Last weekend at MozCamp EU, we rebooted the Drumbeat scenario planning process and started a campaignstorm. The first cut at Drumbeat scenarios turned out to be too much cathedral (sketching a full year plan on a big theme) and not enough bazaar (rough scaffolding plus lots of campaign ideas). We changed this at MozCamp, getting 40+ people to brainstorm simple campaigns that they’d actually be interested in helping to run.

The results were good. We generated seven campaign ideas plus a rough overall Drumbeat audience analysis in an hour and a half. The ideas all used the same simple template — title, summary, goals, audience, activities. Here is an example:

Title: Who owns your picture?

Summary: Raise awareness around the terms of service and ownership of user-created content on the web, and advocate for more open and user-centric terms.

Goals

• Help people understand who actually owns the digital photographs they put online
• Create a networking effect between friends, families and open web groups
• Encourage sites to improve — and better explain — their terms of service

Audience

• Professional Photographers
• “Prosumer” photographers
• People who use Flickr to connect their families and friends
• (Also Facebook photo users?)

Activities

• Facebook Quiz or Application: Create a Facebook quiz asking if people understand the terms of service. Also, comparison of terms of service on different phot sites. The fun part is that most quizzes get access to a user’s friends list, entire photo collection, and photo collections of their friends. This could be used to demonstrate the user’s lack of ownership over their own digital content.
• iownthis tag. Get passionate users to tag their images with #iownthis as a way of expressing their desire to have more ownership over their own digital content. Put together websites to demonstrate how many people are interested, using graphs, photo streams, etc.

Generating many campaign ideas quickly was helpful in two ways: it channels general enthusiasm for Drumbeat into something specific and it gives us real material to test the thinking behind the Drumbeat framework. Also interesting, about 90% of the people in the room said they’d be interesting in actually working on the ideas they proposed in their campaign.

It would be good to get more people (like you!) brainstorming ideas and activities like the ones that came out of Prague. I have started a ‘campaignstorm’ thread in the Drumbeat discussion forum. Also, I am thinking about doing another small FTF campaignstorm in San Francisco or Mountain View next Tuesday. If you have ideas, please please please jump in on the wiki or in the discussion forum