Drumbeat — and growing the number and diversity of people participating in Mozilla — will be the main focus for the Mozilla Foundation team in 2010. I’m super psyched about this, especially about the community projects that are taking shape. I’ll be blogging more about some of these projects soon.

In addition to posting about projects, I figured I should post a broad overview of what’s going on with Drumbeat on a monthly basis. This is the first of these updates.

Headlines

• First steps in Drumbeat roll out started late November.
• Early participation is promising. Join the newsgroup to get involved.
• Proposed projects now over 20. Have an idea? Propose a project.
• Plans emerging for ~5 regional Drumbeat events in Q1 and Q2 of 2010.
• Drumbeat site making good progress. Release in beta early February.
• We’re recruiting two ‘project producers’ for Drumbeat — Paris and Mtn View.

Early participation

• Since November starup: 100+ people on new mail list, ~15 people heavily engaged.
• These people helping on website and general Drumbeat concept.
• 20+ proposed projects = another ~60 early participants.
• Real buzz. “I’ve heard about that. It’s exactly what Mozilla should do.”
• Also: a bit of early press coverage, which got slashdotted.

Projects

• Bootstrapping a few projects that show what Drumbeat looks like remains our biggest priority.
• Three projects that fall into this ‘let’s bootstrap and run fast’ category include:
  • P2PU Open Web Career Track -> Creating an alternative to expensive, proprietary tech education, and teaching open web development skills as we go.
  • Visualizing the (open) internet -> Artists, programmers and everyday web users creating data visualizations that help us understand the living, breathing organism that is the ‘net.
  • WebMadeMovie -> Four Directors. Four hackers. And the citizens of the web. Telling the story of the internet, and inventing the future of online cinema along the way.
• See complete list of projects here. Propose a project idea here.

Events

• ~5 Mozilla run regional events in the works to kick off Drumbeat.
• Idea: local open web festivals, people share and work on Drumbeat projects.
• Start in ‘seed cities’. Train people from nearby cities to organize own events at same time. Aim: create ripple effect.
• Once we’re rolling, anyone can organize an event anywhere.
  Rome, Sao Paulo, Boston, Bangalore as possible ‘seed cities’.
• Also: possible Drumbeat event partnership w/ OReilly’s global ignite week.
• All of this will feed into Drumbeat Festival late 2010.

Web site

• Web site‘s primary role is to attract participation and support for projects.
• Anyone can propose a project, very best ones get highlighted and (small) seed funding.
• Will also serve as hub for local events people are organizing around the world.
• Site being developed in Drupal and CiviCRM. Beta in February.
• Still need to develop a localization plan — community help wanted on this.
• Look for a more detailed web site update on Matt Thompson’s blog soon.

As above, the aim with this (and future) posts is 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.