Big dreams need practical plans. Late last year, we agreed that ‘building a generation’ of web makers‘ should be one of Mozilla’s main goals for 2012. For the last six weeks, people across the Mozilla team and community have been digging into the question: where do we start? I’m writing this post to update people on the plans that are coming out of this.

Concrete ‘web maker’ planning started with the Mozilla Foundation board meeting in mid-December. At that meeting we agreed on the following broad goal for 2012:

Roll Mozilla’s best software and learning resources into a simple ‘kit’ for web makers.

The idea here is that we want to create a single offering — or at least a brand — for people who want to learn and make things with Mozilla. This should roll up things like Popcorn, Hackasuarus, etc. into something easy to comprehend and get involved in.

At the same board meeting, we agreed on five more specific 2012 goals that our web making initiative. They are:

1. Grow our learning programs for teens, journalists, filmmakers.
2. Ship great software that invites making + learning.
3. Build badges and ‘recipes’ to teach web maker skills.
4. Create web sites and events that drive participation.
5. Tell the Mozilla story well, inspire people.

You can see a list of detailed objectives for each of these goals listed here on our 2012 goals wiki page. We will be reviewing and evolving these objectives throughout the year.

As noted above, the plan with all of these goals is to build on our strengths: Popcorn; Hackasaurus; Open Badges; Hive; OpenNews; Mozilla Festival; and so on. Mozilla team and community members have been working on roadmaps that lay our practical plans and tie projects back to our overall goals. Here are the most advanced of these roadmaps:

• PopcornMaker roadmap and blog posting
• Web maker curriculum roadmap and blog posting
• OpenBadges roadmap
• HiveNYC plans – blog post and etherpad
• OpenNews 2012 plans blog post

All of these projects are making great strides — but they all need help as well. We need to people to write, code, test and promote what we’re building. If you’re excited by our web maker vision and want to get involved, you should join one of our weekly open community calls. Or, track Matt Thompson’s weekly round ups of web maker activity and then dive in when you see something specific you are interested in.

 PS. Here are the slides from the December board meeting that I mention above. They also include a review of our work in 2011. If people are interested, I can do a screencast of these slides to give more details. Just let me know.