Making tools for webmakers

We want everyone to tap into the full creative power of the web. That’s the point of Mozilla Webmaker. Part of  this is about people: building a global community of webmakers. But another essential element is building tools that both invite people to make cool things on the web and that help them learn how the web works. Last week, we released early versions of two of these tools: Thimble and Popcorn. This post offers background on these tools plus musings on next steps.

A month or two back, Free Software Foundation Chief Counsel Eben Moglen said: “We made the web easy to read, but we didn’t make the web easy to write. Facebook took advantage of this gap.” This is a useful way to look at the challenges the web now faces.

Over a billion people are now on social networks. They use these networks to create and share (awesome!). But they do so only on the terms social networks offer them. Most people have neither the tools nor the skills to tap into the unbounded creative potential of the web (e.g. I want to change how this app works, let me hack it). This seems like something worth fixing.

The goal of Mozilla Webmaker is exactly this: to move people from being users of the web to being makers of the web. While part of this move is about new skills and attitudes, another part has to be about tools and content. Specifically: tools and content that make it easier to create using the full power of the web. Easier to customize a blog template. Easier to add a data layer to a video. Easier to hack a game. And so on. As Mozilla begins to build tools like this, I see three big buckets of things we need to get done:

1. Build a foundation: Thimble + Popcorn as way to test our making + learning thesis (2012)
2. Build with the community: add in badges, get community adding content and code (2012+)
3. Make the app world hackable: add in JavaScript, game hacking, app hacking (2013+)

Of course, this isn’t just about Mozilla: we’re already working with Tumblr, Codecademy and many others who are also building tools that encourage making and learning. But Mozilla does have a clear role to play here, especially around tools that build in the design principle of ‘making as learning’ from the beginning. This is our focus.

Step 1 – Build a foundation

Quickly ship tools that test our webmaker thinking: this was our plan with Thimble and Popcorn. Earlier this year, we agreed we needed to try out our ‘people learn by making’ thesis soon and in the real world.

With this in mind, we designed very simple tools with a collection of ‘hackable’ projects at the centre. Each project is a web page or interactive video template that gives people a) a starting point for making something and b) instructions that help you learn while making.

In Thimble, for example, each project is a single, simple HTML page. All pages include code comments that suggest what part of the page you might hack and what techniques to use. Eg. <!– This is a comment. These comments tell you what to do. The next section is a <H1> header. Edit the text within the header tags to change what words are on the web page. –> Thimble currently includes about a dozen making + learning templates that teach basic HTML and CSS while letting you make a meme, kill zombies or remix an animal from the London Zoo.

In Popcorn, the focus is much more on learning the mechanics of the web while also learning how to tell stories in new ways. The core element of a Popcorn project is a video wrapped in an HTML page template. You are invited to tell your own story by manipulating the video and the template. For example, with the Robots template, you design your own Robot invasion movie by adding in Google maps (learn how APIs work + target the robots at your home town), by changing the words the robots say (learn about variables and speech synthesis), or by adding in pictures of people and places the robots will target (learn about links and embedding). Similar templates exist where you can make your own web newscast or create a VH1-style pop up layer on top of your video.

Popcorn and Thimble share a common design philosophy. They start from the premise that remix and making are central to how people have always learned the web. The web is an open, view source world where it’s easy to see a technique in action and then copy it. We’re trying to make that even easier and more explicit by offering tools and pre-made projects that help people learn by making. We think this approach is especially promising for the 1 billion+ people on social media who clearly like to express themselves on online but have no plans of becoming a capital P ‘programmer’. For these people, the starter content we’re offering will be much more important than the tools themselves.

Our goal for this 1st step in the Mozilla Webmaker tool roll out: test this making + learning thesis. See if people like what we’ve made so far. Evaluate whether they are learning anything and what they are learning (see ‘badges’, below). We’ll do this testing and evaluating over the next six months while also shipping improvements plus new content for Thimble and Popcorn.

Step 2 – Build with community

Our next big priority needs to be building Mozilla Webmaker with a community. There are two parts to this: a) building basic tools that offer value to people who want to make, learn or teach and b) creating an architecture of participation that makes it easy for people to contribute content and code. We’ve already started on a) (see above), now we need to get moving on b).

We’ve got a few early wins. Some of the best Thimble projects came from the hack jam we held with NESTA in London about a month ago. Popcorn already has a base of open source code contributors. And, of course, we’ve got well over 500 people who have stepped up to organize a #mozparty this summer. These are big contributions already.

What we don’t yet have is a systematic way for more people to get involved, especially on content, code and localization. As an example: we want to get to a place where large numbers of people contribute Thimble and Popcorn projects for other people to make / learn on top of. I believe that this sort of community-made content will be key to the growth of Mozilla Webmaker. Unfortunately, we don’t have a good way for people to do this yet.

As a first step towards fixing this, we’re going to create an easy way for people to propose Webmaker.org and Thimble content simply by posting it to a Mozilla wiki. We’re working on the specifics right now, but the ideas is that people can review / refine / discuss stuff there, and then we can port the best stuff to our main sites when it’s ready. Obviously, we need something easier and more robust over the longer term: a gallery or repository where anyone can post content ideas into the Mozilla Webmaker universe. We also need easier ways into the code side of our projects. These are both things we’re thinking through with the aim of making progress this year. We’re very open to your ideas.

We also need a way to see who’s who in the community: to know what people are working on; to find people with particular skills; to find people with similar interests. This starts with simple communications tools like the new webmaker mailing list and the #mozparty Twitter hashtag. But we need something more robust and something that works across alot of platforms if we want Mozilla Webmaker to scale.

This is where Mozilla Webmaker badges come in. By the end of 2012, we plan to offer badges to recognize the skills that people have learned and that recognize contributions to the community. The skill badges will include things like “I understand HTML basics” and “I’ve helped 5 friends learn CSS”. We’re still working out the specifics. The contribution badges will recognize those who have helped others and those who have contributed learning content and code. This will give people within the Webmaker community an easy way to signal each other — to know who knows what and who is into what. More importantly, it will also give people a way to show what they learned and for us to monitor what and whether people are learning.

We’re starting work on this 2nd step right now, building a more systematic architecture of participation in parallel with our efforts to test and improve our first set of tools.

Step 3 – Make the app world hackable

Our third big step for Mozilla Webmaker tools has to be ‘teaching real programming‘ – getting people to the point where they can create or remix a game, app, etc. We chose to start Mozilla Webmaker with a focus on HTML and video so we could test our making and learning thesis using basic content that almost anyone on the web can make. But, our ultimate goal is to let people control, configure and create all corners of their digital lives. Games. Apps. Social networks. Civic participation sites. Science projects. And so on. At some point, that means teaching programming, or making programming easier to do.

It’s in this last phrase where one of our big questions sits: do we teach ‘real code’ like JavaScript, or do we adopt / develop a simple tool for producing JavaScript etc. like Meemoo or Blockly?

Our plan for 2012 is to explore both paths. We’re working with Codecademy to get their content on Webmaker.org and to encourage people to use their courses as part of #mozparty. This gives people a ‘learn real code in the abstract’ option. We’ll likely do the same with Meemoo, Blockly and other promising tools: write them up on Webmaker.org; encourage people to use them; and then ask people to feedback on what they observed. This is a good way to promote the work of allies who also want to teach the world to code while at the same time investigating whether there are gaps a tool like Thimble++ could play.

There are already a couple of places where I think Mozilla-made tools — and Mozilla’s learning philosophy — could add value in the ‘learn programming space’. One opportunity is in the realm of hackable games: HTML5 games which are designed from the ground up to be modified. People could be invited to change the game mechanics and or to bring in content from across the web. E.g. imagine grabbing your friend’s picture from Facebook and mapping it onto a rock in Angry Birds. Another opportunity is in mobile apps, especially those designed for rich on-the-fly HTML5 content creation. Eg. imagine a Popcorn-enabled Boot-to-Gecko phone that pulled in all kinds of contextual content and data on the fly, feeding a ready to edit package of content back to your laptop via the web. We’ll explore ideas like these this year at a blue sky and maybe even prototyping level to see what’s possible.

My guess is that this 3rd step in the Mozilla Webmaker tool effort won’t really move into high gear until early 2013. There are a number of experiments planned for later in 2012, but these are mainly about seeing what’s possible and giving us enough insight that we can develop a solid roadmap for our work in this space.

–

Admittedly, this is a pretty big dream. Mozilla Webmaker is ambitious on purpose. We need this kind of ambition if we want a world where we all understand and can shape our digital lives.

But we also need a plan to turn ambition into reality. We made the beginnings of a plan when we launched Mozilla Webmaker earlier this year (you can read it here). I’ll post a review of where we’re at with this plan sometime in later July, including how what we’ve learned from tools like Thimble and Popcorn is helping us evolve the plan.

In the meantime, there is one thing we know for sure: Mozilla is way too small to take on the Webmaker vision on its own. As I said above, we need to a) figure out how we can provide something valuable to others who want to teach the world to code and b) get at least some of these people working with us directly to create the tools, content and community for webmakers. Finding ways to work with people who share our vision (is this you?) is the number one priority of the Mozilla Webmaker team right now.

Which leads me to two closing asks: let us know if any of the work we’re doing on Mozilla Webmaker tools can help you + let us know if you want to help. It’s not always easy to find your way in. We know that and can help. The best place to start is on the Webmaker mailing list or our weekly community conference call. You can also just post a comment here or send me email. Just show up, put up your hand and say ‘I want help / how can I help?’ Someone on the Mozilla Webmaker team will be there to help you figure it out from there.

Planting seeds for webmaking

Mozilla Webmaker takes its first big step this weekend: asking people to help out. And, just as important, asking how we can help others working for the same cause.

Mozilla’s Summer Code Party kicks off on Saturday, June 23. Our ask is simple: teach someone how to make something on the web. This could be teaching your kids basic HTML with Thimble or Tumblr. Or it could be learning JavaScript with friends on Codecademy or at a CoderDojo. The only thing that matters is that you are making and learning with friends.

Why? Because getting together with people to make and learn is essential if we want to build a generation of webmakers. It will fuel the community we need to reach our big goals. And, more immediately, getting people together will help Mozilla figure out how to work well with partners and to identify potential community leaders (is this you?).

The good news: many of you have already stepped up to help. There are already 394 Summer Code Party meetups and events in 320 cities and 67 countries scheduled for this summer. And, if all goes well, people will continue to do more and more events over the course of the summer.

Also, we’ve had a great response from partners who share Mozilla’s philosophy and goals: helping people learn how to create cool and powerful things on the web. Tumblr. CoderDojo. The London Zoo. Codecademy. Young Rewired State. Creative Commons. The San Francisco Public Library. NESTA. DoSomething.org. Code for America. Campus Party. And dozens more.

We’re stoked to have these partners are involved, and we also hope we can help them by connecting them to new communities and promoting their work. Helping partners succeed is critical to the success of Mozilla Webmaker overall.

Of course, we’re still just planting our first seeds this weekend. Mozilla’s Webmaker tools are still very basic (I’ll say more about our long term plans soon). And, we’re still in the early days of figuring out how to organize the community around our making and learning goals. But you have to start somewhere. You have to plant seeds.

Which leads me to a second ask: help us grow these seeds. Mozilla Webmaker is premised on the belief that we can build a global community of people who share our goals. We chose Summer Code Party as our first big step because we know we need to start building this community early: to figure out how to organize things; what tools people need; and how we can help others working on similar projects. So, jump in. Push us. Help out. Ask for help. Also, be patient. Growing things takes hard work from alot of people. And it takes time.

Mozilla Thimble preview

Later this month, we’ll be releasing Mozilla Thimble. Thimble is a simple web page editor combined with a series of ‘projects’ that help you learn the basics of HTML and CSS. The idea is to get people to learn basic web coding by just diving in and making something. Thimble projects make that easier by giving people guidance and a head start.

Thimble will go live just in time for our Summer Code Party campaign that kicks off on June 23. We want people using Thimble at their ‘kitchen table’ events, so I thought I should give people a preview of what’s coming.

The first thing you’ll see is a gallery of Thimble projects. The initial projects are designed to grab the interest of 8 – 14 year olds and to invite them to start making. We’ll be rolling out projects for older teens and adults later in the year.

As a part of this ‘interest grabbing’ approach, a number of the projects have been developed by organizations that already work with young people. This one is from the London Zoo. It teaches basic HTML and a bit about endangered species at the same time.

The Thimble interface itself is a simple side-by-side web page editor based on Code Mirror. The left pane is the code, and the right pane is the page preview rendered in real time.

The project pages are a mix of instructional comments and actual page elements. In the London Zoo Awesome Animal Builder project, the aim is to create your own species by combining image files from real endangered species that the Zoo wants you to learn about.

Here I was able to change the background of my species picture by changing the CSS class. As the code comments explain, I can choose between ‘ocean, rainforest or desert.’

If you’re new to HTML and CSS (that’s who this is aimed at), we’ve put in a bunch of features designed to help you if you get stuck with tasks like this. For example, you can click on any tag to get info on what it does.

Also, we’ve included pop-up hints that help you figure out what the right syntax is for a particular element.

After changing my CSS class (above), I then started moving different PNG files from different species into the frame with the question marks at the top of the page. These files are all given to me lower in the page along side info about the real endangered species. All I have to do is cut and paste the image URLs in order to build my animal.

And, voila! After moving a few more image URLS I now have a completed animal. I’ve also learned a) how headline tags work in HTML, b) the idea that CSS can be used to change the look of a major element of a page and c) that images in a web page are just references to a file somewhere on a server.

These may sound like small things to learn — but it’s exactly these small things we want people to start with. There are other projects in the gallery that deal with more advanced HTML and CSS topics. And, in a later release, anyone will be able to submit a project page to teach whatever aspect of web development tickles their fancy. Our hope is that Thimble can become a ‘Wikipedia of webmaking lessons’, which would be an awesome resource for the world to have.

Of course, our Mozilla Webmaker ambitions are much bigger than just teaching HTML and CSS. PopcornMaker will be a major resource for helping people make and learn about interactive video on the web. And, later this year, we’ll start experimenting with ways to teach people Javascript, most likely through game modding and making.

Early next week, we’ll release a preview version of Mozilla Thimble to people who are organizing Summer Code Party events. Most of these events are small and short — just you at your kitchen table or in your living room teaching two or three people a bit about how to code for the web. If you want to organize an event like this (and see the Thimble preview), sign up here on the Mozilla Webmaker events site.

Want feedback: PDF movement talk

Next week am talking at Personal Democracy Forum in New York. My goal is to get people thinking about the big picture of the open internet movement: where product, policy and teaching the world to code connect. Also, I want people to start imagining the long game. I’m excited.

The talk is now at the point that I’d like some feedback, so I’ve posted my outline below. It’ll go through at least 2 – 3 more iterations as I make the slides and refine the narrative. Comments on notes like this always help a ton.

–

Movement Making:  What punk rock, Scouting and the Royal Society can teach us about  movement building. Plus: quick, practical thoughts on keeping the open ethos and technology of the web alive for the next 350 years.

[blank slide]

At 15, I found my first cause. A cause that sticks with me to this very day.

[mark as a teenage skinhead]

At the time, I called it punk rock. It was about creativity, experimentation, edginess, laughter, freedom, comradarie, surprises. It was magnetic, and it was fun

[add 'creativity + freedom' to the same slide]

Over time, two things truly stood out for me about this cause: creativity + freedom.

Ultimately, that’s what the punk DIY ethic is about: the idea that anyone should be able to do or make anything they can imagine without asking permission from others.

As I soaked happily in this creativity and freedom, I started to look for ways to bake this ethos into the world around me. This is when I first started paying attention to technology.

[slides of punk + tech]
[ad for a four track tascam recorder + punk concert]
[photocopier + maximum rock n roll cover]
[sony portapak + still from a protest video]
[2400 baud modem]

I suspect that this quest to bake creativity and freedom into the world — and to bend technology to this end — is something that almost everyone in this room has embarked upon in one way or another. It is at the core of our cause. It is essential.

[picture of a network + words 'freedom + creativity]

This quest is more important today than it ever has been, because it ties back to the internet and what it becomes.

Creativity + freedom are core to the design of the internet and fused into the internet culture that we have built. But there are many people who do not share our love for creativity + freedom, who have a different vision of the internet. One based on prescription + control.

This matters to more than just the internet itself. The internet is now so central to all aspects of our lives, that, as goes the internet, goes humanity.

[text slide: as goes the internet, goes humanity]

The internet we end up with in 100 years will very much shape everything that is possible and everything that is. If you care about:

• Privacy
• Creativity
• Innovation
• Commerce
• Friendship
• Love

… then you should care about how the internet turns out, because it will impact all these things.

With this in mind, I want to explore how we succeed at our quest, how we explain our vision of creativity and freedom, and how we bake it into society for a very long time.

[mark's business cards w/ i <3 open web on them]

These days, much of my time is spent thinking about how to explain this ethos of creativity + freedom to 100s of millions of people.

As you may have noticed, we haven’t cracked that yet. We’ve talked about an open web. We’ve talked about innovation, and openness, and choice. All of it seems so abstract and far away.

[picture of lego blocks]

The closest I’ve come is using the metaphor of lego. I open with a line like: The world (wide web) is made of lego. And I want to keep it that way. And then I use my 10 year old son Ethan to explain what I mean.

[picture of ethan holding a lego]

My pitch goes something like this:

[text on screen with ethan for most of this]

This is my son Ethan.
He loves to make things with lego.
He also loves the web, a lot.

[screencap of rebecca black / fridays]
[screencap of chad vader / fridays]
[back to ethan and lego]

Ethan’s world is a mashup.
It’s a mashup by design.
Tim Berners Lee wanted the web to work like lego.

[screencap of chad vader / fridays]
[screencap of chad vader, view source]
[back to ethan pic]

The web was designed the be like lego.
I want Ethan to know this.
And I want him to expect it.

[back to just the lego]

There are two critical things here:

[big text = explanation]

1. The explanation: we need a metaphor or a word for everyone everywhere to understand what’s good about the web. Lego has it’s downsides, especially the fact that it’s proprietary. But it does help people understand that the power of the web is that you can take it apart and put it back together, and that you can easily see how something is built. Lego helps people get this.

[big text = expectation]

2. The expectation: if we create the expectation that the world — and the web — are made of lego that all of us can understand and reconfigure, then it will be much more likely that this aspect of the web survives. If future politicians, architects, filmmakers and so on grow up in a digital world made of lego, that will shape they laws they write, the buildings they build and the movies they make. Consciously or not, they will be closer to the cause of creativity and freedom.

[text fades away, just the lego blocks now]

I think we’ll crack the explaining part. Even if lego is not quite right, it gives us all something to riff on.

I’m much more worried about how grow the expectation that the world and the web are made of lego. That we make this feeling mainstream, nearly universal.

[floppy disk picture?]

Eben Moglen recently said: ‘We made the web easy to read, but we did not make it easy to write.’ This is not literally true: it’s easy to write the web, to treat it as lego, to make an app. If you’re a programmer. The problem is that programming remains arcane and in accessible to most people.

Which leads me to the question: how do you take something arcane and inaccessible and make it mainstream?

[picture of a scouting jamboree]

At this juncture, I often point to the scouting movement. And I ask: what was the major social innovation of the scouting movement? One that has been wildly successful to the point that it is a major part of our lives?

[pic from wikipedia of civilian camping in ontario, or scout camping]

The answer: civilian camping.

105 years ago when scouting first began, camping was primarily the domain of land settlers, prospectors and the military. It was an arcane activity done primarily by professionals and the highly adventurous.

Baden Powell used this arcane technique and technology of camping as part of scouting’s efforts to connect urban young people to nature. The result: he helped bring camping into the mainstream of recreation, family life and the economy. And, in doing so, he also helped build the *expectation* that we would have parks, rivers and mountains that are protected for our enjoyment.

[add some stats on camping?]

Imagine if 105 years from now we could say the same for coding: that coding is something that huge numbers of people do for fun and self expression.

If we did that, we would certainly have made great progress towards building the *expectation* of lego-ness into the internet. And, in turn, we would have done a great deal for the cause of creativity + freedom.

[smiling kids in brasil w/ smartphones in hand]

I love the long game. It’s so important here. But let’s set the long game aside for a moment and talk about where we are right at this moment.

As I said earlier, the stakes with the internet today are very very high. The internet has become so central to all aspects of our lives, and quickly the lives of billions more people, that, as goes the internet, goes humanity.

[text slide: as goes the internet, goes humanity]

We are at a juncture where the design decisions we make in the next decades will influence:

• Privacy
• Creativity
• Innovation
• Commerce
• Friendship
• Love

… likely for centuries to come. And many of these decisions are tied directly to our vision of the internet.

[mosaic view source vs. ipad app store human]

We are currently faced with two visions of where the internet should go.

The app store vision: where creativity, innovation and commerce happen on the terms of a handful of technology companies, and where privacy exists or doesn’t at their whim.

The view source vision: where the digital world is made and expanded using lego blocks we can all understand and use, and where privacy is a choice that all of use have at our fingertips.

[ipad disappears on the next slide, 'creativity + freedom' comes on screen]

It should be obvious to you which vision I support. The view source vision. The vision that is about creativity and freedom. This is the vision of the internet that I have. This is the vision of society that I have. My guess is that many of you share this vision.

[image?]

The practical question: what do we need to do right now to ensure that our vision wins, to bake creativity and freedom into the internet and the world? Also, what time horizon should we focus on?

[text: 352 years]

The answer to the time horizon questions is simple: 352 years. But let me get back to that. The question of immediate tactics is harder, but I know we can crack it.

[b2g + meemo + soundcloud pic]

The first thing we need to do is run like hell to build creativity + freedom into to core of internet products that everyone uses every day.

When Moglen said: “We made the web easy to read, but we did not make it easy to write,” he went on to point out that Facebook, Apple and others have taken advantage of this, serving up creativity on their terms.

We need to make the raw lego blocks of the web just as easy to create with as Facebook or iMovie. And, importantly, we need to make them both more powerful and more fun.

[sopa girl pic]

The second thing we need to do is defend ourselves. On so many fronts, we are winning. The web is winning. Creativity + freedom are winning.

The predictable result: those who believe they have something to loose if creativity + freedom win have gone on the attack. They attack with SOPA and ACTA. With national firewalls. With arcane yet nasty copyright laws. With quite clear intent, these people want to break the internet. Or, at least, to ensure that our vision of the internet does not survive.

The punk rock kid in me says that policy and politics are a tactic of last resort, possibly futile. But the realist in me knows that we must stand up and fight where people propose to pass laws that will break the internet. And, I can say, Mozilla will stand up against such things even more strongly than it has in the past. We cannot and will not let people destory what we have all built together.

[pic of kids learning to code]

The third thing we need to do now help 100s of millions more people tap the full creativity + freedom, and to pull this into their every day lives.

As a tag line: I believe we need to make coding as mainstream as camping.

This is why I so often point to the scouting movement as an example: it is possible to transform the arcane and the professional into something that huge numbers of people want to learn and do. And, into something that connects people to something deeper.

Practically, this means making it easier and sexier to use code in every day creativity. In fashion. In filmmaking. In school. In journalism. In hip hop. Everywhere.

Which is not about making everyone a coder or engineer, but rather about bringing the power, the freedom and the creativity that coders and engineers experience in the digital world to everyone who has an idea, a dream, something to say.

[text: 352 years]

So those are some practical ideas for how we fuse creativity + freedom into our world:

1. create internet products that work like lego
2. defend the internet from people who want to break it
3. build a generation of people who speak code as fluently as they speak words and numbers

But, what about that time horizon? As I said, I like to take the long view on things like this. Which is one of the reasons 352 feels like a good number.

[picture of the royal society mace]

A couple of months ago I was staring at this mace.

It’s the mace that Charles II gave to the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge when they first set up shop 352 years ago.

I was at the Royal Society to talk about their recent report on computer science education in UK secondary schools. On top of our main conversation, I was struck by the idealism of the people I was meeting with.

These were people who believe deeply in the ideals of science, in the royal society motto of ‘take nobody’s word for it’, and who get up everyday to advance this cause.

[etching of early scientists running an experiment]

What’s amazing is that this is an organization that has stood for this ideal for over 350 years. And, they have been quite successful — along with many others — in spreading the idea we call science. And making it last. And they did so primarily by showing what we possible using the ethos and techniques they believed in.

A big part of the Royal Society’s early history was friends gathering to do experiments together and to observe the results. These were basically meetups for fringe philosophers, radicals. But with these meetups and eventually a cadre of thought leaders called fellows, the ideas spread.

[picture of the royal society building today]

The point here is not to give the royal society all the credit for the success of science. That would be silly. But rather I want to show how planting a few small seeds with friends can build institutions that can keep a cause alive for a very very long time. In this case, 352 years.

[an etching of a network diagram, or something that looks like this]

Which brings me to what I really want to begin — or, more correctly, I think we have already begun — to build today. I build product, and fight bad policy and light up a movement of people who will teach other to code.

But more than anything I want us to create an an ethos of creativity + freedom that people will still treasure and defend 352 years from this day. I think we can do that.

#mozparty: learning code this summer

This summer, Mozilla will take it’s first stab at teaching about code. ‘Code’ in both the webbiest sense of the word: we want to expose 10,000s of people to HTML, CSS and JavaScript to help them make things on the web. Or, at least, to give them a glimpse of how the web works.

Kicking off on June 23, we’re calling this experiment the Summer Code Party. It’s an invite for anyone who wants to teach — or learn — webmaking to spend a few minutes building something with friends. Like the Product (Red) campaign, it’s a big tent for anyone who shares our goal of a more web literate planet. Tumblr. Girls Learning Code. Soundcloud. CoderDojo. Creative Commons. etc. Over a dozen partners are already signed up.

The most basic version of participation: do a small Hackasaurus project with two friends around your kitchen table or in your living room. Taking a cue from Jess and Atul’s LoveBomb prototype, we’re developing half a dozen small starter projects that will make this easy. Of course, the hope is that people will do this more than once after they’ve tried it — but even a single kitchen table event is a great way to show people how the web works.

In addition to Hackasaurus projects, we will also offer up a collection of DIY web projects from partners. For example, we’re working with Tumblr to develop some well-commented templates that both help people make their Tumblr look cooler and help them improve their HTML and CSS a little. Other partners will be posting their own small projects on our wiki.

Some partners are taking on more ambitious projects under the Summer Code Party banner. For example, Girls Learning Code is hoping to offer a week long summer camp at the Mozilla Toronto office. This will cover HTML, CSS, Python and Scratch. Other partners will simply plug their existing summer code efforts into the Party, sharing out what people are learning and making with people around the world doing similar things.

Which brings me to how this all fits together: everyone will be invited to share out what they’ve made, both online and at a series of local events in September. The best projects will get badges. And the best local organizers and instructors will get an invite to the Mozilla Festival in London to help us figure out how to improve our webmaking tools and grow out our community.

For now, there are three ways to get involved: 1) Put your name of the list of people who want run a small code party at home or in a cafe; 2) Sign up as a partner or collaborator; and 3) Put yourself on the volunteer list for our June 23 and 24 kick off event. Or, if you want to get even more involved, join one of our weekly Webmaker conference calls. They happen every Tuesday.

Would love to hear ideas, reactions and partner leads. This should be fun.

A scouting movement for the web

I’ve been thinking about ‘a scouting movement for the web’ for a while: a practical movement focused on skills, creativity and the internet. I finally got around to doing a talk on this idea at last week’s TEDx Seneca. Here is a video of the talk:

The talk starts with a question: what was the most important social innovation that scouting gave to the world? Answer: civilian camping. Before Baden Powell, only the army camped. Camping was strictly for professionals.

A century later, camping is a mainstream amateur activity. Powell met his ultimate goal: he skilled up millions of urban young people as a way to connect them back nature. But he also turned whole generations of people into joyful campers and stewards of the environment.

Imagine if we could do the same with coding and the web? A 100 years from now, we could have a world where making and coding online are a mainstream amateur activity. There would still be professional coders, of course. There always will be. But a huge number of the people making apps, tinkering with robots and writing code would be doing it for the joy of it. Or as a part some other vocation. Or, because they simply wanted to help take care of the web.

There are many practical and immediate reasons to want to teach web making. Skills and jobs and so on. But encouraging creativity and stewardship of the web are equally important. Scouting shows us that building a movement around ideas like this — and teaching a particular skill and technology to whole generations — is very much within the realm of the possible.

PS. Phillip Toronne wrote a piece in Make Magazine on Scouting 2.0. Some good and related thoughts in there.

A big tent for teaching tech

Last Saturday’s Hive Toronto HackJam confirmed something for me: one of Mozilla’s biggest opportunities is building a big tent for people teaching web making. This includes teaching things like Hackasaurus and PopcornMaker that we’re building. But it also includes people teaching Scratch, Ruby, Python and even hardware tinkering. We’re all trying to build the same ethos and teach many of the same skills.

Photo by Jon Lim

Similar to the Hive Tokyo Pop-up, Toronto had a mix of Mozilla and non-Mozilla stations kids could take part in. Hackasaurus and PopcornMaker from the Mozilla side. Scratch, paper-prototyping, Python and PlayLab. We had 50+ kids, 40 parents and 25 volunteers gathered together for 3 hours at the Toronto MozSpace.

As with the Scratch + Hackasaurus mash-up in Tokyo, Toronto saw good collaboration and reinforcement amongst the different groups teaching. Some kids moved easily between the diverse stations (coding vs. physical). Others found their passion or their level (basic to intermediate) and stuck with it for the full time. It wasn’t a competition between the stations: it was the creation of an integrated experience for all the kids who had shown up.

This isn’t surprising. Hive NYC is already a model of how diverse organizations and technologies snap together into a learning experience bigger and more exciting that anything that a single org could do. The interesting part is that we’ve now done this in three new cities: London; Tokyo; Toronto. And, in each, we’re finding the same willingness to play beyond turf and build a new way of teaching using the ethos and technology of the web.

Photo by Jon Lim

What does this mean for Mozilla? It means Mozilla needs to focus equally on building our own making and learning tools and on helping out others who are teaching web making.

Much of Mozilla’s learning work right now is focused on building new tools and curriculum that help people learn while making things on the web. Hackasaurus and PopcornMaker are the big bets. And, for certain, these are some of the most valuable things we could doing right now. People want and will use the things we’re building.

But Mozilla also needs to figure out who else is teaching web making and how we can help them. As Michelle L. and I outlined in our London talk last month, we’re already reaching out to people like CodeNow, Ladies Learning Code and Young Rewired State. But there are dozens — maybe even hundreds — more groups like this around the world. We need to reach out to them broadly.

With this aim in mind, Michelle is in the early stages of building up an instructor community for groups teaching web making. We’re also looking for ways to get groups like this involved in defining the tools, curriculum and badges we build. We want to accelerate the web making and teaching work that people are doing at the local level everywhere — we need to make sure what we build serves that end.

Photo by Jon Lim

Which is all to say: the Hive events we’ve done over the last few months make it clear to me that we can build ‘a cohesive learning offering for web makers’ (our goal for 2012) that mashes up what we’re building with the tools and talents of others. This, of course, is how the web works. It’s important to remind ourselves that Mozilla needs to work that way, too.

Michelle + I explain web making

Want to know what we mean by web making? Or why you (and Mozilla) should care? Michelle Levesque and I did this 20 minute talk at last month’s Learning Without Frontiers conference to answer these questions:

One thing that’s worth pulling out of our slides is the definition of ‘web maker’:

a web maker is anyone who makes things using the open ethos and building blocks 
of the web

I’ve been using this definition for many months now, but it often seems to fly past people. I want to underline it here as this web maker audience is central for all the learning programs Mozilla is developing this year.

If you want more info — or if wonder what I mean by the ‘open ethos and building blocks of the web’ — there are lots of old posts by Mitchell, myself and others that unpack this general topic. Here are a few:

• Describing Mozilla. (Mitchell)
• What makes the web better? (me)
• Describing the open web. (Mitchell)
• Open web definition for drumbeat.org. (me)
• Kids and the open web. (Atul)

You see the pattern in these posts: a) open ethos = transparency, decentralization, participation, remix + b) building blocks = HTML, CSS, Javascript, open source tools and libraries. In my books, anyone who uses this ethos and these tools to make things on the web is a web maker.

PS. here is a PDF of the slides from the talk Michelle and I did. Can also send Keynote to anyone who wants to use these.

Re: public of the web

Inspired by Dave Parry, my friend Andrew said: “We are no longer just seeing the power of the public internet. We are now seeing the rise of the internet public.” It was a bit of an ‘aha!’ moment for me.

SOPA protest pic via Clay Williams

It’s been amazing to watch the push back against SOPA in the US and ACTA in Europe over the past few months. And, of course, to have witnessed the Arab Spring. The people behind these events didn’t just use the internet to amplify voices: they were the voice of the internet speaking. And, at least with SOPA and ACTA, the message itself was about the internet and what it stands for. This is new. And good.

I’ve always believed the internet is something special. Not just something to use and build on, but also something to stand up for.

As Joi Ito said in the New York Times a couple of months back: “The Internet isn’t really a technology. It’s a belief system, a philosophy about the effectiveness of decentralized, bottom-up innovation.” This vision of the internet has motivated me for a very long time. It’s what brought me to Mozilla.

Until recently, it felt like the group of people who cared about the Internet as philosophy was relatively small. I personally know hundreds of people who spend every day evangelizing the open ethos of the internet. I’m one of them. The thing is: none of us have had much luck getting sizeable numbers of people excited or engaged. We’ve all tried. But the idea of an ‘open web’ or ‘internet ethos’ has always been too abstract get people to prick up their ears.

This seems to be changing. We are seeing the rise of the internet public: a movement or constituency that is both of the internet and about the internet.

The Facebook signs in Tahrir Square were a first glimpse of this. In some ways, these signs were a small footnote in a bigger political change in the Arab world. But they also point to the fact that the internet is more than just a part of the story — it is itself a story to pay attention to.

The massive public push back on SOPA and ACTA show this more starkly: there is a broad public passion for and connection to the internet. People are saying: ‘the open internet and the way it connects us is a central part of the world we want to build.’ In this story, the internet isn’t only a disruptive tool that helps bring about democracy where it doesn’t exist, it’s also represents a vision of decentralized, bottom up society in it’s own right.

This part that feels new and different. ‘The internet as philosophy’ no longer feels so abstract. As an example of how things have gotten more concrete, the internet public has quickly and dramatically changed the discussion on both SOPA and ACTA. Both seemed destined for quiet approval just a few months ago, now SOPA seems to be dead or ACTA is under extreme public scrutiny.

Importantly, people with real power are listening and internalizing to this conversation. A White House response to SOPA petitions said:

“Across the globe, the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected.”

and

“Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security.”

Note what’s happening here: the leaders of a major economic power are espousing the importance of an open internet. They are also calling out the protection of a key technical building block upon which the open platform and philosophy of the internet are built. Similar things have happened in Europe around ACTA. This is both important and unprecedented.

At Mozilla, we’ve been talking about what to do next on SOPA and ACTA. This is important. But I believe there is a bigger question: how can Mozilla fuel, bolster, cheer on and be a part of this rising internet public? The world we’ve imagined may be just around the corner: a world where the ethos of the web is a conscious part of how huge numbers of people approach their lives, their work and their government. This is a the world I want to live in.

I’m going to think and write about all this some more. Partly in the context of SOPA and ACTA. But also in relation to building a more web-literate society — teaching tens of millions more people how the web works and how to code. Any thoughts you’ve got would help.

PS. A tip of the hat to Dave Parry for his ‘It’s not the Public Internet, It is the Internet Public.‘ post. I’ve gone in a slightly different direction, hopefully in a way that’s complimentary .

Getting practical on web makers

Big dreams need practical plans. Late last year, we agreed that ‘building a generation’ of web makers‘ should be one of Mozilla’s main goals for 2012. For the last six weeks, people across the Mozilla team and community have been digging into the question: where do we start? I’m writing this post to update people on the plans that are coming out of this.

Concrete ‘web maker’ planning started with the Mozilla Foundation board meeting in mid-December. At that meeting we agreed on the following broad goal for 2012:

Roll Mozilla’s best software and learning resources into a simple ‘kit’ for web makers.

The idea here is that we want to create a single offering — or at least a brand — for people who want to learn and make things with Mozilla. This should roll up things like Popcorn, Hackasuarus, etc. into something easy to comprehend and get involved in.

At the same board meeting, we agreed on five more specific 2012 goals that our web making initiative. They are:

1. Grow our learning programs for teens, journalists, filmmakers.
2. Ship great software that invites making + learning.
3. Build badges and ‘recipes’ to teach web maker skills.
4. Create web sites and events that drive participation.
5. Tell the Mozilla story well, inspire people.

You can see a list of detailed objectives for each of these goals listed here on our 2012 goals wiki page. We will be reviewing and evolving these objectives throughout the year.

As noted above, the plan with all of these goals is to build on our strengths: Popcorn; Hackasaurus; Open Badges; Hive; OpenNews; Mozilla Festival; and so on. Mozilla team and community members have been working on roadmaps that lay our practical plans and tie projects back to our overall goals. Here are the most advanced of these roadmaps:

• PopcornMaker roadmap and blog posting
• Web maker curriculum roadmap and blog posting
• OpenBadges roadmap
• HiveNYC plans – blog post and etherpad
• OpenNews 2012 plans blog post

All of these projects are making great strides — but they all need help as well. We need to people to write, code, test and promote what we’re building. If you’re excited by our web maker vision and want to get involved, you should join one of our weekly open community calls. Or, track Matt Thompson’s weekly round ups of web maker activity and then dive in when you see something specific you are interested in.

 PS. Here are the slides from the December board meeting that I mention above. They also include a review of our work in 2011. If people are interested, I can do a screencast of these slides to give more details. Just let me know.