Over the last three months, Mozilla set up a global lab. It’s called Maker Party. And its goal is to do real world experiments that invite people to teach, play with and test the thinking behind Mozilla Webmaker. This lets us learn and improve as we go. In this post I outline the questions we’re asking. In follow-on posts, a bunch of us will look at what we’re learning.

What are we trying to test? At the broadest level, we want to test the idea that we can teach the culture and technology of the web to large numbers of people by tapping into maker culture and people’s desire to create. More specifically, Maker Party is asking:

1. How broad is (web)making? What do people want to make and learn?

The Webmaker program is a big tent: we support people who are teaching the culture and technology of the web no matter what tools they are using. Maker Party events reflect this, with people teaching everything from HTML to robots to paper prototyping. On the other hand, Webmaker.org is currently focused on Mozilla’s tools. Maker Party helps us ask: What do people most want to make and learn? What’s our relationship to the broader maker movement? Depending on the answers, do we expand the scope of Webmaker.org? How?

2. Does our ‘making as learning’ approach work? Does it draw people in?

We built Webmaker.org with the theory that people will learn how the web works fastest and best if we invite them to make something that delights them and that they are passionate about. The starter makes, new UX and the increased focus on remix that started to appear in Webmaker in June are all based around this theory. Maker Party helps us test this theory, both by seeing which aspects of the tools / content / site people were most drawn to and by asking mentors ‘what do you think people are learning?’.

3 What value can we provide people who want to teach the web?

People who want to teach others about the web are our first target for Webmaker. Spanning everyone from English teachers to web developers to teens who want to show their friends something cool, these are our ‘lead users’ They’re willing to kick the tires to help us improve. And they help us grow by bringing in more users (the people they want to teach). They are key to our early success. The question for Maker Party: What motivates these people? What value can we provide them? What can our tools, content and community offer to them that they can’t find elsewhere?

4. Can we grow our reach by working with partners?

Partnership has always been a core part of our ‘big tent’ approach with Webmaker. For Maker Party, we signed up dozens of partners to help us in the lab (and to run great programs for young people. They include: National Writing Project; Code Club; New York Hall of Science; Black Girls Code; Girl Scouts of America; MIT; California Academy of Science; E-Skills; Pycon Canada. Maker Party helps us ask: What motivates these partners? What value add can we offer to the programs they are already running? Are they helping us grow our reach and impact? Are we helping them do the same?

5. How do we build a global community of mentors?

One of the key goals of Maker Party is to grow and strengthen a lasting community of Webmaker mentors. With this in mind, we designed multi-step process that included: 1) recruiting and teaching mentors (Teach the Web MOOC); 2) offering a Mozilla Mentor badge to create a sense of belonging; 3) supporting mentors as they ran Maker Parties; 4) celebrating the best mentors; and 5) creating an ongoing mentor program for people to join post campaign. The questions for the lab: What parts of this worked? Do people want to stay involved? What does a formal ‘program’ for mentors look like? What content, infrastructure and staff do we need?

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With over 1,000 Maker Parties under our belt, it’s time to start answering these questions. We have a great deal of real world experience and feedback to throw against the questions above. We also have a slate of formal user testing feedback on webmaker.org that we’re rolling into the design. And we have a growing network of excellent mentors who can help us both reflect and design next steps.

For my part, I’m going to write up reflections on Maker Parties I attended in the UK, the Philippines and Indonesia over the past week. People from across the Webmaker team will also be doing their own posts. And we may do a survey of Maker Party organizers based on the questions above. This will feed into how we evolve both the Webmaker program overall and webmaker.org.

If you’ve been involved, I encourage you to do your own reflections. Blog. Tweet using the #makerparty hashtag. Post in the Webmaker mailing list. We’ve all got a to playing in making Webmaker better.