Another goal of our Singapore presentation challenge was to seek our potential Drumbeat projects. A big part of Drumbeat is inviting people to propose projects that make web better and more open — and then helping the most promising ideas succeed. The Singapore event was our first opportunity to see what kind of projects people might put on the Drumbeat table. Here are five of the eight ideas presented.

Idea #1. Free content hat tip system, presented by Preetam Rai. Click to watch as open video or use Flash version below.

Idea #2. Improving the open font library, presented by Jon Phillips. Click to watch as open video or use Flash version below.

Idea #3. Assisting bots in crawling the web better, presented by KahWee.

Idea #4. Better automated site maps, presented by U-Zyn Chua.

Idea #5. More intuitive web browsers, presented by Patipat Susumpow (Keng).

In all cases: great presentations and intriguing ideas. Some are very much about *using* technology to help people understand the web and make it more open. Others are much closer to building and improving the core technologies of the web itself. And interesting mix.

Given the Drumbeat focus on *using* (as opposed to building) technology to make web better, I’d be interested to know: which of the ideas about sound most Drumbeat-y to you? Are there projects that you’d be interested in backing or getting involved with when Drumbeat gets rolling in the new year?

Describing the open web is tough. Yet, it’s essential if we want to help people understand, participate and take control of their online lives (Drumbeat’s mission). We’re running a small experiment with this in mind: asking people to give five minute talks on the open web and why it matters.

We kicked off by calling for talks at events in Singapore and India this past week. Here are two of the best talks from Singapore. India talks coming soon.

Presentation #1 is by Coleman Yee, a user experience designer and strategist.

Presentation #2 is by Lucian Teo, a web standards advocate working in the Government of Singapore.

PS. We also asked for talks on possible Drumbeat project ideas. I’ve got a bunch of these from Singapore. Will post over the weekend.

Another Drumbeat bootstrap idea that’s getting traction is open web skills courses delivered via the Peer 2 Peer University. It’s a simple concept: people combine self organized, collaborative learning with open curriculum materials to improve their skills in areas like HTML, CSS and Javascript. Over time, a peer to peer certification system could emerge as well, with participants rating each others skill level.

At the moment, there are a number of us writing this up, looking for learning materials and trying to find people to help mentor and run courses. Here’s the intro from the write up in the Drumbeat wiki:

Open Web Career Track: a collection of P2PU courses for people who want to learn open web skills

The challenge: Most tech career development courses focus on certification around a single technology (e.g. MCSE or Cisco Academy). The result: students go into their careers knowing one or two tools rather than knowing how to learn and adapt tools on the fly. Also, there is a sense that permission and certification are the keys to tech career success — but the reality is that creative, entrepreneurial problem solving is much more important.

The Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is planning to offer an alternative to this kind of career development. P2PU helps small groups of motivated learners to compile packages of open learning materials and design and facilitate their own courses. Students and tutors get recognition for their work, and an open credits pilot is in the works in order to hack the formal closed accreditation system. Open web technology is the perfect pilot discipline.

The plan: Open Web Career Track is a series of P2PU courses where students collaboratively learn — and rate each other on — open web skills. The courses focus both on specific, standards-based technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) and learn-as-you-go problem solving and hacking (the real skill you need to succeed). Individual courses are organized by learners using the P2PU model. The overall program is organized as a Drumbeat project involving both employers (TopCoder?) and online career web sites (LinkedIn?).

In addition to facilitating social learning processes, P2PU is coordinating a group of individuals and organisations interested in building an open credits infrastructure (think of it as an open knowledge currency that makes sense in the knowledge economy). It will make it easy for Open Web Career professionals to showcase their skills and expertise to potential employers on personal profile pages. The open credits incubator will be held in mid-2010 and we plan to use open web career for our pilot.

The Open Web Career Track program is particularly focused on regions with high growth technology sectors and a strong bent towards certification. Likely places include: India, East Asia and Brasil. We want peer learning and accreditation to emerge as serious open web career path alternatives in these regions.

The reaction to this idea was good when I focus grouped it at #nsc1 in Singapore. Lots of questions, for sure. But people saw value in providing a grassroots (and hopefully very scaleable) alternative to mainstream tech courses and certification. This is one of our main goals. A few of the people I talked to also suggested getting small companies who need more tech talent involved as mentors and co-organizers. Recruiting people directly out of these courses could be a win for everyone.

We’re hoping to try a couple of these courses early next year, with at least some of them based in Asia. If you want to help organize a course — or if you know of good open web curriculum — please get in touch. You can comment below or jump onto the Drumbeat community mailing list.

As I blogged the other day, I’ve been asking people for ideas on the ‘movie about the web, by the web‘ concept. One of my thought experiments was to simply ask people: what does the web mean to you? I edited the answers together as quick video poem just to see what it felt like.

Also: watch or download as OGG open video.

In some ways, the result is a bit schmultzy. But there is a nice affirmation also: people are totally ready to talk eloquently about very big ideas about the web. This is a good thing as the goal is to make a massively collaborative movie that helps people understand the web and why the fact that it’s open matters so much. It think the citizens of the web are more than ready to pitch in to do this.

If anyone’s interested, I’d love to see other clips responding to the ‘what does the web mean to you?’ question. Just you talking. Or you and your friends. You can just paste links below as comments. It’ll keep the thought experiment going.

Name dropping Jane Jacobs at a tech conference is a good way to get my attention. And that’s exactly what Meng Weng Wong did on the hackerspaces panel at  #nsc1 in Singapore the other day. His point: those of us trying to build a vibrant, healthy digital world can learn from people like Jacobs who know how to build vibrant, healthy cities.

A native New Yorker who lived most of her life in Toronto, Jacobs was amongst the wisest people to ever write about cities. Some of the things she encouraged us to do included:

• Embrace density as form of connection. It creates serendipity and dynamism.
• Also encourage diversity. Different ideas banging together drive entrepreneurial discovery.
• Build — or at least look for — ways for cities to evolve and reconfigure overtime.

Jacob’s argument was that cities built on these principles are engines of economic expansion, growing the pie by fostering innovation that creates new industries. Sound a bit like the open internet? Indeed.

Of course, this healthy city <–> healthy cyberspace link shouldn’t be surprising coming from someone who founded a hackerspace (Meng just opened one in Singapore). Hackerspaces tangibly embody the essence of both a good city and the open internet. Chaotic. Malleable. Evolving. Resilient. Filled with all of your closest friends. These are wonderful places born of internet culture. Which makes me smile, and gives me hope.

PS. Another cool internet <–> city link at #nsc1: Pio Stark’s talk on how 19th century growth of cities into teaming masses of unfamiliar faces led to the need for new systems to track identity. New identity systems to deal with so many unfamiliar faces? Very much something we need to be thinking about now on the internet.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been helping Brett Gaylor and Henrik Moltke write up a movie concept. The idea: a documentary about the web, by the web. People around the world would contribute ideas, clips and remixes. The best stuff would roll into a core storyline with regular releases or episodes.

A part of Drumbeat, the goals for this movie project are pretty clear. 1. Help people understand how the web works and why its open nature matters so much. 2. Push the envelope on cool uses of HTML5 <video> and on the open source filmmaking process. 3. Give filmmakers, musicians and artists an easy, fun way to contribute to making the web better.

What’s harder is the storyline. Of course, much of this will come from the people of the web. That’s the point. But you need to start with something. A thesis. A point of view. The small bits of stuff we’ve written on this feel a bit stodgy and unsurprising. Good stories about the internet for sure, but stories we already know.

As a way to insert some creative juice into the process, I did a little experiment at #nsc1: I asked people to put themselves in the casting director’s chair. Each person I talked was invited to propose one character for the movie. Here are some quotes of what people suggested:

• Peter Pan. Because the internet is alot like Neverland.
• The transformers. They’re pretty geeky, but also cool. More to the point, they have the same sort of open ended adaptability that the internet has.
• Web spiders. DNS. And other invisible agents that make up the web under the hood. Bring them to life as characters.
• Doug Englebart and Ted Nelson. Focus on the unsung pioneers and thinkers behind the internet, not just the names we’ve all heard of.
• My grandmother. That’s who I am trying to help when I try to make the internet better and simpler. She should be in the movie.
• Myself. I am a part of the internet. I help make it when I use it and contribute content. I should be a part of the movie. And so should everyone else on the internet.
• Anonymous. Our anonymous identities are just as much a part of the web as our public identities.

This was a really fun — and useful — session to run. So fun that I want to keep it going here. I’m extending the invitation to you: if you could cast one character in the movie version of the web, who or what would it be? If you have an idea, please post a comment.

As I noted last week, we’re in the early stages of defining and rolling out a small handful of Drumbeat bootstrap projects. One that interests me personally is  ‘visualize the web‘: an effort to combine art, design and data to map the internet. The aim is to use real information about what’s happening on the web to help people understand the internet, how it works and what it means.

The maps and visualizations could be practical, or playful -- as long as they help us understand the web. (sources: new scientist and xkcd)

I’ve taken a first shot at writing something up on the project. The wiki includes a full (very drafty) project description. Here’s the high level summary:

The web. Huge, and uncharted.

More than a billion and a half people use the web – for business, for school, for friendship, to express themselves, to love. Despite the importance of the web in our lives, few of us understand how it works. It big, pervasive, complicated. And there are no good maps.

It’s time to make some maps — together.

Visualize the Web is about mapping the web — using data and design to help us understand the internet and where we each fit in.

As a starting point: artists, designers, data nerds and everyday internet users are invited to propose ideas for visualizing the web. These could be literal and insightful. Or playful and thought provoking. The only constraint: use real (public and anonymous) data to tell a story about how it the internet works and what it means.

From there, we roll up our sleeves: working together to make the best design ideas real. Building maps that we can use and update over time to see the living internet, and to help make it better and more open.

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At this stage, Visualize the Web is just an idea under the Mozilla Drumbeat umbrella. If you want to help, add your name and contact info below. We’ll be in touch.

I’m currently working with Lee Rainie at Pew Internet and a few others to refine this write up and turn it into a real project. If you’re interested in helping out, or just have questions or suggestions, please comment below or get in touch. We’re doing a first brainstorming call on December 20.

PS. Credit where credit is due: this idea came out of a Drumbeat brainstorm I did w/ Chris Messina a while back. It’s evolved since, and lots of people have brought their own pieces. But Chris deserves credit for putting the idea on the table in the first place.

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:

1. Build and energize the Mozilla Drumbeat community.
2. Find and set up projects that excite us. Mostly from people we don’t know yet.
3. 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:

1. 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
2. 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
3. ‘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
4. ‘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
5. 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.

Here is a brief status update that I shared with the Mozilla Foundation board last week. This report is based on team goals outlined here.

In addition to Drumbeat, the last two months have focused communications and community support as well as launching a new education initiative. Highlights include:

• Programs. Almost 100 students at 13 colleges participating in Mozilla Education this fall. JetPack for Learning challenge launched. Early Drumbeat plans in place.
• Communications. New ‘better internet‘ page plus Service Week and OneWebDay generate awareness and traffic for Mozilla mission.
• Community. Effort to recruit new contributors launched. Progress being made on Mozilla governance and ‘bugzilla innovation‘ work.
• Org Development. Significant progress on Drumbeat and MoFo 2010 planning.

November and December will continue to focus on early Drumbeat roll out and web development, as well new fundraising push built around the Namoroka park, which is the Firefox 3.6 namesake.

Program

2009 team goal: develop a small handful of programs that go beyond software as a way to promote Mozilla’s mission (e.g. education).

• Core Mozilla Education work with colleges and Mozilla community grew as expected in late summer and early fall.
  • Mozilla-related courses and activities now underway at 13 schools on five continents, with participation from ten professors and almost a hundred students. Students working on  Bespin, GCC optimization for Mozilla, Gecko, WebGL, Fennec, Firefox, Thunderbird.
  • Processing for the Web project particularly successful, energizing students to work on WebGL and Firefox. Ten students from Seneca College and Université d’Evry.
• Received grant from MacArthur to fund Jetpack for Learning, a mashup of Mozilla Education and a Mozilla Labs design challenge. Launched challenge in late October.
• Planning and early work on Drumbeat moving quickly, especially in late October. Web site mockups and year one plans have been posted, and first projects and events scheduled.

Communications

2009 team goal: dramatically increase awareness of Mozilla’s mission and public benefit nature amongst the broader public.

• Ran Mozilla Service Week and OneWebDay campaigns in September. Significant community contributions and enthusiasm, although not as much as hoped in some regards.
• Pointed one of five snippets on google search page to new ‘Better Internet’ page on mozilla.org, aiming to increase awareness of Mozilla’s mission.
• Initial version of new engagement and fundraising database delivered by vendor, almost operational.

Community

2009 team goal: improve the Foundation’s ability to support, strengthen and grow the Mozilla community.

• New Get Involved  page launched on mozilla.org and community-wide contribute group established to make it easier for new people to get contribute to Mozilla.
• Improvements made on a number of project governance fronts including: new Committer’s Agreement, commit access policy harmonization, dormant accounts.
• MoFo-led Bugzilla Innovation Project made first release of web-friendly API, second release almost ready. One client has already been written to use it.

Organizational Development

2009 team goal: consolidate and strengthen the Foundation team, and develop a long term vision that clarifies the Foundation’s role within Mozilla.

• Most organization development efforts in last two months focused on Drumbeat planning, and developing budget and goals for 2010.

Recently, I noticed Knight Foundation and Sunlight Labs blogging together. The topic: rallying Sunlight developers to join the Knight’s efforts to reinvent local news for the internet era. And, in particular, to join the Knight News Challenge.

By collaborating with Sunlight, Knight is reaching out to developers and designers who are using internet thinking to change how government works. If these people are good at coming up with ways to internet-ize government, why not see if they can do the same for local news? Smart.

This got me to thinking: could Mozilla or Mozillians play a role in Knight’s efforts to create sustainable, inspiring local news that looks and feels like the internet? Certainly, the Knight Challenge criteria align well with Mozilla’s values:

The Knight News Challenge projects meet three criteria: 1) use digital, open-source technology to 2) distribute news and information in the public interest 3) to a local, geographic community.

Open source. Public benefit. Community. And, there a number of people who’ve participated in the past feel more ‘Mozilla’ than ‘local news’:

Past Knight News Challenge winners include leading innovators at the intersection of technology and information – folks like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner, and Adrian Holovaty, co-creator of the Django programming framework and originator of one of the first Google Maps mashups, which evolved into his 2007 Knight News Challenge award.

While I’ve only just glanced at all the Knight and Sunlight stuff quickly, it does feel like there could be some useful connections here. Maybe simply by developers or others from the Mozilla community proposing ideas to Knight? Or maybe, at some point, through a more joint initiative through Drumbeat? I’m going to think on it a little and possibly post again. In the mean time, I’d welcome comments / brainstorms / proposals from any Mozilla people reading this post.

PS. The current Knight News Challenge deadline is December 15. If you have an idea, enter. It’s a really simple, short process. The web site is: www.newschallenge.org