Since I posted last, year one plans for Drumbeat have gotten even more solid. We’ve updated the way we’re describing Drumbeat and agreed on a set of initial goals. Also, a slate of ‘bootstrap projects’ is taking shape and early work on some of them has begun. Based on the updated year one plan I posted on the wiki last week, I’ve pulled out some highlights for people who are tracking Drumbeat but don’t want all the details.
What is Drumbeat?
We continue to refine the language we’re using to describe ‘drumbeat in a nutshell‘. This is the version from last week:
Mozilla Drumbeat is global community of people creating tools that enable internet users to understand, participate and take control of their online lives. Drumbeat provides an opportunity for these people to share project ideas — and finds contributors, funds and advice that help the most promising projects succeed. Mozilla also directly leads a number of Drumbeat projects of its own.
While this language feels pretty clear and solid, we’ll likely iterate at least one more time.
What will you do in year one?
Short answer: pick a number of ‘bootstrap projects’ to get us rolling, and then use these to attract community members and more project ideas. More formally, we’ve agreed on three simple year one goals:
- Build and energize the Mozilla Drumbeat community.
- Find and set up projects that excite us. Mostly from people we don’t know yet.
- Establish Drumbeat events as places where there the future of the open internet is being invented.
The idea is to build momentum quickly while at the same time testing our thinking about Drumbeat. You can see basic metrics associated with each goal on the planning wiki.
What projects and topics will you focus on?
The most critical goal for year one is ‘find projects that excite us’. We’ll bootstrap this process by starting work right away on a few projects suggested during the initial planning process — and that illustrate the Drumbeat concept. Examples:
- Simple privacy icon design challenge. Engaging design, law students and regular web users to accelerate the development of icons that make privacy policies easier to understand. confirmed
- P2P University and Open Web Tech: work with P2P university to establish courses where people teach each other open web tech as an alternative or supplement to mainstream tech certification. still exploring
- ‘Visualizing the open internet’ challenge. Engaging artists and web developers to create data visualizations that ’show what the internet looks like’ using new open web technologies (e.g. processing.js). still exploring
- ‘Fair Mobile’ index, like the Economist’s ‘Big Mac Index’ comparing purchasing power, but focused on comparing mobile markets for fairness and openness. still exploring
- Drumbeat Presentation Challenge. Give a 5 minute talk on one of two topics — Your Open Web Idea or the Ultimate Open Web Presentation — and then upload to the Drumbeat website. This is a project in its own right, and also way to get people and ideas into Drumbeat early on. confirmed
There is a full list of possible bootstrap projects on the wiki. More importantly, we’re developing a process whereby anyone can propose and build a community around a project using the Drumbeat website. Over time, this will become central to how we find and support new Drumbeat ideas.
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With all of this, we effectively kicked off Drumbeat ‘year one’ last week — with the idea that it runs until the end of 2010. We’re actively working on at least two of the bootstrap projects and are vetting others. And website development work is well underway (will blog on this separately).
We definitely need alot more help as we move ahead with all this. If you want to get involved or just have feedback, please comment on this post, or join us in the Drumbeat discussion forum or on the weekly Drumbeat call.




