We were fortunate to have the Venture Café host the event, with the help of Carrie Stalder, Elizabeth Peyton and many members of the CIC team. They have a nice recap of the event on their blog. We also worked with Rudi Seitz, and used Whimwords to facilitate conversation among strangers and friends alike.
The evening opened with a classic Drumbeat exercise, the spectrogram. No, not a graph (well at least not a traditional one), a social exercise involving standing along a line of tape so that our “end users” could publicly proclaim a point of view and thus we could precipitate conversation. Users stood to one end to “agree” and another to “disagree,” left with lots of space for movement and agreement percentages in between.
Some hits were “I feel remorse when I use Facebook,” “I know what Mozilla Drumbeat is,” and “the web is totally open.”
The evening continued with the announcement of the Awesome Foundation’s July Fellow, Paul Gardner-Stephen, a post-doctoral fellow at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia and founder of the Serval Project. He received funding for a decentralized P2P phone networks using Android handsets and the VillageTelco’s “Mesh Potato,” a lightweight, cheap building block for mesh networks. The project aims to aide in disaster relief situations, especially in rural areas without many cell phone towers.
The announcement was preceded by a short talk by Jonathan Zittrain on the principles of “awesome” and the benefits of openness.
The Erhardt Graeff from the Awesome Foundation presents their “signature” giant check to Dr. Paul Gardner-Stephen, developer of The Serval Project, their July fellow.
All photos by Reed Sturtevant and are CC-sa 2.0. For more photos check out this album by E Derek Smith, and the rest of Reed’s photos here.
The Yes Men Fix The World, the second film from the culture-jamming activist duo, will be the marquee feature in the Shared Film Festival at the Open Video Conference. After the screening, we’ll sit down for a panel including The Yes Men and their defense counsel, EFF’s Corynne McSherry.
The Yes Men raise awareness about social issues by tactically intervening in the mass media. Posing as executives of giant corporations, they lie their way into big conferences and TV appearances to expose—with surreal humor—the dark underbelly of multinational business. “It takes some nerve, not to mention diabolical intelligence… to pull off [these] pranks,” the New York Times wrote in its review of the film.
The film chronicles, among other episodes, the time Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum appeared on BBC World as a faux Dow Chemical spokesman to apologize for the Bhopal chemical disaster. After tricking a BBC producer into granting an interview, Bichlbaum read a lengthy “official statement” on live broadcast, offering reparations for the 120,000 affected victims. By the time the hoax was uncovered, Dow’s market cap had taken a $2 billion dollar hit.
Because it is such a hot potato, The Yes Men have a hard time securing traditional distribution deals for the movie. Though it’s earned heaps of awards and critical accolades, it also chronicles costly and elaborate pranks against Haliburton, WTO, Dow Chemical, and others—giving most distributors heartburn for the potential liability risks.
As a result, The Yes Men decided to freely distribute the film using P2P systems like BitTorrent. They’ve reached a massive audience, cost-free, and have even received tens of thousands of dollars in donations from fans and supporters.
The P2P edition of the film features special scenes of The Yes Men’s prank at the National Press Club, which resulted in a lawsuit being filed against them by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Don’t miss the Yes Men, the , and the rest of the activities at this year’s Open Video Conference. , and join us October 1 & 2 in New York City!
The Open Video Conference is already chock full of panels, talks, and workshops—exploring open technology, the future of mass media, and everything in between. Today we’re pleased to announce that on both days of the Open Video Conference, the discussion around shared culture and peer-to-peer distribution will continue into the evening with the Shared Film Festival.
The Shared Film Festival at OVC is a showcase for the emerging world of free-to-share films. We’re teaming with our friends at BitTorrent, hand-picking notable films from creators who are experimenting with alternative business models and distribution methods.
Each night following OVC, we’ll screen a short film, a feature length production, and then sit down to a discussion with the filmmakers, learning about the stories behind the films, their production experiences and business strategies. Can you make a living by giving it away?
The marquee feature at the Shared Film Festival is definitely something you won’t want to miss. Check back tomorrow to get a peek at the feature lineup!
The Shared Film Festival is for both creators and audiences, and it’s free to all attendees of the Open Video Conference.
Brett Gaylor (left) and the WebMadeMovies community released their first public demo of "popcorn" last week -- and the reviews are pretty sweet.
Last week you may have heard that Brett Gaylor, open source cinema pioneer and director of RIP!: A remix manifesto, has officially joined the Mozilla team to help with Mozilla Drumbeat and the WebMadeMovies project. The WebMadeMovies team recently released their first demo of “Popcorn,” an experimental tool aimed at turning boring old online video into dynamic “hypervideo” that interacts with the rest of the web, pulling data from Google Maps, Twitter and Wikipedia right into the action. Early reviews and feedback of the demo are in — here’s a sampling of the response:
"Popcorn provides extra depth around videos, and the possibilities are thought-provoking." -- from Wired's WebMonkey.com
Wired: “Mozilla’s Popcorn Project Adds Extra Flavor to Web Video”
From Wired‘s WebMonkey.com:
Developers at [Mozilla's] Drumbeat project — an initiative that advocates new open web technologies — have created Popcorn, a tool intended to make web video every bit as interactive as the rest of the web.
Popcorn is a very new effort and still a bit rough around the edges, but results are already impressive. Popcorn adds metadata to HTML5 native web video, annotating videos with information like location, details about the people and topics in the video, subtitles, and licensing details. The metadata can be used in real time to add to the experience….
The result is what Mozilla developer Tristan Nitot calls “hypervideo.” What Nitot means is that Popcorn is connecting video to the rest of the web, linking it into the hypertext world.
Gizmodo: “Popcorn will contribute to the growth of fre
Some very talented geeks just created a demo of their latest creation. Under the name “Popcorn,” the demo hides a javascript library for adding metadata to videos… – anticipating the future of the web.
Popcorn.js is what I would describe as “hyper-video” (“hyper” as in “hypertext”): the ability to leverage data from the video and link to it, Web style.
I think this is a very significant step further for video on the Web, which was until now a very TV-like, passive and linear approach, now merged with the hypertext nature of the Web (its ability to link to things in other places), so that users can click on links in order to learn more. Of course, this is just a demo. Tons of things need to be done, but I see this as a very cool way to show what HTML5 and its video element, combined with the power of JavaScript and mash-ups.
Video at this time is a mostly passive experience: you click and watch movies, pretty much…. Post-Flash technology opens new horizons for HTML5 video on the Internet.
“The future of web video”
A sampling of the reaction on Twitter:
“the future of web-video. Can’t wait for this to be the regular.” –adamstributer
“Popcorn semantic video demo brings us a step closer to Open Source Cinema” — gabrielshalom
“HTML5 video is not just video, it’s HTML” –html5guy
“Popcorn.js making internet video exciting again” –SimonHold
Feedback for round two: Less is more?
One interesting note on the user experience from CHIP online (with apologies for the poor translation):
Personally, I find [the meta-data] still a bit chaotic, and it steals attention away from the video, which should be the main star. Popcorn is just the beginning, and could be the way to a special experience. But success will depend more on how to implement it.
The first Popcorn demo takes an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach, showcasing ALL the various meta-data that could be included to enhance a video experience. That makes sense as a first demo designed to show the full range of what’s possible. But for subsequent demos, “less is more” may be the way to go — reigning in some of the meta-data to focus on serving the story more and avoid overload.
“Hyper-video” and “Popcorn” feel sticky
Other takeaways from the reviews and feedback:
People are adopting the “Popcorn” brand. Maybe that’s a brand we should consider making more central in our messaging around the project? “Popcorn” vs. “WebMadeMovies?”
“Hyper-video” seems to resonate with people as a way to describe what it is. In terms of grokking the front-end experience and helping first-timers understand the value and difference of open video versus “TV in a web page.”
Exploring the storytelling and creative possibilities will be key. Getting the user experience right will be as much a creative challenge as a technological one. Which is exactly why WebMadeMovies’ larger mission and plan to bring hackers and filmmakers together on the project is so ideal.
Popcorn veut contribuer à l’essor de la vidéo libre sur le web
Concept. Publié sur Gizmodo.fr par Allan Annas le 20 août 2010 à 16:18
Si toi aussi tu développes des sites internet, ce message peut t’intéresser.
Des geeks bourrés de talents viennent de faire une démo de leur dernière création.
Sous le nom de “Popcorn” se cache une bibliothèque javascript permettant d’ajouter des méta-données à une vidéo. Ces dernières pourront être exploitées pendant la lecture de la vidéo comme l’explique le grand chef de Mozzarella Europe sur son blog.
Pour montrer comment fonctionne ce petit système qui préfigure l’avenir du web, les développeurs ont mis une vidéo (encodée dans le format libre Ogg évidemment) dans une page codée en HTML 5. Si vous avez un navigateur moderne (Firefox 3.5 minimum) et que vous voulez voir le résultat, c’est par ici.
MPEG LA n’a qu’à bien se tenir, l’avenir appartient à ceux qui ne veulent pas débourser de l’argent inutilement pour acquérir le droit d’utiliser un codec aiment la liberté ! [Brett Gaylor]
I just had a fun breakfast with Simona Levi from ExGAE/ / oXcars. What I learned: Learning, Freedom and the Web isn’t the only interesting thing happening in Barcelona two months from now. There are at least seven open internet / open education / free culture events happening over the span of 10 days.
We should find a way to shout and promote all of this. Barcelona will be the global epicentre of free culture / open education / open web stuff for 10 days this fall! We need a phrase or a name for it. ‘10 days of freedom‘? ‘Barcelona abierto‘? Not sure, but Simona and I agreed to call out for suggestions. If you have ideas, post them below.
PS. goes w/o saying -> book an extended trip to Barcelona if you can.
We just opened signups for the third cycle of courses at P2PU which are starting in September. This is our third, and largest cycle yet. We had 6 courses in the first, 16 in the second, and 23 so far for the third cycle. I'm organizing a course called "Web 200: The Anatomy of a Request" as part of the School of Webcraft. Here's the story from the P2PU blog:
The Peer 2 Peer University announced its third round of free and open online courses today, opening sign-ups for a growing list of courses dealing in su bject areas ranging from Collaborative Lesson Planning to Manifestations of Human Trafficking.
P2PU is also excited to announce the launch of the P2PU School of Webcraft, run in conjunction with the Mozilla Foundation. The School of Webcraft is a powerful new way to learn open, standards based web development in a collaborative environment. School of Webcraft courses include Beginning Python Webservices and HTML5.
All classes are globally accessible, free, and powered entirely by learners, mentors and contributors with the goal of creating a vibrant, peer-led system that helps people around the world easy access to build careers on open web technology.
The P2PU community is growing and excited to have these new courses and their organizers on board.
Since the last round of courses, a few changes have taken place at P2PU, most noticeably on the P2PU site which has seen a major overhaul, and is simpler and easier to use than ever before. However, the nature of the P2PU community remains the same, and all community generated content is open and shareable under CC BY-SA.
The P2PU community consists of a diverse group of people. They are writers, teachers, designers, doctoral and alternative grad students, artists, copyright specialists, scientists, and blues guitar players. Above all, they are learners–peers working together to learn from each other.
Sign-ups for all courses are available at http://p2pu.org/course/list. Deadlines for sign-ups are 8th September 2010. The courses will run until October 27th. Each course application may require additional information.
Beautiful Barcelona will host the Mozilla Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival November 3 - 5. (cc Marcel Germain)
Registration for the 2010 Mozilla Drumbeat Festival is now open! Join teachers, learners and technologists from around the world November 3 – 5 in Barcelona to teach, hack, shape and invent the future of education and the web.
Not
Imagine a teeming festival filled with different tents, each with its own unique flavor and focus as you move from tent to tent making up your own experience. The Drumbeat Festival will work just like this – with multiple spaces to teach, make and learn in a variety of different studios, labs, playgrounds and classrooms.
From a local learning incubator, badge lab and open source classroom to hackerspace playground, wikipedia lounge and video and learning gallery, there’ll be multiple spaces to dive deep and get your hands dirty.
The main stage will include keynotes fromJoi Ito, Brenda Gourley, Bre Pettis, Mitchell Bakerand others. Think Makerfaire + Hackfest + TEDtalks + Lollapalooza for open web education!
In May, Mozilla and the Shuttleworth Foundation announced a new Education for the Open Web Fellowship. The aim is to support practical ideas that help people learn about, improve and promote the open nature of the internet, as part of our commitment to supporting leaders working at the intersection of open education and the open web.
While response was promising, we did not feel any of the submissions were far enough along to award the fellowship in July as planned. So we’ve decided to a) push back the application deadline to October 17, 2010, to allow existing applicants to further strengthen their pitch and new applicants to throw their hat into the ring; and b)offer the early stage proposals a chance at small grants that will help them get off the ground.
What are we looking for? And how can you make your pitch stronger?
Based on learning from the first round of fellowship applications, here are five things we encourage applicants to consider in writing up their idea:
1) Tell us story. The person behind the project is as important as the project itself.
We want to know about the social entrepreneur or visionary behind the project. The fellowship basically pays the salary for one person for one year — so finding out exactly who that person is is important. Create and flesh out your profile page on Drumbeat.org to tell us more about your mission in life, your bio, and your “big picture.”
(cc Mark Surman)
2) Community engagement and participation are key.
The best project proposals will clearly spell out how they’re going to engage communities and enable participation from real people. This is crucial — and often difficult to achieve in real life. So be sure to provide some meat around how your project will enable meaningful participation and community engagement. Simply saying something like “we’ll move an existing offline community over to online” or “we’ll reach out to community x or y” is probably not specific enough.
3) We’re looking for cross-pollination between open education and the open web.
The best projects aim for innovation in both the education and open web space. Great educational initatives that happen to have a web site or some online component aren’t quite it. And neither is simply building online tools or software for education projects. The best projects are true hybrids — ideas that can help reinvent education and make the web better at the same time.
4) Include a roadmap.
Promising people and ideas are great. But baked strategies and plans are even better. Try to include a clear roadmap of how you’ll spend your fellowship year, with an emphasis on outcomes, milestones and tangible products.
5) video.
If at all possible, include a short video or slide presentation. It can be as simple as you explaining the project to your web cam. You can also check out examples of other successful Shuttleworth Fellowship application videos for inspiration.
Remember: it’s not a competition — it’s a community.
Collaboration and communication between projects is encouraged. Let’s use this as a jumping off point for building ties and connections to each other that help grow the space. Check out and comment on the gallery of existing project proposals or rope others into collaborating around similar ideas.
There’s multiple ways for your project to get recognition and help.
In addition to the one-year fellowship, all applicants will be eligible for Mozilla Drumbeat’s new monthly grants for featured projects — which include $1,000 and hands-on help from Mozilla. Plus a chance to receive a travel scholarship for the Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona on November 3 – 5.
The fellowship grant amount will be equivalent to one year’s salary, and includes contribution toward expenses and travel — plus potential access to an investment pool that will match personal investments in projects by at least ten-fold. Fellows may also receive help with online fundraising, and future support in seeking grants from other sources.
The deadline for all applications is October 17.
To apply, simply fill out a project page and personal profile at Drumbeat.org. Project proposals must follow the original guidelines outlined here. Fellowship recipients will be announced by the end of the year.
One may ask why Mozilla has hired a film director[2], but it actually makes a lot of sense thanks to Mozilla Drumbeat, as Brett is working on a Drumbeat project called Web made movies.
Now Brett has been a Mozilla community member for quite some time, contributing with the good folks at CDOT / Seneca College to create popcorn.js, "a JavaScript library for merging video with semantic data". I understand that this is a bit of a mouthful, but don't close your browser window just yet! Popcorn.js is what I would describe as "hyper-video" ("hyper" as in "hypertext"): the ability to leverage data from the video and link to it, Web style. Such data include:
location. Where on earth was this video sequence made? Then display it on an interactive map
subtitles. What is being said on the soundtrack. Display it as text, and offer to translate it into the foreign language of your choice using an online translation service
license. Under which license is this video sequence made available? (Copyright, Creative Commons, etc.)
person. Who's on the screen? If we know, then link to his/her Twitter and Flickr streams in real time
topic. What is being discussed? Then link to the corresponding article in Wikipedia and in the news.
Go and see for yourself the PopCorn.js demo (in case you're stuck with an older browser that is not capable of running the demo, here is a video of the demo).
I think this is a very significant step further for video on the Web, which was until now a very TV-like, passive and linear approach, now merged with the hypertext nature of the Web (its ability to link to things in other places), so that users can click on links in order to learn more. Of course, this is just a demo. Tons of things need to be done, but I see this as a very cool way to show what HTML5 and its video element, combined with the power of JavaScript and mash-ups.
Notes
[1] I can't say how strongly I recommend watching this movie, starting with its trailer.
I’m very happy to announce that Brett Gaylor officially joined the Mozilla Drumbeat team earlier this month. He’ll be playing the role of project producer — leading his own Web Made Movies project and helping to find new Drumbeat projects over time. Brett will also be directing a documentary series about Mozilla and the future of the web.
Photo: CC-BY, Joi Ito
Brett’s already made great strides setting up the Web Made Movies lab initiative with Seneca College. The idea is to get filmmakers and web developers collaborating on new tech tools that shape what cinema will look like on the open web. The first project coming out of this lab is popcorn.js, which was demo’ed in early alpha at Whistler. A polished version of that demo is here:
Also, Brett has started work on a documentary where Mozillians will paint a picture of the open web that we’re building. He interviewed about a dozen people at Whistler and has a number of other shoots set up. Footage and a call for participation will start leaking out through the fall, with first episodes or edited clips coming by the end of the year.
For those haven’t heard of Brett before: he is the director of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, an awesome film on copyright and culture that has been broadcast in over 20 countries and seen by millions He also founded OpenSourceCinema.org, an experiment in applying open source principles to filmmaking which was used to get thousands of people to contribute to the making of RIP. In many ways, Web Made Movies is a continuation of the Open Source Cinema experiment.
People and ideas are falling into place for the Drumbeat ‘Learning, Freedom and the Web’ Festival taking place in Barcelona this fall. We released an updated web page with highlights last week:
I’m particularly excited about the unusual learning meets the web mashups in the works. Hackerspace folks sharing what they know with radical librarians to create new neighborhood learning spaces. Web developers working with textbook remixers to find better ways to teach open tech. People at the cutting edge of online identity and online learning fusing their tech together. These are all things that will happening in Barcelona.
For those who haven’t yet heard of this event, this is our first annual Mozilla Drumbeat Festival. We’ll do a different theme each year. This year the theme is ‘learning, freedom and the web’. We’re describing the event this way:
The open nature of the internet is revolutionizing how we learn. Mozilla’s 2010 Drumbeat Festival will gather teachers, learners and technologists from around the world who are at the heart of this revolution. It’s not your typical conference. Imagine a folk festival combined with a teach in with a dash of outstanding oratory thrown in for good measure. Join us in Barcelona for three days of making, teaching, hacking, inventing and shaping the future of education and the web.
We’ll announce more confirmations and content every few days starting late next week. If you’ve got ideas to add into the mix, feel free to add them onto the sandbox wiki page or post comments below. We’ll also be putting out a bigger call for ideas towards the end of the month.
If you want to attend, sign up for updates on the web page. We’ll be send out an announcement as soon as registration opens (target: August 25). If you want to volunteer, contact me directly or comment below.
Ethan Zuckerman is a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. His research focuses on the distribution of attention in mainstream and new media, the use of technology for international development, and the use of new media technologies by activists.
With Rebecca MacKinnon, Ethan co-founded international blogging community Global Voices. Global Voices showcases news and opinions from citizen media in over 150 nations and thirty languages, publishing editions in twenty languages. Through Global Voices, Ethan is active in efforts to promote freedom of expression and fight censorship in online spaces.
In 2000, Ethan founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer corps that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa. Previously Ethan helped found Tripod.com, one of the web’s first “personal publishing” sites. He blogs at http://ethanzuckerman.com/blog.
Register today for the Open Video Conference, October 1-2 in New York City!
Spreading love and rapid innovation through
“micro-genius grants”
What can Mozilla Drumbeat learn from “the Awesome Foundation” and its awesome mission to “forward the interest of Awesome in the universe, $1,000 at a time?”
A recent London chapter Awesome Foundation grant winner with his £1,000 cheque
Tim and Elizabeth’s presentation was indeed awesome — you can listen to the full audio version here. Here are some of the major takeaways for Drumbeat to chew on:
Mini-grants fill a great “small dollar” niche — especially for project testing and prototyping.
“There’s lots of opportunity to get a lot of money — from the Knight Foundations of the world, etc.,” Tim explained. “But it’s actually fairly difficult to get a modest sum of money, like $1,000. Not every project needs $100,000 — a lot of things can get done with a fairly small amount of resources.”
Sometimes you don’t need a whole donut — you just need a timbit (forgive the Canadian-ism.) Mini-grants help fill this need, especially for projects focused on early testing and prototyping. Which feels very agile and Mozilla-ish.
Sometimes great projects don't need a whole donut -- just a timbit.
Keep it lightweight and minimize bureaucracy.
Small projects often struggle to meet the infrastructure and reporting requirements of large funders. Awesome Foundation applicants only have to fill out an extremely lightweight online application form. It’s dead simple. And there’s no strings attached.
The deliberation process can be the most interesting and exciting part.
“Everyone really does have a say in what gets funded,” Elizabeth told us. “And often the deliberation process is the most interesting and exciting part.” This seems like one of the most important takeaways for Drumbeat — in some ways, using the process of deciding who should receive the award to build participation and community is the real meat of the entire effort. AF uses the deliberation process to build face-to-face community and participation in their local chapters. They’ve found that contacting and talking directly to the people who have proposed a project is the best way to decide who should get funded. And they’ve also learned that it’s best, where possible, for the selection committee to deliberate in person. “Hashing out a long list over email can be a nightmare.”
The money is just one small part of the larger value to projects.
The actual dollar amount is small. But winning provides more than just money — it provides promotion, connection and opens additional opportunities as well. The award is often the starting point of a larger relationship, as the Foundation connects projects to past winners and other useful contacts. They also often help projects gain traction for larger funding efforts from sources like Kickstarter.
There may be opportunities for Drumbeat and AF to collaborate more directly in the future.
The Awesome Foundation is thinking about creating funds that are more topic-specific — like “the Awesome Foundation for Research” or “the Awesome Foundation for Flamethrowers,” etc. Mozilla Drumbeat could potentially partner or play a role here, for awards specifically geared toward technology and the open web?
Ok. So what does all this mean for Drumbeat’s own potential mini-grants program?
How do we boil this down into next steps for Drumbeat’s own version of micro-genius grants? Here’s some early questions and rough ideas:
How ’bout we call it: “the Mozilla Drumbeat Awesome Awards.” “Awesome” is a playful word that doesn’t take itself too seriously. And gives an explicit nod to the “Awesome Foundation” grants people are already familiar with.
It’s not just a “grant” — it’s an “award.” And a badge. And some hands-on help. Winning a Drumbeat Awesome Award could include: a) a thousand bucks for your project, PLUS
b) a cool community-designed award-winner badge you can attach to your project and show off on your web site or blog. (“e.g., Mozilla Drumbeat Awesome Award Winner — September 2010″) c) some hands-on help and coaching from the Mozilla Drumbeat team. (Which is something we should be doing for promising up-and-coming projects anyway.) Let’s learn from the Awesome Foundation’s example that the value of the award is greater than just the money.
Drumbeat Awesome Award winners could get a cool Drumbeat-y badge to display on their project.
Use the selection process to build community participation and fun. This is probably the most challenging part to figure out, in terms of the precise process and mechanics. But here’s what I think we do know so far: a) We want to make the deliberation process as participatory and community-led as possible. It’s an opportunity to strengthen the community and refine what it means to be an awesome Drumbeat project, together. This is ultimately more important than just giving away a few thousand bucks. b)I think we should tie the process into our weekly community calls. We’ve been wanting to build more emerging projects and diverse voices into those calls, anyway. Having Awesome Award candidates do occasional lightning talks on their project, and then using the last Monday of every month to pick a winner would be a great way to add drama, excitement and participation.
c) The ultimate winners could be decided by a small jury. We can make the process of considering and short-listing projects for the award fairly ad hoc and organic. And make the discussion around who should win open to anyone. But then leave the ultimate decision up to a small jury to minimize complexity and make an executive decision?
We could invite Awesome Foundation members (like Tim and Elizabeth) to be on the initial jury. As a great way to help build buzz, signal collaboration between the two projects, and kick things off?
Past “Awesome Award” winners could then be added to the jury as we go. This could be a great way to maintain and strengthen relationships with past winners — by having them select the future winners. Over time, the jury becomes a kind of esteemed collection of Drumbeat project veterans that can share knowledge and offer guidance. And a great way to recognize and celebrate some of our most important customers and community members.
Look for opportunities to tie in local events? I thought it was interesting that the Awesome Foundation’s process of selecting winners ties in local chapters, and builds the idea of local community generally. Is there a way for Drumbeat to similarly tie in local events? At a project speed geek session, for example, event participants could discuss and vote on the most promising project afterward. With the winner receiving a check and Awesome Award right at the event.
Keep it lightweight. We need to minimize the transaction cost on us and on projects. If we create a bureaucratic or unweildy process, it’ll be too hard to do every month.
Let’s give it a geographic flavor. Mark has proposed that we start with a $1,000 award monthly — and include a second $1,000 award specifically for projects from Brazil. Given the importance of making Drumbeat a truly global project, this seems like a great idea to me.
At this year’s OVC, pop culture hacker and video artist Jonathan McIntosh demonstrates how video remixing can be used as a critical media literacy tool for school kids.
Embedded in the 25,000 TV commercials children are subjected to every year are a set of specific social norms and values about gender roles. Behind the colorful pieces of plastic and sugar coated cereal on sale are deeply restricting attitudes about gender. Gradually, they teach kids of all genders what is expected, what is desirable and what is possible in their lives as adults.
So how can kids be empowered to not only understand their media spaces, but also talk back—responding to a hundred million dollar marketing machine in audiovisual terms? In his presentation, Jonathan will show how simple remix video tools can be used in classroom settings to deconstruct and creatively re-frame gendered TV commercials. Jonathan has been running educational remix workshops for students for several months. He’ll share how his students learned new media technology, video editing, fair-use rights and critical media literacy.
At last year’s OVC, Jonathan McIntosh premiered his video remix, Buffy vs. Edward, to a filled auditorium at NYU. Minutes after his 15 minute session finished, the remix went viral on YouTube and hasn’t let up since. It’s been viewed 3 million times, featured on NPR, Jezebel, Slate, the LA Times, Vanity Fair and the NY Post. The remix quickly reached cult status and was subtitled into 30 languages by fans from all over the world.
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the first Open Video Conference, the Webby nominated remix is being re-released in a special BitTorrent edition that includes all 30 subs, higher res video, better sound quality and deleted scenes that did not make the final cut. Here’s the torrent link and come to this year’s OVC (October 1-2) for the world-premiere of Jonathan’s next remix!
P2PU School of Webcraft: Web developer training that’s free, open and globally accessible. Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, a new way to teach and learn web developer skills. Our classes are globally accessible, 100% free, and powered by learners, mentors and contributors like you. Our goal is to provide a free pathway to skills and certification to help people build careers on open web technology. Existing developer training is expensive, out of touch, and out of reach. We leverage peer learning powered by mentors and learners like you and self-organized study groups. We use existing open and free learning materials In this sixty minute session we'll briefly cover the inception of the Peer 2 Peer University along with details and success stories from the first three cycles of courses. We'll then dive into more detail about our collaboration with Mozilla Drumbeat including Mozilla's mission to engage the next million Mozillians. We'll present the P2PU School of Webcraft, and a case study of courses offered so far, including the first course, 'Mashing Up the Open Web.' Additionally, we'll introduce our plans to separate learning from assessment and our community driven credentialing system. At the end of the session we will invite the audience, and all of SXSW, to join a course on open web skills to be offered during the week of the event. Read more: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/p2pu/one_pager
My July Mozilla Foundation status update (sorry it’s late!) provides a details on all of this, with a special focus on where each of the bootstrap projects are headed. It also includes some reflections from Whistler. Here it is:
There is alot of detail in this slidecast (17 minutes). For people who just want the highlights:
Mozilla Summit in Whistler provided a first chance to *show* Drumbeat to Mozillians via our main projects.
Core message: Drumbeat is innovation on the open web, powered by everybody. It brings new kinds of people to innovate *with us*. Many people got this.
Across Mozilla, there is a strong desire to scale our movement. Drumbeat can help by expanding the kind of people who participate.
All three major Drumbeat projects showed early outputs at Whistler: a Universal Subtitles Alpha; a Webmade Movies demo’d popcorn.js; and School of Webcraft announced fall courses.
These projects also shared roadmaps at Whistler. Based on these roadmaps, Mozilla Foundation has awarded its first major Drumbeat grants (total = $US200k).
We’re also opening a $1000/month grant program for the most promising emerging Drumbeat projects. This will build our pipeline of projects for next year.
The ‘learning, freedom and the web’ theme for the 2010 Drumbeat Festival have been locked down. It will take place in early November in Barcelona.
There will be a strong focus on how the web powers informal learning — P2PU, hackerspaces, libraries, YouTube tutorials, neighborhood tech centres.
The slidecast above offers slightly shorter version of info presented at our most recent board meeting. I’ll continue to provide these updates every two months, following the board meeting schedule. Comments welcomed here on my blog or by email.
Figuring out who to pay attention to and who to work with is a big challenge in a community like Mozilla. Using the Whistler Science Fair as example, Les Orchard points out the underlying issue — we don’t have a quick way to parse through all the awesome to find out who’s good at what / who’s contributed what / who is doing things relevant to me. This is a common problem in online life overall. We don’t have an easy, portable and reliable way to represent our skills, achievements and social capital.
Over the last two months, I’ve been talking to people about this same challenge in another context — learning and education. Historically, we’ve used degrees and certificates to show what we know. This breaks down online — partly because we have no good way to show these credentials and partly because so much of our learning is now informal that degrees aren’t really relevant. People like P2PU, Remix Learning and others have come same conclusion Les has — we could use online badges to represent these things. Sites like Stack Overflow already use badges like this. We’re going to do the same for the Mozilla / P2PU School of Webcraft.
Which brings me to the experiment I want to do: a digital ‘backpack’ that lets you store and display badges you pick up from many different sites across the web.
Badges can provide a good way for potential friends, collaborators, co-workers and employers to size you up. However, that’s only true if they can associate all your badges with you. You don’t want to send them traipsing around the web to look at sites like P2PU, iRemix and Badger to see your badges. Instead, you want to all the badges from these different places reliably associated with your online identity.
With this in mind, I’ve been talking to Mike Hanson and others about an experiment that displays badges from multiple places as a part of the identity you build up through Firefox. Someone wanting to check you out would see something like this:
At an implementation level, this would work by storing your badges (or references to your badges) in both a personal data vault like Weave and some sort of claims system. It could work something like this:
The main ‘layers’ of this system are the 1. the badge issuer, 2. you and your online identity and 3. badge display and badge viewers. Specific to my proposed experiment are:
P2PU, Badger and iRemix -> these are places where you *get* a badge for some skill or activity. They act as ‘badge servers’ and would expose all the badges they have awarded to you in a structured and standardized way.
A personal data vault (e.g. Weave) and a claims system (Mike Hanson is working on a general system like this) -> from a user perspective, these items combine into a ‘personal badge manager’ that you access via identity tools in your browser or on a web site.
Your identity profile (webfinger?) plus social media sites like LinkedIn -> these display all of your badges and associate them with the rest of your identity.
At a practical level, we need a system like for P2PU School of Webcraft and the kind of badge platform Les is proposing for Mozilla. Connecting badges a version of your online identity the you control also presents a huge opportunity in informal digital learning – everyone working in that space needs something like this as well.
With this in mind, my proposal is to roll out an proof of concept for the idea described above using badges from Mozilla, P2PU and various orgs in the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Network. I’m going to work with Mike, Les, Philipp, Robert and others on this in the next few months, with the hope of showing the prototype at the Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival in Barcelona this November. If you’ve got ideas or want to help out, please post comments below.
Vincent Moon is an guerrilla filmmaker from Paris whose obsessive love for music takes him around the world in pursuit of new sounds and images. He’s worked with many notable mainstream artists like Tom Jones, R.E.M. and Arcade Fire, and is best known for his Takeaway Shows—single-take field recordings of indie rock musicians for the French music community La Blogotheque. The direct and honest simplicity of these videos has since been imitated by a legion of copycats, but Moon’s style remains his own.
Moon has long been a believer in artistic freedom and sharing, and has employed Creative Commons licensing on his works for years. He’s also an expert at skipping the middle men—record labels, producers, and others who get between an artist and his art. At OVC, we’ll explore with Moon how far artists should go for “openness”—when can openness actually compromise artistic integrity? How can artists balance a respect for open technologies with a desire to present the best possible work? What challenges do filmmakers and others have in embracing open video?
Besides making music videos, Moon also makes experimental films and documentaries. He’ll share some of his work with us at the event. For a beautiful example, see Moon’s takeaway show with the Seattle folk quintet Fleet Foxes.
For those in the NYC area, OVA will be hosting an informational meeting next Tuesday, August 10th from 7-8pm . We’ll share details on conference volunteer opportunities, take t-shirt sizes, and chat with NYU net scholar Gabriella Coleman. Plus, free pizza.
For more information, get in touch using our volunteer sign-up form. We’ll send exact details to everyone who signs up.
Jamie Wilkinson, internet culture researcher & software engineer, is joining the speaker lineup for this year’s Open Video Conference. While working at Rocketboom, Jamie co-created the Know Your Meme video series & Internet meme database, selected as one of TIME Magazine’s Top 50 websites of 2009. He is also a founding member of the Free Art & Technology (FAT) Lab, an open-source research & development group. In 2007 & 2008 Wilkinson taught the “Internet Famous” class in Parsons graduate design & technology program, where students’ grades depended on how much Internet traffic they can generate. His work has been featured on NBC, TIME, NYTimes, CNN, CurrentTV, MAKE, ArtNews and more.
Jamie and his friends at FAT and Graffiti Research Labs are pushing the boundaries of pop-culture and open technology with projects like Laser TAG , LED Throwies, and Grafitti Markup Language (GML). GML (“The new digital standard for tomorrow’s vandals”) is a file format for archiving motion-captured graffiti tags. In other words, a specific piece of graffiti can be captured in real time, stored as a file, and played back as a video visualization or even reproduced physically (with the help of a robot arm holding a marker). GML is an open format, so graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data. The project aims to bring together two seemingly disparate communities that share an interest hacking systems, whether found in code or in the city.
Recent GRL projects are listed here. Check out Open Video Conference, this October 1-2, for a look into some cool new video projects.
At 22 years old, Amelia Andersdotter is the youngest member of the European Parliament, representing a new Swedish political party. That’s interesting in its own right.
What’s perhaps more interesting is that she represents Piratpartiet, a political movement for freedom of information, transparent government, and intellectual property reform. Piratpartiet (“Pirate Party”) has a full legislative platform, but to many concerned copyright holders it’s just a platform to legitimize file sharing. Perhaps that’s because Piratpartiet recently announced its intent to host the Pirate Bay servers from inside the Swedish parliament, invoking parliamentary immunity.
Boosters of the Pirate Party insist that it’s not simply a political stunt. Instead, it’s a fork in the road: “New technology has brought us to a crossroads,” reads the party platform. Either we find new ways of compensating artists, and ask the market to adapt—they say—or we embrace ever more extensive government control and surveillance of what citizens do on the internet.
Copying and sharing are essential parts of the success formula for the web. And though the web has long been a wild west, with frontier zones of varying danger, it’s now an essential part of everyone’s lives.
There are fundamental questions we must be asking: how deeply should governments be involved in policing and protecting information? What expectation of privacy should web users expect? And how will creators be compensated in a thoroughly media saturated world?
Piratpartiet is the third largest political party in Sweden, and Amelia is its leading spokeswoman. Whether you agree with her or think she is destroying the creative economy, her perspective is pressingly relevant and interesting.
Join us this October 1-2 and join the conversation with Amelia—and many others—about the future of video on the web.
Communications scholar Barbara van Schewick, of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, has joined the speaker lineup for this year’s Open Video Conference. Barbara will share insights on video innovation and the architecture of the web, based on her recent book Internet Architecture and Innovation. The book has earned widespread acclaim (including praise from figures like Lawrence Lessig, who called it “the very best” analysis of its kind).
Barbara’s research focuses on the economic, regulatory, and strategic implications of communication networks. In particular, she explores how changes in the architecture of computer networks affect the economic environment for innovation and competition on the Internet, and how the law should react to these changes. This work has made her a leading expert on the issue of network neutrality.
Professor van Schewick is the Faculty Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society and an assistant professor of electrical engineering (by courtesy) at Stanford’s Department of Electrical Engineering.
Lance Weiler, story architect and culture hacker, is giving a talk at this year’s Open Video Conference about data-driven storytelling.
Lance is internationally recognized as a pioneer in indie film production and distribution. WIRED magazine named him one of twenty-five people helping re-invent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood.
In addition to his work as a writer and director, Lance is behind some downright amazing transmedia storytelling, incorporating augmented reality, social interaction, and gaming elements.
In 2006, Lance founded the WorkBook Project, an open creative network that connects filmmakers, musicians, game designers and software developers. Lance is definitely a resource, and we look forward to his talk at this year’s Open Video Conference.
Last week, the core Drumbeat Festival team met, clarified our vision and next steps. Here are some of the big headlines:
We’re happy to announce that Festival partner Creative Commons is providing us with the support of their international program manager, Michelle Thorne. Michelle will work directly with Mark Surman and myself to develop Festival programming. Michelle works in Berlin, which will help us build up participation by European residents.
By the middle of next week, we will start making announcement about confirmed programming. We’ll also lay out a solid timeline, so it will be much easier to build the buzz, backed with clear information regarding registration open dates, the process for submitting ideas, etc.
We talked about how we want to engage the multilingual participant cohort we expect. We have committed to working with the Mozilla localization community in Spain to provide the most important Festival information in Spanish and Catalan. On site at the Festival, we will provide Spanish and Catalan translations every time we convene all Festival participants and provide guidelines for language issues at the smaller sessions.
We’re getting close to nailing down our venues. Our local lead is in dialogue with the following venues: Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), the Arts and Design Promotion (FAD), and FABRA COATS (a converted factory space used for community events). MACBA and FAD share a public square that we are working with local authorities to secure for outdoor events and programming, as well. More updates to come – stay tuned!
We’ll be setting up a list serv/group for people who want to be really involved and advise us in Festival programming.
Join us Saturday, August 7th for a look at some cool people and projects that are keeping the web open. Plus, free pizza and beer!
About Mozilla Drumbeat
Will the web still be open in 100 years? Mozilla thinks it can, and should, and must be. That's why we're starting Mozilla Drumbeat, an invitation to everyday internet users to imagine ideas and projects that build a more open web. We want you to get involved!
We are building a new community that includes teachers, artists, designers, filmmakers, writers, lawyers, and policymakers—not just open web geeks. Online, Drumbeat is catalyzing new open web projects that address critical needs and make the Web healthier. Check out current projects or initiate your own at www.drumbeat.org/projects.
About Drumbeat NYC
The Drumbeat NYC event will showcase cool projects and people that are keeping the web open. Come to Drumbeat NYC and learn how you can get involved, or show others what you've been working on.
Drumbeat events aren't just for geeks. We're here to weave together local networks of creative, Web-loving people and start new projects to make the web better.
This piece was published as part of a weeklong online dialogue hosted by Arts Journal called “Creative Rights & Artists,” to which I was asked to contribute. Join the conversation here.
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At the risk of being accused of changing the subject, or worse, heresy, I want to offer the following:
Fighting on the policy front is not the only way for artists (or “creators” going forward) to maintain and expand their creative rights in our communications system.
I’m going to argue that there are many points of intervention when it comes to the evolution of technology in society, that artists are already taking the lead on these other fronts (in addition to policy), and that recognizing and leveraging creators’ strengths outside of policy-focused strategies will make the policy battles go much better for us.
Why am I doing this? I have spent a few years fighting the good policy battle in the media and communications sectors. As one of the wonkier NAMAC board members, I still do. I can’t argue with a lot of what’s already been said…
Policy is hard. Check.
Big money tends to win in Washington. Check.
The groups working on cultural and communication policies for the public benefit need more resources. Check.
Representing and empowering “artists” in policy debates is a non-trivial proposition. Check.
However, I see at least two problematic trends in the conversation so far. First, I don’t want us to get stuck on what I would call policy determinism. The idea that “getting the policy right” will make the world a better place for creators doesn’t always work. As the political is the art of compromise, no one wins 100% of what they want out of a policy debate. Reforms come with new loopholes baked in (see campaign finance). The result of government action are never predictable (see, ARPANET). Regulators are captured by the industries they were meant to oversee (see, well, any regulator).
The bottom line is that policy changes are not the sole (or often the most important) mechanisms shaping the structure and impact of any technology or industry.
Second, I’m afraid we could run in endless circles trying to find the magic bullet that would strengthen the creator’s voice in the policy debate. I hope we have some great ideas, but we’re up against several limiting factors.
Leaders in every policy change effort are trying to get everyone, including creators, involved in their thing. As I sat down to write this piece, I got an email asking me to help involve artists in the climate change fight. There’s only so much activism time in the day.
While I support the idea of an awesome iPhone app for creator activism, and I really like what I read about Fractured Atlas’s Bay Area Cultural Asset Map in Ian’s post, I’m always wary of Shiny Object Syndrome. Online tools are just tools, and a hammer is only going to get you so far without a blueprint.
Worst of all, we’re limited by the fact that, when push comes to shove, policy fights just aren’t that sexy, especially when technology is at the heart of the debate. Put as much lipstick on that pig as you want, making law has too much in common with making sausage to turn most people on. I suppose I slaughtered that analogy.
For all these reasons, we have to understand what else creators can do and what they are already doing that can play into creating the world of boundless creative freedom that we’d like to see. In the immortal words of President Bartlett, as he gave Sam Seaborn a priceless chess lesson (Season 3, Episode 58), before you make your next move, you need to “See the whole board.”
So, what other tools and sites for intervention are there when it comes to creative freedom online (or on the airwaves)? To get there, it’s important to have a working theory of technological change and evolution.
There are a lot of theories to choose from. For working out social change strategies, I always return to Lawrence Lessig’s argument at the beginning of his first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. To make his first and now famous point that “code is law,” he first offered a model of how any complex system or subject, like the internet, is regulated through four modes or “constraints.” These are:
Architecture: the “code” or design of the system.
Markets: the interplay of choice and competition within a system.
Norms: how people act upon and within the system.
Law: what the government wants the system to do.
This gets really complex if you think about how each of these modes shapes the others, but we’ll leave that aside.
Primarily, this model suggests that law (or policy) is just 25% of the picture when it comes to regulating the internet (or the health care system, etc, etc.). At all times, complex systems like the internet are malleable forms of potential being poked, prodded, deformed, and constantly reformed by these powerful forces.
And I’m going to tell you this is really good news. It means there are at least four points of entry for those of us who want our communication system to evolve to reflect our values on creative expression, even more if we start mixing and matching. It means that your engagement strategy with the creative communities you touch can be nimble, responsive to change, and value multiple forms of participation. Even better news: creators are acting through every mode already. If you’re reading this, chances are you too are shaping our communications system through multiple means. It’s time to name it, claim it, and think through how each mode of impact can support the others.
Following are some examples of creators at work on each non-policy front. Full disclosure, I am involved in some of these efforts; that’s just how I know about them.
Architecture: A new project, Web Made Movies is a laboratory bringing together film makers and web developers to explore the full potential of HTML5 for the online video experience. Together video producers and developers can embed video with metadata that interacts with other streams of information and users online, making internet video a more webby (and more exciting) experience for audience/participants than ever before, all based on free, open standards.
Markets: Every time a recording artist opts to use a Creative Commons license and explains their choice to their audience, they are adding a new element to the music marketplace, daring to share (and share alike), and increasing mindshare for the concepts of radical online openness and new business models for working musicians.
Norms: At next year’s digital arts and culture festival Transmediale in Berlin, an artist (or artists) will win the first Open Web Award of 5000 Euro for works that are on the web and about the web, use open and free technology, and incite participation and collaboration. There are many artists working along these lines, and nothing creates incentives for leaders pioneering new norms like a cash prize and recognition!
There are many more examples of creators influencing the direction of communications technology through non-policy interventions. In fact, I hope that respondents or those leaving comments can link to other efforts. Creators are good at creating: new designs, new markets, and new norms – we need to recognize those strengths and add them to our strategic toolbox with deep intention.
Now, back to policy. Why am I bringing these ideas into a discussion on artist’s creative rights and policy?
First off, on principle, if you don’t like the system, innovate. Break some rules, slay some sacred cows, claim your rights in practice, and let the legal realm follow. Artists and creators have always done this (see the Howl trials).
Secondly, the big players in media, IT, and communications, the Microsofts, Comcasts, Apples, and Googles, are always playing all four fields. Each shapes the design of the communication systems through their technologies, each has a market strategy, each spends millions on advertising as just one intervention in shaping norms, and each has a government affairs team. It reminds me of a pep talk at an elections training for activists who normally work on issue advocacy (as opposed to party types focused on elections). The speaker said, “If you don’t do elections, elections will do you.” If we, as a community of arts advocates, aren’t bringing strategic interventions into the realms of architecture, markets, and norms, those realms will do us. in.
Finally, we’ve got an amazing story to tell. Let me repeat, “creators are demanding, and building, the open future of creative freedom in communications.” As several participants in this group blog have pointed out, narrative is one of our constantly renewable, effective resources in the policy battle. I think Casey from FMC brought this up first. That makes a lot of sense, as FMC is very good at bringing musicians to the table to tell their stories.
This is especially relevant in the Obama era. Nothing wins in the rhetorical war over technology policy right now more than the innovation appeal. Fact: when the new President needed someone to lead the FCC and, in theory, defend net neutrality, he did not go knocking on the doors of the dozen or so established and qualified public interest communications lawyers. Why pick a confirmation fight for someone with a public record of controversial positions when you can get a leader from the innovation-obsessed culture of Silicon Valley, with just enough government experience, at half the political price? This bent toward perceived innovators vs. public interest champs was a recurring theme in the Obama appointments in the information and communication technology space.
Fact: for a long time, the big ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, etc.) were beating Google all around the FCC on the net neutrality issue, because at the end of the day, Google was providing Web services and “didn’t know what it was talking about” concerning network provision and management. So Google called their bluff, and decided to build their own damn network, open access and network neutral and promised to share everything they learn along the way with the public and regulators. It’s a powerful gamble, and I hope it pays off.
I’m not suggesting that the arts advocacy community build a fiber network, of course (although…). I’m just trying to make the point that, in this policy environment, arguments premised on values like creative freedom are only going to get us so far. Government decision makers are looking for proof in the pudding. They want people at the table who are building the future as innovators. I believe we have those people.
Apologies for the long piece. To close what may be my one contribution to this group blog (busy week), I hope we see winning policy battles as just one means to a greater end: ever-expanding creative rights for everyone. I hope we take a good look at all of our communities’ strengths as change agents in the world, and how to leverage each strength to support the others. And I hope this helps us expand our notion of creators as activists and what it means to offer engagement opportunities for creators.
image by Donald Judge at Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Repeat after me:
“Mozilla Drumbeat Festival is NOT a conference.”
Recently, Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation asked me to act as global coordinator for the first annual Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, slated for November 3-5 in Barcelona.
The theme is “Learning, Freedom, and the Web,” and we are now working hard to create an open space where everyone who comes (up to 500) can be both teacher and learner.
This week, I have been designing our planning framework, and working with Mark and others on the team to imagine how this kind of radically open peer-learning space will work.
We have some ideas and some questions.
From the planning page:
The Festival is not a conference with a structure of tracks, plenaries, sessions, and workshops. Instead, imagine a hybrid network of curated and self-organized groupings that meet and disperse in the spaces provided throughout the Festival…
Each grouping will gather in largely pre-determined times and spaces to move their Festival project from conversation/showcasing to action/state changes. Grouping leaders are responsible for designing an engaging co-learning experience, because people can vote with their feet.
Participants will build their own Festival experience by committing to working with some groupings through the whole Festival and sampling among the others. Every grouping is “in a fishbowl,” transparently available to any Festival participant to experience at their own level of commitment…
Every participant should come committed to playing, working and learning together. Everyone has something to teach. Everyone has something to learn.
We have listed some of the groupings that are already defined here. You can also find a list of confirmed participants and some ideas we have for other open and interactive experiences we are planning.
One problem is that “groupings” is not a very compelling term for what we are trying to create. Here are some ideas we’ve had:
Tents: fits into the “Festival” concept. However, once we’ve designed the space, there may not be any actual tents.
Pods: I’m partial to this one. I like the idea of participants joining a series of pods.
At this point, we’re totally open to recommendations. Use the comments section below to weigh in. Which of these do you like (or hate) and why? Can you suggest another term to describe these ad hoc co-learning groups?
Also, if you have ideas for tents/nodes/pods you would like to propose and design, please let us know. You can suggest one in the comments, and I’ll get back to you, and we’ve also set up a sort of suggestion box called the Drumbeat Festival Awesome Sandbox on the planning wiki that anyone can use to leave ideas for us to consider at this early planning phase. Anyone can sign up for an editing account on the Mozilla wiki.
So, please, be in touch with your recommendations and ideas. My contact information is here.
UPDATE:
Some new ideas have come through for naming the groupings:
The Mozilla Summit far surpassed my expectations. The event was personal, technical, creative and inspiring all at once.
The Mozilla Summit is an invitation-only gathering of some of the most active contributors in the Mozilla community. This year's theme was "Be More Like the Web".
I was lucky enough to be among those who were invited, due to my involvement with the Drumbeat project. There were a total of around 600 Mozilla community members at the event: hackers, localizers, testers, marketers, and the individuals formerly known as 'users'.
Background
Mozilla is most well known for the open source browser, Firefox. In addition to Firefox, there are number of other software projects like Jetpack at Mozilla Labs. Although Mozilla has been incredibly successful with open source software, they're ambitious and ready for the next big challenge. As stewards of the open web, Mozillians around the world are banding together through Drumbeat: a collection of practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas that improve the open web. The Summit was our forum to share the project with the greater Mozilla community.
Day 0: Arrival & Reception
I flew in from Alaska, direct from my family vacation to Vancouver and then hopped on a bus to Whistler, BC. I arrived on Tuesday afternoon just in time to join the Mozilla Foundation meeting and presenter's workshop. I spent the better part of the afternoon working on a speed geek with my new partner in crime at P2PU, Pippa Buchanan. We rehearsed our talk a few times and got valuable feedback for the next day.
The rest of the attendees arrived in time for a reception, where we had a chance to get to know each other and kick off the event properly.
Day 1: Getting Started
The day started off early with a few inspiring keynote speakers and an extended lunch break to watch some of the World Cup. After lunch I headed to a session from Mozilla Messaging where they demoed experimental Thunderbird mail client features.
Photo CC-BY-NC-SA, Nathaniel James
The next session was "Drumbeat in 2100 Seconds," led by Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. Mark took about four minutes to describe Drumbeat and why it is important to Mozilla before splitting the crowd into groups for the speed geek sessions. All three of the featured Drumbeat projects (P2PU School of Webcraft, Web Made Movies, & Universal Subtitles) were represented along with Drumbeat Events and a couple others. The speed geek session went really well; we got a few people to join the project.
Day 2: In the Groove
The second day was filled with more sessions, and some especially interesting HTML5 demos including WebGL and the <audio> and <video> tags. I had a chance to talk to Ben Moskowitz about open video and the upcoming Open Video Conference in New York City.
The Flight of the Navigator is a WebGL demo rendered in the browser that built by the Mozilla audio team. The demo pulls in live data and video from the web while rendering. Everyone in the crowd was awe-struck.
I spent the better part of the afternoon at the Summit Science Fair. There were around thirty individual booths showcasing all kinds of software. Everything from accessibility for the blind to a JavaScript framework for building Firefox extensions.
Photo CC-BY-NC-SA, Michael Morgan
We rounded out the day with the Summit World Expo and International Dinner, where representatives from the over forty countries in attendance showcased their local communities and cultures.
After dinner, there was a late night JetPack hackathon. I built a Firefox extension (more details in a later blog post) in just a few hours. The extension is called 'Clickable Phone Numbers' and it makes any number on the web into a click-to-call number using the Twilio API.
Day 3: Grand Finale
The final day of the conference was a bit more laid back, we talked about the Drumbeat event strategy and did a bit of planning for Drumbeat NYC (August 7th) and the Drumbeat Festival (November 3-5) which is going to be held in Barcelona. I attended a few more lightning talks and a session on the future of client-side debugging.
Pippa and I ran our session on the P2PU School of Webcraft. There was a 10 minute intro, and then we split the audience into four groups with tasks:
Design a course for P2PU School of Webcraft
Brainstorm a list of core web developer skills
Brainstorm a list of 'soft-skills' that employers look for in web developers
Come up with ways to legitimize P2PU School of Webcraft so that we have some 'street-cred'
The session went incredibly well, so well that we had a lineup of people to talk to for almost 30 minutes after it was over.
At the end of the day, we took a Gondola ride up to the peak for a farewell party of sorts. The views of Whistler were magnificent and the "Army of Awesome" was incredibly fun. We enjoyed a delicious dinner, cartoony mascots, toasts, and a dance party before calling it a night.
Day 4: Departure
We left Whistler by bus through the mountains, luckily unobstructed by rock slides. Now I'm on the ground in Seattle for the next week, followed by a trip to Portland for OSCON. Get in touch if you're nearby.
P2PU just got coverage in The Hindu, which, according to Wikipedia "is the second-largest circulated daily English newspaper in India." The author, Ajai Sreevatsan, quoted me and mentioned my course "Mashing Up the Open Web."
Video discussions
John Britton, course organiser of 'Mashing up the Open Web,' says time zones are a problem while attempting to simulate a "sit around the fire and learn by discussion" environment virtually. "But lively weekly video discussions (using a combination of Skype and IRC) to review materials and work through the questions presented by the peers still happen."
The 'class' is very diverse, he says. "We have peers from Korea, Japan, India, Spain, the U.S. and Canada. They're artists, technologists, environmentalists, and traditional students."
Aside: This blog post was posted while on a moving bus from Vancouver to Seattle. The wonders of modern technology.
I mentioned in the announcement of batucada, that we are dropping Drupal for the next phase of development on the Drumbeat website project. We’ve decided to build Batucada with the Python web framework django. There are a bunch of reasons why I think django is a good choice, but the primary one is that people are already using it for a number of Mozilla web projects, including AMO and SUMO. Having other people in the organization who are familiar with the framework is helpful, of course, and it means we can reuse work done elsewhere within the webdev team (particularly in fairly generic areas like localization, caching, etc). It also means that our IT department is already familiar with deployment issues.
Django is also simply a great framework. The ability to package up reusable pieces of a project as applications means that we should be able to take advantage of a lot of great work done by folks working on similar web applications, and where we build applications ourselves, we’ll be able to release those as separate reusable components. If the work we do can help other people build Django based social web applications that use open web technologies, then we will be further working towards Mozilla’s mission of promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web.
In order to stay on track, I’m working on a roadmap and a set of core principles that will guide our development of batucada. The roadmap is a work in progress, but I think we’ve got a good set of principles hashed out:
Social – Batucada will be a social application. People and activities will be at the centre of the experience.
Intelligent – Batucada should be able to suggest connections based on a users activity and profile information.
Data Ownership – Users will control who has access to their personal data and will be able to export their data easily.
Open Web – Batucada will be built using Open Web technologies and will use open standards to integrate with other applications whenever it makes sense to do so.
It goes without saying that Batucada will be Open Source as well of course!
I’m starting preliminary research on people’s perception of different types of media. If you have a few minutes, please take my survey. Would love your thoughts and feedback in this format before I launch a larger-scale version of this. (with, of course a less biased sample than my readership :)
I’m excited to announce a new phase of development for the Drumbeat website project. We are about to begin development on a new project, code named batucada, that will eventually power drumbeat.org. With batucada, the future of drumbeat.org will be more social and will have the open web at its core.
To understand how we got here, it’s important to give a brief history of the drumbeat website. The current alpha and beta phases of development were very experimental. We didn’t have a clear idea of what the end result would be. We wanted something that would allow us to experiment and iterate quickly and so building on a CMS was a natural decision. Drupal was a good choice for an open source CMS product. Building the site on Drupal allowed us to get something up and running quickly and gave us a good chance to see how people interacted with the site. We always knew that the technology choices we had made were probably not going to be permanent. Any CMS product is going to introduce tight coupling between code and content changes, which means that developers need access not just to code, but also to the configuration data stored in a database. Providing this in a way that does not compromise users privacy has been a challenge and a barrier for people wanting to contribute code to the project. Additionally, while Drupal’s module system is very handy for getting something up and running quickly, at times it makes adding custom functionality and integrations more difficult than if we were using a standard web framework. The lack of unit testing in Drupal also means that we can’t create a robust set of test cases for each feature we add to the site, and can’t take advantage of things like Continuous Integration, which we’re big fans of. I’m aware that many of these issues are going to be further addressed in Drupal 7, but given the amount we’re looking to change in the next major release, waiting and upgrading presents its own set of challenges.
We now have dedicated technical staff and a much clearer idea of what drumbeat.org should be, so it’s a good time to take the user feedback we’ve collected from the alpha and beta versions of the site, and apply our experimental results to a production ready, 1.0 product. Batucada will represent a radical shift for drumbeat.org. The vision is a much simpler, user centric site that integrates well with other web applications.
Social and the Open Web
Thinking about where we want to take the site next, one thing is really clear to me, drumbeat.org is a great use case for a social web application: connecting people with projects and local events. Furthermore, if we are to promote the open web, we should be using open web technologies wherever they make sense. Batucada will use open web standards to integrate with other web applications whenever possible. Users should not have to do everything on drumbeat.org. Instead, drumbeat.org should be a “launch pad” for projects, and activities performed on other sites should make their way back to drumbeat.org.
The next version of drumbeat.org will have social at its core and will be built on Open Web goodness. Where the current version is pretty document centric, the new version will be entirely people centric.
Global Community
The Drumbeat community is not centered in any one country or region. Drumbeat participants come from all corners of the globe. Events have been held in Brazil, Canada, Germany and community members are currently organizing events in France and the United States. Given the global nature of the movement, we will be building in support for localization and internationalization from day one and will be seeking help from localizers who want to contribute to the project. The code name for the project, batucada, is a nod to Drumbeat community members in Brazil who kicked off the first two Drumbeat events.
Open Source and Community Driven
Another thing that is clear is that drumbeat.org should be an open source project. We are Mozilla, we make open source software. For a variety of reasons, we failed to fully capitalize on this with the current version of the site. The next version will be launched as an open source project and we will be actively encouraging ideas and contributions. We want to build a community of people actively building the software behind the project. If this sounds exciting to you, join us! We’ll need software developers, front end designers, UX engineers, QA testers, localizers and a whole host of other skill-sets.
I’ll be publishing an initial roadmap in the near future and will be looking for feedback.
Using Drumbeat to build the next Drumbeat
Drumbeat.org is all about projects. It makes perfect sense to us to make batucada itself a Drumbeat project. Using existing tools to build new one will allow us to step into the shoes of project maintainers on the site – a perfect way to experience first hand how a future version of the site could better serve the needs of our users. Plus, as a programmer, I like recursion! The batucada project page on Drumbeat is a work in progress, but will be used to facilitate work on the project. Join up on the project page to help build this, and share ideas and feedback.
So there you have it! I’m really excited to kick off this next phase of development. This is the first of a series of posts, in the near future I’ll be outlining some of the technical choices we’ve made (language, framework, etc) as well as a set of values I’m going to pitch for us to follow while we work on this project. Much more to come.
This coming September we'll be launching our first cycle of six week courses including Introduction to HTML5 and Building Social with the Open Web. We still have space for a few more courses, so whether you can teach a class for novice web developers, or run a workshop for web developers managing thousands of user accounts, we'd love to have you involved.
Following on the delivery model developed by P2PU, course organizers volunteer to take existing open learning materials or develop their own content and lead a group of peers through 6 weeks of online classes. Courses focus on project based learning in a peer environment and are proposed, created and led by members of the web development community — so the content will always be up to date with the latest technologies.
Over the next 18 months we'll be developing a new way of assessing and recognizing skills, hacker attitudes and knowledge that rewards project portfolios and realistic developer challenges, rather than hours spent cramming for a meaningless exam.
We'd love for you to become a part of this project and until July 18 we're inviting course proposals for P2PU School of Webcraft. We've made it really easy to get started, just fill out the proposal form, it takes less than 5 minutes!
If you're unable to commit to organising a course this September, there are other great ways to become a part of the community whether as a curriculum adviser, web development guru and of course, as a student.
Mozilla Drumbeat is a global community of people who use web technology in new ways that help them understand, participate, improve and take control of their online lives. The P2PU School of Webcraft is just one of many exciting projects that Drumbeat supports. Find out more here.
Mozilla Drumbeat: Innovation on the open web. Powered by everybody.
On Sunday morning, I led a workshop on the Mozilla Drumbeat project Peer 2 Peer University School of Webcraft. I was very pleased to have 20+ attendees show up to the AMC Media Lab bright and early on the last day of the conference. Below are some highlights from the workshop, including questions and critiques, course suggestions and an early start on a new course called Open Web Toolkit.
After a round of introductions and ice breakers (“What’s your favorite thing that you can do with the web – your web super power?”), I started us off with a brief description Mozilla Drumbeat, and then we dug in to discuss the School of Webcraft and begin to brainstorm the kinds of courses and other support that the School will need to be successful.
For the uninitiated, Mozilla Drumbeat is supporting a new Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) project, the School of Webcraft. While anyone can use P2PU to organize a course on any topic, we are working with them to create their first comprehensive set of courses that will allow anyone (with the connection and bandwidth) to study web development and become proficient in open web technology.
After introducing the concept, I asked the participants to brainstorm potential challenges for this model. Here are a few main questions that came up:
Why should people trust the course content? I think that once people get used to working through P2PU, they will see that the course content is transparent and open to review and improvement (a little like Wikipedia), and every course organizer(P2PU-speak for “teacher”) will be open to improvements as their courses develop.
What about accessibility? People wondered about issues like basic web access, disabilities, different learning styles, and the range of potential learners’ starting points (think prerequisites). In that order, I suggested that P2PU won’t solve the web access problem, but that I hope in the long run that we can partner with community technology centers and libraries to provide the necessary connectivity. I wasn’t aware of P2PU’s strategy for supporting people with disabilities, but would check into it (starting with this blog post, which is going to the P2PU team). I believe that P2PU course organizers will get better over time at working with diverse learning styles; as a volunteer effort (course organizers are unpaid, co-learners with the other participants), we will probably struggle with this for a while. Finally, I mentioned that P2PU course descriptions give a pretty clear indication of previous knowledge participants will need to be successful in a course. Questions around language and culture differences came up, too. I know that the P2PU team is working hard on these issues, and that we should see courses in Spanish and Portuguese pretty early on.
Are P2PU courses focused on book learning or hands-on experience? Definitely, the latter. Participants should finish all School of Webcraft courses with at least one project they built for every course and leave the program with a portfolio, a key piece for moving from education to employment.
Is the School of Webcraft accredited? This is a big, big question in the open education movement – how do we compete with the traditional institutions that have a kind of monopoly on accreditation. It’s also one of the main reasons that Mozilla Drumbeat is investing in Webcraft – we believe that we can organize all the big players in the open source space to create a peer-recognized certification that anyone should be proud to put on their resume. Apparently, we aren’t without precedent in this area. One workshop participant pointed out that CompTIA’s certification services began in a similar, peer-driven manner. If you are interested in the accreditation question, please leave a comment or contact me, as that conversation is ongoing.
Then, with just a little time left, we got onto the really good stuff: brainstorming the kinds of things people wanted to see offered through the School of Webcraft.
We got a few suggestions, namely:
Design for Developers: one participant said that a major trend in hiring for web development is that clients are expecting developers to have an eye for design and the ability to design something beautiful in addition to building something functional.
Developer Lingo 101: A course to ease the pain we get when bombarded with techno-speak. I mentioned that I think this will be covered in the Web 101 course, and someone else offered that the School could have an online glossary that everyone in all the courses could use and improve.
Open Web Security: ’nuff said. Good idea.
Open Web Toolkit: this is the one where I thought there was the most potential for building out some course content…
Open Web Toolkit Brainstorm
This course suggestion came from one participant recalling the pain of acquiring a toolkit for web development without any clear recommendations. Basic web development tools include: text editors (you just should NOT use a word processor to write code), version control systems (like Subversion and Mercurial), FTP clients, IRC clients, and Firefox plugins like Greasemonkey. Clients, and plugins, and bears, oh my! This could definitely make a new learner’s head spin. I can really see the value of a course dedicate to a peer review of all these options, where the participants each leave with a toolkit of their choice.
The P2PU team agrees, so we will be following up with the participants and seeing who wants to get involved in shaping that course up for the September course cycle.
Thank you so much to those who participated. We will be following up soon.
As always, AMC was a powerful experience, and I believe Drumbeat’s debut there went very well. I only hope my next few posts can capture some of the most important ideas and outcomes.
Melissa (left) introduced her new Toronto-based project, Pixelpowrrr. Recognizing that working with content management systems like WordPress and Drupal can often be expensive, frustrating, and lonely for grassroots organizations without tech support, Melissa and her friends set up Pixelpowrrr as a kind of DIY, community-driven tech support shop for organizers.
Anne Jonas talked about Miro Community, a project she is supporting as a Digital Arts Service Corps member. Anne is taking Miro’s video technology to its logical next step – supporting people at the local level to use their open source web portal to build video sites that highly relevant to their communities. While it’s true that anyone can upload videos to YouTube pretty easily, those videos can often get lost amid the sea of LOLcats and celebrity fare. With Miro Community, anyone can set up a dedicated site for all their “lost videos” and connect with niche audiences. I think it’s especially important to note that Anne is bridging the technologists at Miro’s Participatory Culture Foundation with their users. In other words, you can make great open source technology, but it’s also important to invest in “the social layer,” to reach out and support the participants you hope will use the technology.
FreeGeek Columbus‘ Kirk Kimmel Clued us into his personal project, OpenMediaForge.org, which aggregates technical knowledge on open source alternatives for media production and distribution online.
The key point is that Kirk, not unlike Anne, is trying to link online media makers to the technologists writing the code that makes it possible.
Kirk has struggled to explain to the technologists why his project is necessary; engineers don’t always understand that tool users often have a very different experience than tool makers. This was a persistent theme throughout the workshop.
Finally, I introduced the participants to the Mozilla Drumbeat initiative, where we are trying to open up the ability to shape and control the web to every kind of user. To help the participants get a clear sense of the kinds of open web projects we want to support, I focused on Peer 2 Peer University’s School of Webcraft, where we are building a free, online, project-driven school that will take learners from the basics of HTML though Drupal and all the way to sophisticated HTML5 applications.
Then, we turned it over to our participants and had a lively discussion.
Here are some highlights:
We had some technical questions, like whether open source software is more secure than proprietary solutions (in general, it is!) and requests for best web hosting solutions (in general, they all come with problems, but Dreamhost, Mayfirst/People Link, and using virtual private servers got good mentions).
The concepts of appropriate and pragmatic technology strategies were key. Sometimes an effort will start using proprietary solutions like YouTube or Facebook, because they need to act fast and privacy or other issues aren’t a major concern. Later, that effort might develop the infrastructure to adopt open and/or community-controlled solutions. Sometimes, the web isn’t the right solution at all. Depending on the community one is mobilizing, local radio or print communications might be the most appropriate.
We did a little myth-busting about free/libre/open source software. For example, I pointed out that the open source ecosystem is supported economically by huge corporate interests, so that while it is, in many ways, superior to proprietary technology to those who value freedom, choice, and user control, it is not developed in a vacuum of capital solely by a band of heroic hacker-activists.
The deepest conversation, from my perspective, revolved around the perceived divide between developers and users. The participants recommended a number of great strategies for bridging that divide including: non-techie participation on development teams, fostering new entrants to development coming from diverse backgrounds (like the School of Webcraft intends to do), and supporting better documentation by developers working with writers who know diverse audience.
Damian Kulash, lead singer and guitarist of the rock band OK Go, will give a talk at this year’s Open Video Conference.
OK Go is perhaps best known on the web for its mega-viral “Here it Goes Again,” the famous music video of the band dancing on treadmills. OK Go choreographed and shot the video themselves, and posted it to YouTube in 2006 without the record label’s permission. A legion of bloggers and positive word of mouth helped popularize the video and launched the band into the stratosphere. “Here it Goes Again” has been transmitted over 200 million times and counting.
Since then, OK Go has produced a number of other massively viral videos, each more creative than the last (be sure to check out the amazing video for “This Too Shall Pass,” for which the band built an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine). The videos have been an effective promotional tool and have continued to earn the band exposure. But earlier this year, a decision by the band’s record label to forbid embedding videos on blogs and other social media created a small controversy. The move frustrated fans and followers, and views dropped precipitously. “When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000,” Kulash explains in a recent New York Times op-ed.
As one of the bands to most successfully leverage the web, OK Go are at the center of a discussion of how artists can reap success from sharing and open networks.In addition to being a major creative force, Kulash and company are also outspoken advocates for an open internet—in 2008, Kulash served as a lead witness for a House judiciary committee hearing on net neutrality.
Join us this Fall to hear from Kulash about the relationship between artists, their fans, and the new distribution channels. And keep an eye out for more information about Open Video Conference. Registration begins next week!
Last week was a bad week for the government on the copyright front. The government recently tabled legislation to reform copyright and the man in charge of the file, Heritage Minister James Moore, gave a speech at the International Chamber of Commerce in which he decried those who questioned the bill as "radical extremists." The comment was a none-too-veiled attack at people like University of Ottawa Professor Michael Geist who have championed for reasonable copyright reform and who, like many Canadians, are concerned about some aspects of the proposed bill.
Unfortunately for the Minister, things got worse from there.
Still worse, the Minister got into a online debate with Cory Doctorow, a bestselling writer (he won the Ontario White Pine Award for best book last year and his current novel For the Win is on the Canadian bestseller lists) and the type of person whose interests the Heritage Minister is supposed to engage and advocate on behalf of, not get into fights with.
In a confusing 140 character back and forth that lasted a few minutes, the minister oddly defended Apple and insulted Google (I've captured the whole debate here thanks to the excellent people at bettween). But unnoticed in the debate is an astonishing fact: the Minister seems unaware of both the task at hand and the implications of the legislation.
The following innocuous tweet summed up his position:
Indeed, in the Minister's 22 tweets in the conversation he uses the term "market forces" six times and the theme of "letting the market or consumers decide" is in over half his tweets.
I too believe that consumers should choose what they want. But if the Minister were a true free market advocate he wouldn't believe in copyright reform. Indeed, he wouldn't believe in copyright at all. In a true free market, there'd be no copyright legislation because the market would decide how to deal with intellectual property.
Copyright law exists in order to regulate and shape a market because we don't think market forces work. In short, the Minister's legislation is creating the marketplace. Normally I would celebrate his claims of being in favour of "letting consumers decide" since this legislation will determine what these choices will and won't be. However, the Twitter debate should leave Canadians concerned since this legislation limits consumer choices long before products reach the shelves.
Indeed, as Doctorow points out, the proposed legislation actually kills concepts created by the marketplace - like Creative Commons - that give creators control over how their works can be shared and re-used:
But advocates like Cory Doctorow and Michael Geist aren't just concerned about the Minister's internal contradictions in defending his own legislation. They have practical concerns that the bill narrows the choice for both consumers and creators.
Specifically, they are concerned with the legislation's handling of what are called "digital locks." Digital locks are software embedded into a DVD of your favourite movie or a music file you buy from iTunes that prevents you from making a copy. Previously it was legal for you to make a backup copy of your favourite tape or CD, but with a digital lock, this not only becomes practically more difficult, it becomes illegal.
They [digital locks] transfer power to technology firms at the expense of copyright holders. The proposed Canadian rules on digital locks mirror the US version in that they ban breaking a digital lock for virtually any reason. So even if you're trying to do something legal (say, ripping a CD to put it on your MP3 player), you're still on the wrong side of the law if you break a digital lock to do it.
But it gets worse. Digital locks don't just harm content consumers (the very people people Minister Moore says he is trying to provide with "choice"); they harm content creators even more:
Here's what that means for creators: if Apple, or Microsoft, or Google, or TiVo, or any other tech company happens to sell my works with a digital lock, only they can give you permission to take the digital lock off. The person who created the work and the company that published it have no say in the matter.
So that's Minister Moore's version of "author's rights" -- any tech company that happens to load my books on their device or in their software ends up usurping my copyrights. I may have written the book, sweated over it, poured my heart into it -- but all my rights are as nothing alongside the rights that Apple, Microsoft, Sony and the other DRM tech-giants get merely by assembling some electronics in a Chinese sweatshop.
That's the "creativity" that the new Canadian copyright law rewards: writing an ebook reader, designing a tablet, building a phone. Those "creators" get more say in the destiny of Canadian artists' copyrights than the artists themselves.
In short, the digital lock provisions reward neither consumers nor creators. Instead, they give the greatest rights and rewards to the one group of people in the equation whose rights are least important: distributors.
That a Heritage Minister doesn't understand this is troubling. That he would accuse those who seek to point out this fact and raise awareness to it as "radical extremists" is scandalous. Canadians have entrusted in this person the responsibility for creating a marketplace that rewards creativity, content creation and innovation while protecting the rights of consumers. At the moment, we have a minister who shuts out the very two groups he claims to protect while wrapping himself in a false cloak of the "free market." It is an ominous start for the debate over copyright reform and the minister has only himself to blame.
The Mozilla Drumbeat Festival is going to be happening in Barcelona right around the same time as the P2PU workshop and the Open Education Conference. I'd say it's very likely that I'll be there, you should come too. Spread the word.
Save the date: November 3-5, 2010, Barcelona
The web is changing how we learn. It surrounds us with a massive and remixable tapestry of perspectives, facts and data. It gives us the freedom to learn whatever we want at our own speed and in our own way. It lets us become our own teachers. Fundamentally: the free and open nature of the internet is revolutionizing learning.
Who among us has not fallen into a long journey across the web on a surprising topic? Or learned a new skill by making, building or creating something online? Or, for that matter, found a new mentor or apprentice in a forum or on a social network? More and more, this is how we learn.
The open technology and culture of the web are at the heart of this revolution. They give us raw material to take control of our own learning. Teachers and learners around the world are experimenting, inventing, creating, exploring and building in wonderful ways with this raw material. They are living at the intersection of learning, freedom, and the web. Mozilla's 2010 Drumbeat Festival is a gathering of these people.
Drumbeat Festival 2010 will showcase people, ideas and projects making connections between learning, freedom and the web. Things like:
A secure 'data backpack' where students control their own learning materials and credentials
Libraries transformed into digital garages where kids learn to make, do and create with an agile, hacker attitude
Massively scaled apprenticeship, we people learn by diving into the world of open source master craftspeople
Hackerspaces where people teach each other about everything from robots to lasers to knitting
Alternative accreditation models based on web and open source peer review techniques
The idea is to gather people with the puzzle pieces needed to ideas like these real: data portability; open educational resources; secure, decentralized storage in the cloud; open content licenses; agile thinking; open, user controlled online identity; massive, credible informal learning opportunities; passion.
The good news: we have all these puzzle pieces in our hands already. We just need the right people to get into a room and use them. That's the spirit of the Drumbeat Festival.
People and orgs we'll invite to Barcelona include: Web tech companies. P2P University course leaders. Digital learning startups. Hackerspaces. Creative Commoners. Online identity experts. Wikipedians. Software developers. Filmmakers. Web standards nerds. Open web activists. Artists. Web developers. Teachers. Foundations. And, of course, learners of all stripes.
Why is Mozilla doing this?
We believe that everyone has a role in keeping the web open and vibrant. That's why we started Mozilla Drumbeat: a collection of practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas that improve the open web. The annual Drumbeat Festival is a part of this, bringing together people doing things at the intersection of the open web and other important aspects of our society. The first Festival will focus on the connection between learning, freedom and the web.
Drumbeat Festival 2010 is being organized in partnership with Creative Commons, MacArthur Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. If you are interested in joining as a partner, please email drumbeat-events@mozilla.org.
The Festival will take place on November 4 + 5 in Barcelona, with an opening keynote and reception on the evening of November 3.
This year’s Open Video Conference will feature a panel on the ongoing conflict between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Burning Man festival.
For some time, the organization behind the event has enforced a highly restrictive set of policies around photography in Black Rock. Through its ticket sales and online terms of use, the Burning Man Organization claims ownership over all photos and videos created at the festival.
Those Terms and Conditions include a remarkable bit of legal sleight-of-hand: as soon as “any third party displays or disseminates” your photos or videos in a manner that the Burning Man Organization (BMO) doesn’t like, those photos or videos become the property of the BMO.
The BMO also limits your own rights to use your own photos and videos on any public websites, (1) obliging you to take down any photos to which BMO objects, for any reason; and (2) forbidding you from allowing anyone else to reuse your photos (i.e., no licensing your work no matter what is depicted, including Creative Commons licensing, and no option to donate your work to the public domain).
Burning Man argues these restrictions protect attendees’ privacy. People do wacky stuff out there—in various states of undress and sobriety—and they need to be protected. But EFF thinks attendees’ freedom of expression, and their copyrights, must be respected. How do you balance both concerns?
In a interesting turn of events, Burning Man, the EFF and Creative Commons have entered into negotiations to transform the largest counter cultural art gathering in the world into a legal platform for human readable language and free culture. Will it work? Will it crash? What will they as a team decide?
Join us for a real world ethics question, with insights into the governance of online video platforms, privacy, autonomy, and freedom of expression. Throw in panelists from Burning Man, EFF, and Creative Commons—and giant burning wicker man—and you have one interesting discussion.
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. This mission encompasses a comprehensive strategy of policy analysis and reporting, public campaigns, investigative research, grantmaking support, and open source technology. Together, these efforts improve the quality of public discourse, empower citizens through access to information, and hold political figures and institutions more accountable. Sunlight shares our passion for free expression and healthy public discourse on the web, and we’re very excited to have their support for this year’s Open Video Conference.
The Open Video Alliance is looking for volunteers for the Open Video Conference 2010. Volunteering gets you free conference registration, an Open Video Alliance t-shirt, and a warm feeling inside.
There’s lots of ways to help out. There will be an informational meeting in July for New York-based volunteers, but we welcome volunteers from all over. If you’re interested, let’s get in touch.
Help Drumbeat projects — get the official 2010 Mozilla t-shirt! Get a (super cute) limited edition dino T-shirt when you donate to the Drumbeat Open Web Fun. All proceeds go towards helping great Drumbeat projects succeed.
Shuttleworth/Mozilla Education Fellowship entries are in. Drumbeat and the Shuttleworth Foundation announced a joint ‘education for the open web’ fellowship in May — and great project proposals have been pouring in. Check out the proposals and vote for your favorites here.
Universal Subtitles project picking up steam. Thanks to support from generous folks like you, we’re now more than 25% of the way towards our goal of raising $25,000 for this project.Mozilla will match every dollar donated from the open web fund, so if you haven’t supported this project already, consider making a donation. And check out this video blog by Universal Subtitles supporter Caro for a great explanation of the project’s potential.
Open Video Alliance Conference. The Open Video Conference will bring together artists, developers, entrepreneurs, academics and others Oct 1 and 2 in New York to help unlock online video’s potential.Drumbeat projects likeUniversal Subtitles, Web Made Movies, and Video on Wikipedia will be on hand.
Creative Commons Catalyst Grants. Creative Commons’ new Catalyst Grants program is investing up to $100,000 (via grants ranging from $1,000-$10,000) in seed funding for projects around the world devoted to increasing access and openness. Application deadline is June 30. More info here.
Drumbeat Events: coming to a city near you! Over the past three months we’ve seen awesome Drumbeat events in Toronto, Sao Carlos, Sao Paulo and Berlin. Along with Drumbeat local organizer sprints that will help spread events to other cities like Boston, New York, Montreal, Vancouver, Rome, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Sofia and Munich. Interested in organizing something in your city?Get in touch and we’ll help you get going on your own awesome Drumbeat event.
Check out the rest of the June 2010 newsletter for other Drumbeat news. Or dive in here to get involved in other ways!
I’m here for my third year in a row, and it’s been a blast watching good friends and old (and new) colleagues come in. This year, I’m also very proud that the Mozilla Foundation and Drumbeat are sponsoring the conference.
Drumbeat is sponsoring AMC because it is a major gathering place for people who are working at the intersection of community engagement and communications technology.
It is especially aligned with Drumbeat, because AMC has always been about people building, making, and learning to take control of the means of communication. Through its history, that has meant that people learn and apply skills in audio and video production, “low” tech solutions like printing, and building computers loaded with open source software. In recent years, there has been a new emphasis in the web as tool and public resource that people “at the edges” should be empowered to shape and mould. In other words, Drumbeat is going to be right at home.
AMC is also one of the most vibrant conferences I have ever attended, and I go to lots of conferences. The attendees are young, innovative, and inspired. The presentations are always participatory, and the main stage literally sings with multi-media presentations delivering music, dance, video, and amazing talks.
I will be presenting Drumbeat and Drumbeat-supported Peer2Peer University’sSchool of Webcraft with two Mozilla volunteers at Allied Media Conference. We hope to walk away with ideas for course, new teacher/facilitators, and potential student/participants.
If you are interested in open source, Mozilla Drumbeat’s brand new Open Web Fund and open philanthropy, and/or open education, please follow us and help spread the word.
To stay informed as the conference proceeds, follow me on Twitter @james_nathaniel and the conference at #AMC2010. Check back here, as I will plan to update my blog frequently with pictures and updates.
If you are in Detroit, come find us at the Mozilla Drumbeat table near the main stage and check out our sessions, listed below.
Saturday 6/19 9am Open Source for Open Communities: How Participatory Technology can Empower Everyone
Presenters: Anne Jonas, the Participatory Culture Foundation; Nathaniel James, The Mozilla Foundation – Drumbeat; Kirk Kimmel; Pixelpowrrr
Moderator: Geoff Hing
TRACK: Do-It-Yourself Technology
Do you have a desire to use free, open source software but don’t know where to start? Are you an open source expert looking to build community with other people working on awesome open source projects? Are you a media-maker wondering how open technology relates to open licensing systems, such as Creative Commons? This session is for everyone who loves openness – on the Internet and in our daily lives. We will hear brief presentations from technologists and organizers working on open source projects. They will break-down how their projects advance a vision for a more open world. Then we will solicit anonymous questions from the audience on slips of paper – from “how are racial and gender assumptions built into technology?” to “can we collaborate on an open source artificial intelligence robot?” No questions will go unanswered! Then our highly-skilled moderator will sort the questions into over-arching categories. In small groups around the room, we will model the kind of open source communities of learning we want to see – answering our collective questions about different aspects of open technology. Participants will walk away ready to apply what they’ve learned in the open source collaboration station in the AMC Media Lab throughout the weekend.
Sunday 6/20 10am Open Internet Meet-Up
TRACK: Do-It-Yourself Technology
Join Mozilla in a media lab meet-up to put the walk in the talk. Help build classes for the Peer 2 Peer University, a Mozilla Drumbeat project. In this meet-up participants will design an open technology class together for the community of AMC participants.
In addition to my engagement and events work on Mozilla Drumbeat, I have initiated a strategic communications planning process for Drumbeat’s launch through the rest of 2010?
What does that mean?
As we launch the Drumbeat initiative in general and help each of the supported projects progress to success, there are literally a billion people we could be talking to. How do we decide who we are going to talk to and when, what we want them to know and ask them to do, and which tools and communications channels to use? To answer these questions we create (you guessed it) a strategic communications plan.
This process is pretty involved, but I wanted to update the community on some highlights.
At the beginning, I decided that instead of trying to drive engagement for Drumbeat in general, we should focus our communications plan on the supported projects. First off, as a new initiative that absolutely requires a diverse range of engaged participants, we are best prepared to support engagement in our supported projects. A call for participation is also a promise – it’s a promise that someone will be answering questions, providing a roadmap and resources, and responding to feedback. In addition to our highly participatory events, supported projects are the place we can keep our promise.
Second, we will of course be doing a lot buzz-building to that vague entity known as “the general public,” and to the slightly less vague entity known as the 0pen community, or the tech community, or the internet community (ok, still a little vague). But I believe that buzz will be more meaningful if it is tied to projects that are clearly communicating their successes and their needs. Communicating the projects’ vision to the right people will answer the “So, what?” we’ll hear as we introduce Drumbeat in general. And communicating project successes will drive new audiences who are ready and pscyhed to move their own Drumbeat projects forward.
Status report:
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been talking to Mozilla staff, the Drumbeat community, and recently leads for each project to get us started on an strong communications plan.
We are developing a grid that documents our target audience analysis, messages for each audience, and the communications tactics we will use to get those messages out to the right audiences. You can see the grid (very much in progress) by clicking here.
So far, I have worked with the teams to analyze and prioritize their audiences.
With some clear target audiences in mind, I asked project leads to decide what they really need from each community (the “ask’) and to try to figure out how “ready” each audience is to get involved. Have they heard of the project? Do they already trust and believe in the project but are responding with barriers to participation? These questions are key to determining a good message for target audiences. We often need to decide whether we are sharing beginner information or helping people understand how we will support them as they jump any barriers to entry, how our projects share their values, and how they offer a believable vision of a better future.
We’ll come back to messaging in more detail in future updates.
What’s Next?
Next week, project leads are sending me their project management road maps. I will cross-reference their milestones and deliverables against our target audiences to give them useful guidance for the who, what, how, and when of their strategic communications plan for the rest of 2010.
Then, we will evaluate. If this is an effective process for our first three supported projects, I hope we can document it and make it available for all Drumbeat projects that are ready to use strategic communications to engage the kinds of people they need to be successful.
The plan for our first Drumbeat Festival has really snapped into focus over the last week. The theme is ‘learning, freedom and the web’ — connecting people on the radical, disruptive edge of learning with people from the open web world. It’s happening in Barcelona from November 3 – 5. I’m stoked. Really.
Right now, we’re focused on refining the theme and recruiting a handful of high profile participants. Here is the current version of our top level blurb:
The web is changing how we learn. It surrounds us with a massive and remixable tapestry of perspectives, facts and data. It gives us the freedom to learn whatever we want at our own speed and in our own way. It lets us become our own teachers. Fundamentally: the free and open nature of the internet is revolutionizing learning.
Who among us has not fallen into a long journey across the web on a surprising topic? Or learned a new skill by making, building or creating something online? Or, for that matter, found a new mentor or apprentice in a forum or on a social network? More and more, this is how we learn.
The open technology and culture of the web are at the heart of this revolution. They give us raw material to take control of our own learning. Teachers and learners around the world are experimenting, inventing, creating, exploring and building in wonderful ways with this raw material. They are living at the intersection of learning, freedom, and the web. Mozilla’s 2010 Drumbeat Festival is a gathering of these people.
A number of participants from the broader Mozilla family are already confirmed Mitchell Baker, Joi Ito, Brian Behlendorf are already confirmed. And Drumbeat projects like P2PU School of Web Craft and Web Made Movies will be there in force. If you have suggestions for people or projects to inivite, please let me know. You can post as comments below or on this wiki page for people to invite.
I’m extremely excited to announce the Open Web Award 2011 in collaboration with Berlin-based art and digital culture Festival transmediale. Following the Mozilla Drumbeat Berlin event we’ve had good talks with Free Culture Incubator and hope to announce more great open web art initiatives soon. Stay tuned, and please tell the world (or just your friends) about the Open Web Award 2011! Open web art is important to show the world what can be done by building on the open architecture of the web!
The award will be given to the most creative work or art project that:
- are on the web and about the web
- use open and free technology
- incite participation
giving specific consideration to “the creative use of HTML5″.
The winner will receive a total prize of 5000 EUR, and will obtain ‘supported’ status on Mozilla Drumbeat (including the opportunity to fundraise, if needed). Download Flyer
Jean-Baptiste Kempf of VideoLAN will explore the past, present, and future of the VLC media player this October at the Open Video Conference.
The VLC player, by the non-profit VideoLAN project, is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files. It’s also some of the best software around. With nearly half a billion (!) downloads, it’s among the most ubiquitous and indispensable open source projects in history. VLC will play anything you throw at it, and it is continually embracing the cutting edge.
Version 1.0.0 of VLC media player was released on July 7, 2009, culminating 13 years of development (in fact, Jean-Baptiste announced the release of 1.0 at last year’s Open Video Conference!). At this year’s OVC, he will talk about the genesis of VideoLAN, the difficulties in creating award-winning software in a non-profit setting, and the future of the project—which includes an ambitious video editing suite.
Join Jean-Baptise in others in exploring the future of online video, this Fall in New York City. Visit http://openvideoconference.org for more.
The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) is the biggest broadcaster in Norway with 16 local offices, three national TV stations, 12 national radio stations and major web sites. It’s been leading the way with a number of open video experiments, including CC licensing and BitTorrent distribution.
Eirik works in the development department of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. He is leading projects involving internet services, interactive TV, social media and broadband strategies. He’s consulted with Accenture and has worked hands-on digital production as a sound designer, editor, steadicam operator and photographer. He’s also a prize-winning blogger at eirikso.com.
Last year, Eirik blew us away with a hilarious lightning talk about YouTube and cultural difference based on his experience with NRK. This year, he’ll be expanding on those themes as one of several public media luminaries who will discuss strategies for “being the best provider of your content.”
We didn’t build libraries for a literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have public policy literate citizens, we build them so that citizens may become literate in public policy.
Yesterday, in a brilliant article on The Guardian website, Charles Arthur argued that a global flood of government data is being opened up to the public (sadly, not in Canada) and that we are going to need an army of people to make it understandable.
I agree. We need a data-literate citizenry, not just a small elite of hackers and policy wonks. And the best way to cultivate that broad-based literacy is not to release in small or measured quantities, but to flood us with data. To provide thousands of niches that will interest people in learning, playing and working with open data. But more than this we also need to think about cultivating communities where citizens can exchange ideas as well as involve educators to help provide support and increase people’s ability to move up the learning curve.
Interestingly, this is not new territory. We have a model for how to make this happen – one from which we can draw lessons or foresee problems. What model? Consider a process similar in scale and scope that happened just over a century ago: the library revolution.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, governments and philanthropists across the western world suddenly became obsessed with building libraries – lots of them. Everything from large ones like the New York Main Library to small ones like the thousands of tiny, one-room county libraries that dot the countryside. Big or small, these institutions quickly became treasured and important parts of any city or town. At the core of this project was that literate citizens would be both more productive and more effective citizens.
But like open data, this project was not without controversy. It is worth noting that at the time some people argued libraries were dangerous. Libraries could spread subversive ideas – especially about sexuality and politics – and that giving citizens access to knowledge out of context would render them dangerous to themselves and society at large. Remember, ideas are a dangerous thing. And libraries are full of them.
…for a period of time, censorship was a key responsibility of the librarian, along with trying to persuade the public that reading was not frivolous or harmful… many were concerned that this money could have been used elsewhere to better serve people. Lord Rodenberry claimed that “reading would destroy independent thinking.” Librarians were also coming under attack because they could not prove that libraries were having any impact on reducing crime, improving happiness, or assisting economic growth, areas of keen importance during this period… (Geller, 1984)
Today when I talk to public servants, think tank leaders and others, most grasp the benefit of “open data” – of having the government sharing the data it collects. A few however, talk about the problem of just handing data over to the public. Some questions whether the activity is “frivolous or harmful.” They ask “what will people do with the data?” “They might misunderstand it” or “They might misuse it.” Ultimately they argue we can only release this data “in context”. Data after all, is a dangerous thing. And governments produce a lot of it.
As in the 19th century, these arguments must not prevail. Indeed, we must do the exact opposite. Charges of “frivolousness” or a desire to ensure data is only released “in context” are code to obstruct or shape data portals to ensure that they only support what public institutions or politicians deem “acceptable”. Again, we need a flood of data, not only because it is good for democracy and government, but because it increases the likelihood of more people taking interest and becoming literate.
It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.
This is why coders in cities like Vancouver and Ottawa come together for open data hackathons, to share ideas and skills on how to use and engage with open data.
But smart governments should not only rely on small groups of developers to make use of open data. Forward-looking governments – those that want an engaged citizenry, a 21st-century workforce and a creative, knowledge-based economy in their jurisdiction – will reach out to universities, colleges and schools and encourage them to get their students using, visualizing, writing about and generally engaging with open data. Not only to help others understand its significance, but to foster a sense of empowerment and sense of opportunity among a generation that could create the public policy hacks that will save lives, make public resources more efficient and effective and make communities more livable and fun. The recent paper published by the University of British Columbia students who used open data to analyze graffiti trends in Vancouver is a perfect early example of this phenomenon.
When we think of libraries, we often just think of a building with books. But 19th century mattered not only because they had books, but because they offered literacy programs, books clubs, and other resources to help citizens become literate and thus, more engaged and productive. Open data catalogs need to learn the same lesson. While they won’t require the same centralized and costly approach as the 19th century, governments that help foster communities around open data, that encourage their school system to use it as a basis for teaching, and then support their citizens\' efforts to write and suggest their own public policy ideas will, I suspect, benefit from happier and more engaged citizens, along with better services and stronger economies.
So what is your government/university/community doing to create its citizen army of open data analysts?
In addition, the Center hosts screenings, symposia, and film festivals related to social engagement. Particular focus is placed on fair use, human rights and film, and the future of public media. Check out www.centerforsocialmedia.org for more information.
We’re looking forward to collaborating with the Center for Social Media on OVC 2010!
Tim Shey from Next New Networks will be speaking at OVC 2010 about how a small media startup embraced Creative Commons and built an audience of tens of millions of viewers per month.
Tim is one of Next New Networks’ founders and is the head of programming and creative development. Tim has spent fifteen years as a designer and producer of projects on television, mobile, and the web. He co-founded Proteus in 1996, a pioneering interactive agency that was responsible for first-ever nationwide interactive TV broadcast using mobile phones during FOX’s Super Bowl XXXVI.
I’m figuring out what to do with my life in the year between now and (hopefully) being at a PhD program fall 2011. I’d like to outline my principles, so that I can have a benchmark, guiding point and even a place to record any changes in my outlook as I do more research and map this space I’m figuring out. The key principles won’t be changing, but their implications are what I envision shaping through further research.
I’m an advocate for openness. This DOES mean that I think people should have access to information that they need, and have the ability to innovate in new ways, and built off of old systems (eg. Zittrain’s generativity or the idea of “remix” or “view source.”)
This DOES NOT mean I’d want to use an open-source version of paypal (an example where ‘closed’ is a bit of a necessity, or would require some SERIOUS innovation to be open in the FSF/GPL sense of the word), nor does it mean that I think people shouldn’t be able to charge for content/services/goods — whether or not it’s always a good *idea* to charge for those things is another story.
I think that good, clean, design, and simplification are NECESSITIES of technology — not afterthoughts or options to add in later. This DOES mean that I think things like ergonomics of physical devices and user experience of media are valuable assets that should *never* be subject to death-by-committee, being pushed back to version 2.0 or any excuses for lacking legitimate research in this area.
This DOES NOT mean that everyone need be using Helvetica (the canonical “simple, clean” font, for all you non-design snobs out there), agree on the same design aesthetic, or meet every end user’s needs, nor does it mean that because I value this, (despite my degree in design) I want to design it for you.
Social is important. I mean this in many, many ways. From a future-online-business-model discussion, people are always going to value content they find from their friends, online and off. Now that it’s moved online, we finally have word-of-mouth, quantified. Companies and brands are just now beginning to realize the value of this
Also, getting people together face-to-face is an invaluable way to communicate, brainstorm and build. I don’t know if any video-chat-second-life-online-VOIP will ever replace good human eye contact, and the truth is, it doesn’t have to. Meetups, Hackathons, Bar Camps and Parties can’t be replaced by a “killer app.”
Technologies can enhance the ways we connect to one another, and anyone making “social media” should embrace the fact that it’s an enhancement, not a replacement or replica. The companies (and quirky projects in people’s basements) that design systems around this will succeed, and those that don’t will fade away as clutter. Systems that allow users to build off of existing connections, and make signifigant, valuable new ones (‘IRL’ as they say) will remain relevant to people’s real lives. There are also niche markets in this space, because one person’s “media overload” is another’s “media zen.”
These aren’t all of my “guiding principles” but it’s a good list of the ones that have been on my mind lately as I’m shaping the projects I take on for the summer and the next year.
FOMS—the Foundations of Open Media Software Workshop—is coming to New York on October 3rd and 4th, on the heels of the Open Video Conference. If you are a technically-oriented developer who is planning to make it to NYC for the Open Video Conference, you might want to plan on extending your stay.
FOMS is a action-oriented workshop designed for individuals that work on open audio and video software. This year, FOMS will have a special emphasis on the new WebM format announced by Google, Mozilla, and Opera. We will identify and close technology gaps to help progress WebM towards a baseline codec solution for HTML5.
FOMS workshops have been held in the week prior to linux.conf.au for the past four years. This will mark the first time it comes to North America, and we are thrilled to see it happening.
If you would like to attend, please contact foms-committee(at)lists.annodex.net or register online, and visit FOMS for full details.
The internet and the web are always changing. Every current and aspiring internet user has a stake in this constant evolution.
These technologies are also endlessly complicated, and sophisticated understanding of the technology will always be unevenly distributed. In other words, most people are not engineers.
How, then, are the users of the web, the non-engineer multitudes that make the web vibrant and powerful, to evaluate whether or not they like how the Web is changing? This is a familiar question for everyone who works to educate and empower internet users.
In today’s New York Times Magazine, Virginia Heffernan wrote a piece in her column, “The Medium,” entitled “The Death of the Open Web.”
Strong words, to be sure. In it, she compares the Open Web to the Great American City and likens the development of new walled gardens like Facebook, but especially Apple’s App Store, to the rise of Suburbia.
Like the great modern American cities, the Web was founded on equal parts opportunism and idealism. Over the years, nerds, students, creeps, outlaws, rebels, moms, fans, church mice, good-time Charlies, middle managers, senior citizens, starlets, presidents and corporate predators all made their home on the Web. In spite of a growing consensus about the dangers of Web vertigo and the importance of curation, there were surprisingly few “walled gardens” online — like the one Facebook purports to (but does not really) represent.
She goes on:
But a kind of virtual redlining is now under way. The Webtropolis is being stratified… All these things make spaces feel “safe” — not only from viruses, instability, unwanted light and sound, unrequested porn, sponsored links and pop-up ads, but also from crude design, wayward and unregistered commenters and the eccentric voices and images that make the Web constantly surprising, challenging and enlightening…
The far more significant development, however, is that many people are on their way to quitting the open Web entirely. That’s what the 50 million or so users of the iPhone and iPad are in position to do. By choosing machines that come to life only when tricked out with apps from the App Store, users of Apple’s radical mobile devices increasingly commit themselves to a more remote and inevitably antagonistic relationship with the Web. Apple rigorously vets every app and takes 30 percent of all sales; the free content and energy of the Web does not meet the refined standards set by the App Store.
It’s a fair and important point. I have an iPhone. It and it’s new cousin, the iPad, are sleek and offer many fast tracks to information on the Web. Yet, the list of arbitrary rejections from their platform continues to confuse and frustrate entrepreneurs, geeks, and internet freedom advocates alike.
A quick scan of dozens of critical comments to her piece reveal a pattern: detractors with a little (or maybe a lot) of tech-savvy are out to get Heffernan because her comments are inaccurate and biased.
Aside from the the hollowness of crying bias at an opinion piece, these skeptics are often technically correct. To claim that iPhone/iPad use is equivalent to “quitting the open Web entirely,” is squarely hyperbolic. iPhone users clearly use Apps and surf the web (if only on Apple’s Safari browser – another choice denied the user).
I applaud Hefferman’s piece, but for its explanatory powers, rather than its factual precision.
The world is a complicated place, and every single one of us relies on metaphors to simplify the world and make it navigable. In Metaphors we Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphorical thinking is both far more common than we realize and completely necessary to us as we are bombarded by a world of infinitely complex stimuli.
Arguments are wars – “It was a battle of wits.” Life is a journey – “I have finally arrived,” or “I just feel so lost.”
We take metaphors for granted, which gives them their power to clarify and define the world. They are also gross simplifications, but very useful ones.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a powerful allegory in 145 words called On Exactitude in Science, in which a generation of perfectionist cartographers created a map, “which coincided point for point” with their native country, a map that literally covered its own territory. It was perfect in its complete representation and also perfectly useless. As tools, maps work because of what they leave out, giving you just the lay of the land and not the land itself. If it were otherwise, they wouldn’t fit in your glove compartment.
So it is for anyone who cares about the future of the web and who also knows that if we are to make any progress, the web as a shared, public resource that we all build together must be understood better by every user. Every user needs the lay of the land, and until the day that we are all engineers, we will have to rely on metaphors, like Ms Heffernan’s.
People understand the difference between cities and suburbs. Cities are vibrant, entrepreneurial, often marked by anonymity and spontaneity, diverse, and sometimes a little scary. Cities are open. Suburbs are perceived to be safe. They are planned. They have gated communities. They are also artless, and many people find them anti-democratic and unsustainable. They are closed.
Swap out the words “open web” for city and “closed web” for suburbs, and you get something that makes some sense. It’s neither perfect nor precise, but if it makes a little sense for someone who is looking desperately to understand the constant changes brought on by the internet, then I’m definitely ok with that.
Technical discourse (“How is the web changing?”) requires technical precision. Social discourse (“Should we support how the web is changing?”) requires a broader literary palate and deserves broader audiences. As we strive to describe the web (or anything more complicated than a PB&J sandwich, for that matter), we will always dance clumsily on the line between rhetoric and reality. However, I believe we must learn to use the former to help each other get a handle on the latter.
What do you get when you bring together over 50 people from 8 countries, representing a mix of video makers, artists, educators, technology advocates, and open source gurus to talk and take action to protect and expand internet freedom?
Betahaus
The Mozilla team, in coordination with local volunteers, hosted the very first Drumbeat event in Europe at Betahaus in Berlin on May 8th.
At 10 am, we started with a discussion using the interactive spectrogram format. Spectrograms are like dynamic human graphs, where all participants respond to challenging statements by physically moving to their own position (strongly agree, strongly disagree, etc) on a line, and defending their position openly. Here are two of our statements:
“Governments should play a central role in keeping the Internet open and free.”
And
“When I use Facebook, I feel regret.”
The spectrogram helps people clarify their thinking about difficult issues while respectfully engaging with different opinions.
Through the rest of the morning, we split into groups to brainstorm some creative ways to describe the open web to diverse audiences, such as “my grandma” or “politicians.”
A Vote for the Open Web is a Vote For Everyone
Come to find out, talking about the open web in ways that make sense to everyday internet users is hard, and I’m always happy when people who speak teach start to think about storytelling and metaphor to reach new audiences. We saw people try out political campaigns (left) and a little performance art (below) in which robots trying to talk to each other had their conversation interrupted by artificial traffic blocking (read: no net neutrality).
Robot interuptus
Having established some common language around web openness and internet freedom in the morning, we got down to business in the afternoon, opening the meeting to rapid fire project presentation (aka “speedgeeking”) and open space workshops.
During the speedgeeking session, I represented the Universal Subtitles project, an initiative to build tools and communities that can provide video translations for any language, for any video, anywhere on the web. 8 people signed up to help out with the technology and to offer translation skills.
During the open space workshops, I sat in with Tobias Eigen of Kabissa to discuss supporting Drumbeat across Africa. We’re going to start an outreach and working group to make it happen.
Then, we had some tasty German beer (below).
Drumbeat Afterhours
This is what Drumbeat events are all about, translating our values into action and building community, so I was really happy to help out.
If you attended Drumbeat Berlin, please help us document your experience. Leave a comment here about what you took away from the event or go to our wiki page and enter your notes, pics, and videos. Anyone can sign up for an account on the wiki, and you can let me know if you need help editing the page.
More local Drumbeat events are being planned for Paris and Sao Paolo. I am ramping up outreach to seed Drumbeat events across North America. If you want to get involved, please let me know.
July 1, 2010 – 6:00pm – 10:00pm
La Cantine; 151 rue Montmartre
Passage des Panoramas, 12, galerie Montmartre
Paris, 75002
The Drumbeat Paris event is coming up soon soon. Below a short text – which, like the event, is in french. We will try to accommodate non-french speakers and already have a few signed up – email me if you want to join and don’t speak french. Don’t hesitate to sign up! The agenda is here, also in french. You’ll see many similarities with the Berlin agenda, though.
A few personal observations from the two Drumbeat Events I’ve attended (Toronto and Berlin).
– They’re fun, and a great way to meet people who care about the web. Even if you go to web events often, there’s bound to be some UNusual suspects and surprising connections waiting.
– They’re different from most other events, in a participatory and fun way.
– If you have a project idea that you want feedback on – or are looking for collaborators for – you don’t want to miss a local event. People connect and go off and do things. It’s also a good way to get a project on our radar.
Appel à tous ceux qui aiment un Web ouvert : participez à Drumbeat Paris!
Est-ce que le Web sera ouvert dans dix, vingt – voire dans 50 ans ? Mozilla pense qu’il peut – et doit – l’être. C’est pourquoi nous lançons l’initiative Drumbeat, une invitation à tout passionné du Web à participer à des projets qui améliorent le Web et le rendent plus ouvert à long terme.
Nous bâtissons une nouvelle communauté qui inclut bien sûr non-seulement des “geeks”, mais aussi des enseignants, des artistes, des avocats, des entrepreneurs, des musiciens; bref, tous ceux qui sont passionnés du Web et désireux de participer à Drumbeat. Si vous avez des collègues, amis ou proches susceptibles de vouloir participer, invitez-les !
Mozilla Drumbeat est un point de départ et peut vous apporter les moyens et le savoir-faire pour mener à bien des projets concrets. Venez donc à Drumbeat Paris et découvrez comment vous pouvez participer à l’initiative Drumbeat, et partager vos idées avec d’autres Webophiles. Si vous avez déjà un projet Drumbeat en cours, nous vous invitons à venir le présenter dans un cadre convivial et collaboratif. Vous trouverez le programme de la soirée ici.
Actifs et participatifs : nous voulons réellement "agir" pour que que le Web reste ouvert, plutôt que de simplement en parler !
Inclusifs pour les gens qui aiment le Web, mais qui ne sont pas forcément de vrais « geeks ». Dans le cadre de Drumbeat il y a des développeurs de logiciels qui collaborent avec des communautés de vidéos en ligne ou de sous-titrage universel, des projets de conception ou de design, des modules de cours, des livres, et plus encore – donc il n’est pas nécessaire de savoir coder pour nous joindre!
Interactifs : ces évènements sont l’occasion de découvrir et de rejoindre de nouveaux réseaux de « Webophiles », à l’échelle locale ou globale.
Préparez-vous à partager votre vision de l’avenir du Web, les défis que vous anticipez dans votre travail ou votre vie quotidienne, et vos idées pour répondre à ces défis. Plus important encore, préparez-vous à collaborer et à construire le Web Ouvert – et à prendre votre pied en même temps.
"We live in a world where nerds have web freedom and no-one else does" @zittrain, sur BBC Radio.
A common Drumbeat questions is ‘what do you mean by open web?‘ Having a solid answer is especially critical as reach out to teachers, lawyers, filmmakers and other people new to Mozilla.
Of course, there are manygoodanswers. Nonetheless, we need a single, simple list of ‘open web ingredients’ to explain what we mean to people interested in Drumbeat. Here is what we thinking about using:
The open web is made up of four primary ingredients:
Freedom: built with technology and content that anyone can study, use or improve.
Participation: anyone can participate or innovate without asking permission from others.
Decentralization: the architecture is distributed and control is shared by many parties.
Generativity: we can make new ideas from old ones. As we use, we also hack and innovate.
Or, for short:
Open web = freedom, participation, decentralization and generativity.
One issue we bounced around on was whether to talk about transparency (we had that in earlier edits) or freedom (the ‘study’ element of software freedom covers ‘transparency’). The current version uses freedom both because of its breadth and because free software and content are clearly core building blocks of the open web. Could be too arcane for the Drumbeat audience?
Keep in mind: our goal is a working open web definition for drumbeat.org, not something canonical. It should speak to people who aren’t necessarily technical and suggest how they can shape the web. At the same time, it needs to be sound, encompassing the primary ingredients we believe make up the open web.
The plan is to put an expanded (and likely evolved) version of this definition up on drumbeat.org later this week. If people like it, maybe we can use it more broadly in other venues. Who knows.
Comments and suggested improvements welcome, as always.
A few years ago, I had an idea: I wanted to travel around the world and meet interesting people who I could learn from in exchange for sharing my skills. I remember having the idea very vividly. I was on an airplane, as I often was back in those days, and I was scribbling as fast as I could in my notebook. There was going to be an online component to a mostly offline experience. People would be able to lend resources such as classrooms, domain knowledge, books, supplies, and equipment. I was convinced something like this should already exist, so I did what you'd expect, I scoured the net high and low. As I searched I came across a number of different communities and resources but couldn't find exactly what I was looking for.
Sure there was CouchSurfing, but that was mainly focused on the travel community with a very minor attempt at a skill sharing system. I also found things like MIT's Open Course Ware, but there was something lacking, the community, the people. In my searching I came across a new term, Open Education. I had long known of FLOSS, so the concept of open education was pretty natural to me. Further down the road I heard about the annual Open Education Conference, so in 2008, I attended. My trip was kindly funded by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation based on my intent to share the idea. As it turned out, I wasn't alone in my thinking and I met Philipp, Stian, and Joel.
At this point, tons of ideas were brewing for all of us. There were a million directions that we could go. Different people had different ideas and we took a slow growth route in order to solidify what it was we were trying to accomplish.
Fast forward two years and you've got Peer 2 Peer University, a thriving community of individuals passionate about learning. Our core values are clear. We're an open community for peer learning. We're here to facilitate learning groups and give participants the recognition they deserve. P2PU encourages experimentation, and I love experiments.
As of now we've run more than twenty courses in two cycles. In the most recent cycle, I organized my first course, Mashing Up the Open Web. Mashing up The Open Web is the first course in a series of Open Web courses that we're working on in conjunction with Mozilla as part of the Drumbeat initiative. I'll save the details for a later post, but I will say that the course was an amazing success and that I absolutely enjoyed every minute of it. I've always had the idea of becoming a teacher in the back of my mind, P2PU has helped me prove that idea is a good one.
Almost five months into 2010, key Drumbeat projects and the Drumbeat local event series are picking up speed. Web Made Movies, Universal Subtitles and P2PU Open Web Career Track have all released new material and gotten more people involved. And additional events have taken place in Toronto, Berlin, Sao Carlos and Florianapolis. We’re also making progress on our overall fundraising and engagement efforts — albeit slower than hoped.
One things that has been particularly good to see: our first efforts to push community support and donations to a Drumbeat project have started to show (modest) results. By actively promoting Universal Subtitles in late April, Drumbeat helped to surface 600 beta testers as well as other offers of support. We generated over 100 comments like this one:
“Hi, I don’t have any talent in computer. I’m just a common people who can speak Mandarin, Cantonese, English, Malay, and little Japanese. And maybe very little Spanish. Is there anything I can do to help?”
Of course, support like this isn’t an end itself — the real goal is to make sure Universal Subtitles succeeds in bringing open video translation to the web. But it’s still good to see that the Drumbeat concept of bringing new people to participate in projects that improve the web has at least some early traction.
As we go into the summer, we’ll need to make some decisions about where to push hardest on Drumbeat for the rest of the year. The current plan is to focus on a few key projects build up strong participation and impact — the ones mentioned above plus a few more based in Europe or Brasil. We also want to pick a handful of cities to really invest in where we can get a vibrant community going. Sao Paulo is one of these. Berlin may be another. Finally, we need to pick a theme for the 2010 Drumbeat Festival. The current thinking is something around education (‘learning, freedom and the web’).
My May Mozilla Foundation status update provides a detailed overview on all of this, with a special focus on where and how we should focus our resources for the rest of the year. Here it is:
You can also view this in open video (ogg theora) or download the slide deck (PDF).
This slidecast offers slightly shorter version of info presented at our most recent board meeting. I’ll continue to provide these updates every two months, following the board meeting schedule. Comments welcomed here on my blog or by email.
The internet and the web are always changing. Every current and aspiring internet user has a stake in this constant evolution.
These technologies are also endlessly complicated, and sophisticated understanding of the technology will always be unevenly distributed. In other words, most people are not engineers.
How, then, are the users of the web, the non-engineer multitudes [...]
I’m trying to capture the essence of the open web movement so that it’s accessible to non-web people. I think, with the help of @msurman, @moltke, Geoffrey Macdougall, @herhighnessness, @openmatt, @alina_mierlus,@gameguy43 and many others, I’ve gotten pretty close.
What follows is a snapshot of the current Mozilla Drumbeat description on the site. I didn’t describe it *too much* in my intro because I’d like to see if my description works. Would love your feedback and thoughts.
Mozilla Drumbeat is keeping the web open.
We want to spark a movement. We want to keep the web open for the next 100 years. The first step: inviting you to do and make things that help the web. That’s what Drumbeat is — practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas, solving problems and building the open web.
We all benefit from the open web.
The open web is the most powerful communication tool in the history of humanity. It’s the nervous system of trade, education, governance, activism and play. It allows a single idea to achieve global impact. At its core the open web is participatory, transparent, decentralized and generative. Existing content and software can easily be spun into something new. All without needing to ask for someone else’s approval or permission.
But we can’t take the freedom of the web for granted.
There are many who would neuter or control the web we have built. Imagine an internet filled with devices you can’t tinker with and walled gardens. What’s at risk? Access. Privacy. The freedom to create and innovate.
We need to protect it. Improve it. Grow it.
Mozilla’s mission is to guard the open nature of the internet. 20,000 of us did this when we built Firefox. We took back the web. We’ve been continuing this work ever since. And it’s exactly why we’re starting Drumbeat.
Drumbeat is your chance to keep the web open and free.
Drumbeat is for anyone who wants to lend their skills and creativity to the cause of keeping the internet open. It’s a chance to for everyone — not just software developers and testers — to get involved in keeping the web open. Who? Teachers. Lawyers. Artists. Accountants. Plumbers. Web Developers. Anyone who uses and cares about the internet.
You can get involved online or face-to-face.
With Drumbeat, we’ve planted a flag. A place to gather. A place for you to find collaborators. You can start a project, or join one that’s already rolling. If your project gets traction, we’ll shout from the top of the mountain so everyone knows about it. And we’ll even fund a handful of the very best projects. You can also attend — or start — an event in your city. Events offer a place to work on projects with neighbors, and a chance to paint a picture of what you want the open web to look like in 100 years. Check out featured projects and upcoming events. Get involved now!
What do you get when you bring together over 50 people from 8 countries, representing a mix of video makers, artists, educators, technology advocates, and open source gurus to talk and take action to protect and expand internet freedom?
The Mozilla team, in coordination with local volunteers, hosted the very first Drumbeat event in Europe at [...]
A few weeks back, I posted an updated Drumbeat description. People said it was good, but not good enough. We’ve pushed hard to come up with something better and crisper. These result is a simple set of key messages that explain Drumbeat and why it matters. We’ll use these to write site copy, update our slide decks and drive our upcoming social media campaign.
I’ve pulled the current version from the wiki and pasted below. It’s very close to final — we’re turning it into new web site copy as we speak. Feedback and tweaks welcome. As always, we’ll iterate.
Drumbeat is about keeping the web open.
We’re building a movement. We want to keep the web open for the next 100 years.
Where to start? Everyday web users making and doing things that help the open web.
Drumbeat’s role: host projects and events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas.
We all benefit from the open web.
It’s the most powerful communication tool in the history of humanity.
The nervous system of trade, education, governance, activism, and play.
Lets a single idea achieve global impact.
All without needing someone else’s approval or permission.
Open = ( Participatory +Transparent + Decentralized + Generative)
But we can’t take the freedom of the web for granted.
There are many who would neuter or control the web we have built.
Imagine an internet filled with devices you can’t tinker with and walled gardens.
What’s at risk? Privacy. Access. The freedom to create and innovate.
We need to protect it. Improve it. Grow it.
We helped keep the web open when 20,000 of us built Firefox.
And we’ve been continuing that work ever since.
It’s what we do. It’s all we do. And we’re known to do it well.
Drumbeat = your chance to keep the web open and free.
A chance for the rest of us to get involved.
A global community of smart, creative, everyday people who actually make and do things that attack problems, power big ideas, and build the open web.
Who? Teachers. Lawyers. Artists. Bankers. Plumbers. Anyone who uses and loves the internet.
You can get involved online or face-to-face.
We’ve planted a flag. A place to gather and collaborate.
Start a project, or join one that’s already rolling.
If your project gets traction, we’ll shout from the top of the mountain about it. We may even fund it.
Go to an event in your city. Work on a project with neighbors, or just paint a picture of what you want the web to look like in 100 years.
It’s all about lending your skills and creativity to the cause of the open web.
When we first thought of a Mozilla event last year as nois3lab, we had a different idea of events.
In our previous experiences events are those things where you either listen to experts talking or attend to a show or a performance.
In both cases you're a spectator there.
In terms of events this is the closest metaphore of a closed web could be.
As a user you're supposed to listen, consume, and follow.
Probably you can review, and comment.
Cannot create or diffuse.
Just spread someone else's messages, ideas, products.
Then we've been invited to Drumbeat events in Berlin on May 6th and 7th.
-AMAZING-
The first thing that was clear to us is that such events are pretty different from the ones we pictured in our mind before.
They have to be participatory.
They need to involve people and stimulate as much creativity as they can.
There is no audience, there are no lecturers.
On May 6th we were trained to facilitate and lead such an event.
Let me tell you: I've learnt more from that experience than in 5 years of hacktivism.
The spirit we all had was something very fresh, and true.
None of us knew each other, more or less. But all of us were pervaded of a sense of participation.
May 7h. We were facilitating.
On our marks, get set, go!
Fifty of us, more or less. Fifty people eager to share, learn and discuss.
First: the spectrogram.
It's a great way to discuss about some controversial topics, letting people making their point and the other express agreement (far left on an imaginary line), or disagreement (far right on the same line).
Every point made, can make you reinterpret the statement and move yourself along the line.
Right after that great icebreaking activities, we went through a lot of participatory activities.
Speedgeeking, then.
If you have a project idea, you probably want to share it. You have 3 minutes for describing it. Once for each rotating group, not much differently from speeddating.
You can obviously propose your project for the speedgeeking time; this gives everyone a rough picture of what are the project around, and collect interesting and quick feedback.
Everyone of us had the chance to propose a topic and gather other people in groups to discuss about that.
And the purpose was to tell all the others what are the result of the discussion.
Very effective.
-A-M-A-Z-I-N-G-
Amazing, thanks to the wonderful teaching by Allen Gunn: Squirrel!
Amazing, thanks to the Mozilla Foundation guys: Mark Surman, Henrik Moltke, Barbara Hüppe, Alina Mierlus, Nathaniel James.
Amazing, thanks to the beautiful people being there.
Make stuff. Meet People. Keep the web open.
The last six weeks have been busy for Drumbeat — getting ourselves ready to make some louder noise. With our top projects more solid and a better version of the web site almost ready for release, we’re almost there. The plan is to start beating the drum louder at the end of May. We will need your help. Here are the details…
Highlights
An early teaser video for Web Made Movies went up on the Drumbeat site in April. It gives a hint of what’s to come.
A second wave of local events took place in Toronto, Sao Carlos and Berlin. We also held the first Drumbeat Local Organizer Sprints. These will lead to more events in other cities.
We also announced that we will be joining forces with One Web Day. OWD exec director Nathan James is now part of the Drumbeat team.
Henrik Moltke joined the Drumbeat team. He’ll be heading up our search for projects in Europe.
Where we need help
Overall: we need ideas and ambassadors to help us make more noise about Drumbeat starting later this month.
Brett Gaylor is asking people to brainstorm cool HTML5 video player experiments as a part of the Web Made Movies project.
The P2PU team is looking for people to help lead the next round of Open Web Skills courses. These courses start in August.
Richard Milewski is looking for teachers and other collaborators to help get open web education into high schools.
Nicholas and Dean are asking people to donate to the Universal Subtitles project. For the next month, Mozilla is matching all donations dollar for dollar.
Comment below if you can help with any of this, or contact the project leads directly by saying how you want to help via their Drumbeat page.
Project notes
Web Made Movies released an early video teaser and an IdeaScale site for brainstorming HTML5 video experiments. Also, shot a number of interviews at ROFLcon.
Universal Subtitles recruited over 600 beta testers and other volunteers via the Drumbeat site so far. Private beta is starting over the coming weeks.
P2PU Open Web Career Track has begun early work on an accreditation framework. The first course continues to roll out.
StopBadware.org released a sneak preview of their new web site. It’s now open for testing and feedback.
The first Drumbeat events in North America (Toronto) and Europe (Berlin) took place over the last month. Also, our second Brasilian event happened in the university town of Sao Carlos.
Learning from these, we’re coming to the conclusion that we need to do follow up events fairly quickly as a way to get people activated / working on real projects. A second Sao Paulo event is scheduled for June 12.
Local Organizer Event Sprints took place in Toronto and Berlin. The aim is to give people skills to organize their own Drumbeat events.
We had organizers from Montreal, Vancouver, Boston, New York, Rome, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Sofia and Munich attending the sprints.
Web site notes
We’re about a week away from a major new web site release, with a focus on improved pages for projects.
Over 2,100 people have now created accounts on Drumbeat.org (up from 500 last month)
People who want to help should joint #drumbeat-dev on irc.mozilla.org. Or join the discussion forum.
The aim with these monthly update posts is to provide a high level overview for people who aren’t deeply involved in Drumbeat. For more detail or to get involved, jump into the Drumbeat wiki and newsgroup.
PS. Yup, it’s true – I skipped the April update. The March update was so late that I decided I could wait until May to publish issue #3.
After years of talking about the web, advocating for freedom on the web, building a presence for several organizations on the web, and pretty much living my life on the web, I’m so excited to be launching my very first personal web site*!
Many thanks to Jim at Music in Code for building the site and making the process fun (and affordable).
So, what’s this site about?
It is a blog in 2 parts. On the home page, I will be sharing the experience of working my own peculiar intersection of communications technology, community engagement, politics and policy, research, and the arts. Currently, that will mean a lot of writing on the new Mozilla Drumbeat initiative, where I am taking a leading role. Readers will also learn about my work on the board of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (or NAMAC). I also hope to include some posts on non-work (or at least semi-non-work) parts of my life like travel, cooking and food, films, music, keeping up with the latest trends in scientific and tech research, and reading. Reading for me means a mix of nonfiction (technology, politics, society, etc.) and science fiction; conveniently, the two have ever more in common.
On the second blog, Open Web Digest, I will collect and share news and views concerning the development of freedom and openness online – my own personal wire service on the internet-related topics I follow. I hope the Digest can be a resource to others who want to stay informed as the internet and the web continue to evolve and change the world.
I’m shooting for short, informative, even fun posts, but may need to digress into long form essays on occasion. I hope to make the site interactive, so I encourage people to post comments, ask questions, and make recommendations.
Thanks for reading!
* Ok, ok. This is only true if you don’t count my pages on Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn. I think I still have an account on GoodReads. I also once started a blogspot blog, but we won’t speak of (or link to) that.
The News Feed and Beacon taught Facebook to push the limits of privacy to gain pageviews (and thus relevance and perchance $$) and taught users, for the first time to be wary of Facebook, regarding their privacy.
From the standpoint of “online business models,” (which is somewhat of an oxymoron) this is an interesting crossroads. To what degree can users’ data be used without violating their (own social norms of) privacy? Is (total, clear and absolute) transparency about user data usage enough to maintain users? Is policy the correct intervention? What do users want from the social web? When and why do dissatisfied users leave a service?
I don’t think the open web should have to get a day job to underwrite and support its values–so how does a company make money *online,* maintain relevance, and not infringe on user’s privacy? Will Facebook figure this out before more and more users leave?
Today Mozilla Drumbeat and the Shuttleworth Foundation are announcing a joint fellowship focused on ‘education for the open web’. Our aim is to find someone with solid, scalable and fresh ideas on how open learning and the open web intertwine. Once we find this person, we will back them with a year’s salary, project funding and all the connections, horn-tooting, coaching and love that we can muster.
We invite applications from individuals interested in using innovative approaches to teaching and learning to promote the open web.
The applicant should have one or more practical ideas that involve *making things* that will allow large numbers of people to learn about, improve and promote the open nature of the internet. The fellowship is not an academic fellowship aimed at research.
Ideas can connect the open web with learners of any age: opening up the world of web citizenship to kids; encouraging highschool students learn from the bendable and hackable world of the the web; helping people in their 20s learn the skills they need to create wealth or find work in the web era. Any of this would be a fit.
Also, ideas need not focus on formal learning within the education system. In fact, informal learning approaches that draw on the fluid nature of the web are highly encouraged. The main thing is that ideas need to have the potential for large scale participation and impact. Can you imagine your idea reaching thousands of people? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?
While these projects should *use* open technology and open source-style participation, they should not be primarily about software development.
The fellowship is open to anyone currently living in We are giving preference to proposals coming from Europe or Brasil, two key geographies for Mozilla’s Drumbeat initiative. However we recognize that good ideas can come from anywhere.
The deadline for submissions is June 7, 2010. We will interview the top five candidates in late June 2010.
Will the web still be open in 100 years? Mozilla thinks it can — and must — be. That’s why we’re starting Mozilla Drumbeat, an invitation to teachers, artists, lawyers, filmmakers and other everyday internet users do things that will make the web better, and keep it open for the long haul. We want you to get involved.
Offline and on, we are building a new community that includes open web geeks, but also teachers, artists and designers, bloggers, lawyers and even enlightened people in government. Come to Drumbeat Berlin and learn how you can help keep the web open, or show others what you’re already doing!
* Active and participatory: we’re going to be making and building the Open Web. Less talk, more action!
* Inviting to people who love the Web, but may not be geeks. As part of Drumbeat, people can make more than software. Videos, universal subtitling, design projects, training courses, books, and more!
* Opportunities to weave together local networks of creative, Web-loving people and share their exciting local work with the global community.
Come prepared to share your vision for the future of the Web, the challenges you have with the Web in your work, ideas you have for new projects to address those challenges. Most importantly, come prepared to collaborate and build the Open Web!
Register here FOR FREE and let’s Rock ! If you have time, you may visit my article about our first Drumbeat event in Bulgaria !
It's been a long time since I last spoke about Mozilla Drumbeat.
The main reason is that I didn't have time to do that.
In fact in last mid february we submitted a social media strategy proposal to Drumbeat community: the results were amazing.
Now nois3lab is responsible for Social Media Strategy in Mozilla Drumbeat; as you can imagine we have been cluttered a bit right after that.
In fact, we have been invited to share this proposal at Better Software 2010.<br /> View Larger Map The talk Lorenzo and me are going to have is on Thursday May, 6th at 3.25pm. If you are, by any chance, in Florence surroundings tomorrow you might want to come and listen to it.
We are going to explain what Mozilla Drumbeat is, who is going to deal with and why it's worth it. What are the already existing great projects into that platform, how they are going to be helped by users, and by Mozilla Foundation in terms of support, participation and fundings.
And we're going through our social media strategy, explaining it step-by-step, of course, in the open.
Plus, we're going to talk about Mozilla Drumbeat events in 2010, especially about the Berlin event, next Friday. We'll talk about the chance to have a local event in Italy next fall, as well.
See: it's going to be fun. Too bad you didn't get a seat already.
Ethan Zuckerman is a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. His research focuses on the distribution of attention in mainstream and new media, the use of technology for international development, and the use of new media technologies by activists.
At 22 years old, Amelia Andersdotter is the youngest member of the European Parliament, representing a new Swedish political party. That’s interesting in its own right.
Communications scholar Barbara van Schewick, of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, has joined the speaker lineup for this year’s 
Lance Weiler, story architect and culture hacker, is giving a talk at this year’s Open Video Conference about data-driven storytelling.
Each year, Nevada’s Black Rock desert plays host to the 
