May Mozilla Drumbeat Update

by Mark Surman | | 3 comments

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.
  • Mozilla Drumbeat and the Shuttleworth Foundation announced a joint ‘education for the open web’ fellowship. Deadline is early June.
  • 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.
  • There are also a number of newer projects gathering steam, including Open Web Analytics, K-12 open web curriculum and Video on Wikipedia

Event notes

  • 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.

Comments

  1. Martin Kliehm replied on | Reply

    I will start teaching informatics students at the University of Mainz in Winter semester 2010/11, and I will be more into translation of the WaSP curriculum. So I’m eager to learn about Mozilla’s open web education ideas. But with a couple of curricula already out there (there are also a few sponsored by the EU Commission, though not very well-known) I would prefer if the authors would cooperate more instead of re-inventing the wheel. With an coordinated, networked education effort supported by Mozilla, Opera and WaSP I believe outreach will be more efficient.

    Also sadly I didn’t know about the Berlin event until I read your tweets. When is the Munich event going to take place? I think we could organize one in Frankfurt. Where can I get more info on the organization, topics and requirements of such an event? I admit until recently I had only a vague idea what drumbeat stands for, but the reports from Berlin sound exciting. 😉

  2. John Britton replied on | Reply

    @Martin

    We agree entirely, we aren’t out to reinvent the wheel and plan to incorporate as much existing curricula as possible. Once we have our first curriculum map in place and go to the community for feedback I think it would be wise of us to share with WaSP and Opera and ask them to help us promote.

  3. sashank replied on | Reply

    Mark ,

    At Drumbeat Bangalore , we were told all our talks on ideas would be uploaded onto drumbeat website , where we believed our ideas would get more people and momentum , what happened to it ? and where are the goodies advertised for speakers ?

    Regards
    Sashank

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