Archive for the ‘Drumbeat’ Category

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Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership

Monday, February 7th, 2011

I’m excited to announce the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership, a Mozilla Drumbeat project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Journalism Program.

For the next three years, we will have the opportunity to engage a huge community, bring people together for trainings and in-person events, and ultimately build software and thought leadership to address the challenges that news organizations are facing today.

We’ll be working with some amazing news partners: BBC, Boston.com, The Guardian, and Zeit Online, who are launching the partnership with us, and many more who we will invite to join the initiative.

If you’re excited about the challenges and opportunities facing journalism, we want you to be part of this: if you’re interested, please join the project mailing list.

We are creating a major new opportunity for the growing community of news innovators, sometimes called news hackers.  Every phase of the  partnership, from the innovation challenges to our online courses and in person news hacking events, will help participants learn, network and build a community around their interests, develop their careers, and take leadership at the intersection of news and technology.

Over the course of the  partnership, we’ll be awarding at least fifteen yearlong fellowships to participants who demonstrate passion, great ideas and collaborative skills. This fellowship cohort might include software developers, user experience designers and statisticians.  We’re open to many types of candidates.  The fellows will be embedded within the news partner organizations, where they will work side-by-side with newsmakers, producing experimental news applications based on open-source, open-web technologies.

In the coming months, as we get the partnership underway, I will be sharing more of our thinking, announcing new partners, and so on. In the next few weeks, we’ll be asking some big questions that will help to refine the plan for the project.

We’re aiming to formally launch the program with a design challenge in the spring — aimed at finding great ideas, and great people — so, if you haven’t already, please join the project mailing list [link] and follow along with our thinking on the project wiki.

Also check out the Knight Foundation’s blog post here and a post from our news innovation consultant, Phillip Smith here.

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Posted in Drumbeat, Journalism, MoJo, News | 9 Comments »

Drumbeat Festival Evaluation 2: Evaluation & Feedback

Monday, January 10th, 2011

“Collabtastic!”

This is the first bit of feedback that jumped out at me as I began to review the 113 Festival evaluation survey responses as 2010 came to a close.

As the new year begins, I have absorbed the evaluations and want to share some of our findings, including some key metrics for last fall’s Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival.

We’ll start with the quantitative bits for those who love numbers and end with a selection of written feedback for those who love words.

Drumbeat Festival 2010 by the numbers

  • 430 participants
  • 40 countries represented
  • 30+ participating organizations
  • 13 stories published in the traditional press
  • Too many blog posts, tweets, pics, and videos to properly count
  • 40 volunteers
  • Over 240 hours of volunteer work on site
  • 6 people on the core staff
  • 113 evaluations submitted, a 26% response rate*
  • On a 1-5 scale (disappointing-to-awesome), the Festival earned an average score of 4.28. We can safely say the the Festival was at least 85.62% awesome!
  • Less than 12 respondents rated the Festival 3 or below.
  • People who thought it was too structured – 12%; too unstructured- 30%; just right – 58%.
  • Insert “Something, something, something? Priceless” joke here.**

Festival feedback in words

Here are some excerpts from questions we asked on the evaluation survey.  I chose them because they either reflect a general consensus among multiple respondents or offer a singularly unique contribution to our thinking on Mozilla’s investment in learning or great advice for future Festivals.

If you could say one thing about this event, what would it be?

  • “I learned more and left with more ideas and connections than at any
    other conference/festival.”
  • “Drumbeat is inspiring in a practical way.  Not airy-fairy theories and ideas but real things you can do to affect change.”

There was also a funny pattern I just have to point out:

  • “ADHD (in a good way!)”
  • TWISTED! I mean that as a compliment.
  • “…overwhelming in a good way…”
  • “It made my brain hurt (in a good way!)”

What were the top 3 ‘Aha’ or great learning moments for you?

  • “Emergent collaboration (adhoc hackathons) -Meeting someone in a  restaurant who teaches math, leading him back to a hacker dungeon and seeing him help a designer understand vectors (protractors were used!)”
  • Honorable mentions for favorite technologies: “Subtitling videos can be SO much fun! (with right tools!)” “HTML is MUUUUUCH more important and world-changing than I had thought.” “Arduino – I can do that at my local college”
  • Honorable mentions for keynotes: Cathy Davidson & Aza Raskin
  • “I am not alone.” This was a common sentiment, along with ideas of “community” and “connection.”

What 3 things would you change about how learning (content, skills, socialization, accreditation) works in 2020?

  • “Less textbook knowledge, more hands-on/real world pedagogy.”
  • “More emphasis on peer learning.”
  • “Information would be free and open and teachers would be valued for making sense out of that information.”

That’s just a quick overview. Please use the comments section below to raise your own ideas or ask questions.

I’ll be back with one more look back at Drumbeat Festival 2010, focusing on the organizing process and logistics (to a small extent) with the intent of recording my advice for moving us from 86% to at least 90% awesome in 2011.


* This is a huge response rate and why we did paper evaluations, rather than a web-based survey, for those who were wondering.

** Please forgive the US-centric attempt at humor.

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Drumbeat Festival Evaluation 1: Objectives & Outcomes

Monday, December 6th, 2010
As I have been evaluating the process and outcomes of producing the Festival, I spent some time studying one of the earliest vision statements to see how the reality of Barcelona compares to our first conceptual work on the Drumbeat wiki.
It’s important to remember that the purpose and strategic guidelines of the entire Drumbeat initiative were still emerging while Festival planning began. In many ways, the two happened in dialogue with each other, and it seems that the Drumbeat initiative has emerged from the Festival with a stronger, better-defined identity.
We didn’t tell the Drumbeat story in Barcelona. We wrote it.
Let me show you what I mean.  Comparing our objectives with our outcomes, I pulled out some language from our original goals and looked to see how it evolved into the language we use now to explain the purpose and objectives of the Festival.
Finally, I analyzed how well we met these evolving goals, what it means for Drumbeat and our innovation efforts in education and learning.
1) Convene & connect leaders making radical disruption in learning and web technology became…
The Drumbeat protocol -
passionate people + creative hackers = tangible progress for the open web.

2) Energize & inspire + develop partnerships, collaboration and community became…
Add rocket fuel to projects within & beyond Drumbeat.

3) Grow and strengthen Drumbeat as a hub of open web innovation became…
Build Drumbeat through buzz & new relationships with big players outside the open web world

Based on these evolving objectives, how did we do?
(more…)
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Some Announcements: Drumbeat Festival Update 2

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Last week, the core Drumbeat Festival team met, clarified our vision and next steps.  Here are some of the big headlines:

  • We’re happy to announce that Festival partner Creative Commons is providing us with the support of their international program manager, Michelle Thorne.  Michelle will work directly with Mark Surman and myself to develop Festival programming.  Michelle works in Berlin, which will help us build up participation by European residents.
  • By the middle of next week, we will start making announcement about confirmed programming.  We’ll also lay out a solid timeline, so it will be much easier to build the buzz, backed with clear information regarding registration open dates, the process for submitting ideas, etc.
  • We talked about how we want to engage the multilingual participant cohort we expect.  We have committed to working with the Mozilla localization community in Spain to provide the most important Festival information in Spanish and Catalan.  On site at the Festival, we will provide Spanish and Catalan translations every time we convene all Festival participants and provide guidelines for language issues at the smaller sessions.
  • We’re getting close to nailing down our venues.  Our local lead is in dialogue with the following venues: Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), the Arts and Design Promotion (FAD), and FABRA COATS (a converted factory space used for community events).  MACBA and FAD share a public square that we are working with local authorities to secure for outdoor events and programming, as well.  More updates to come – stay tuned!
  • We’ll be setting up a list serv/group for people who want to be really involved and advise us in Festival programming.

You can sign up for Festival updates here.  Complete notes from Friday’s meeting are available here.

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Policy Ain’t the Only Way to Change the Game

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

This piece was published as part of a weeklong online dialogue hosted by Arts Journal called “Creative Rights & Artists,” to which I was asked to contribute.  Join the conversation here.

——————————–

At the risk of being accused of changing the subject, or worse, heresy, I want to offer the following:

Fighting on the policy front is not the only way for artists (or “creators” going forward) to maintain and expand their creative rights in our communications system.

I’m going to argue that there are many points of intervention when it comes to the evolution of technology in society, that artists are already taking the lead on these other fronts (in addition to policy), and that recognizing and leveraging creators’ strengths outside of policy-focused strategies will make the policy battles go much better for us.

Why am I doing this?  I have spent a few years fighting the good policy battle in the media and communications sectors.  As one of the wonkier NAMAC board members, I still do.  I can’t argue with a lot of what’s already been said…

Policy is hard. Check.
Big money tends to win in Washington. Check.
The groups working on cultural and communication policies for the public benefit need more resources. Check.
Representing and empowering “artists” in policy debates is a non-trivial proposition. Check.

However, I see at least two problematic trends in the conversation so far.  First, I don’t want us to get stuck on what I would call policy determinism.  The idea that “getting the policy right” will make the world a better place for creators doesn’t always work.  As the political is the art of compromise, no one wins 100% of what they want out of a policy debate.  Reforms come with new loopholes baked in (see campaign finance).  The result of government action are never predictable (see, ARPANET).  Regulators are captured by the industries they were meant to oversee (see, well, any regulator).

The bottom line is that policy changes are not the sole (or often the most important) mechanisms shaping the structure and impact of any technology or industry.

Second, I’m afraid we could run in endless circles trying to find the magic bullet that would strengthen the creator’s voice in the policy debate.  I hope we have some great ideas, but we’re up against several limiting factors.

Leaders in every policy change effort are trying to get everyone, including creators, involved in their thing.  As I sat down to write this piece, I got an email asking me to help involve artists in the climate change fight.  There’s only so much activism time in the day.

While I support the idea of an awesome iPhone app for creator activism, and I really like what I read about Fractured Atlas’s Bay Area Cultural Asset Map in Ian’s post, I’m always wary of Shiny Object Syndrome.  Online tools are just tools, and a hammer is only going to get you so far without a blueprint.

Worst of all, we’re limited by the fact that, when push comes to shove, policy fights just aren’t that sexy, especially when technology is at the heart of the debate.  Put as much lipstick on that pig as you want, making law has too much in common with making sausage to turn most people on.  I suppose I slaughtered that analogy.

For all these reasons, we have to understand what else creators can do and what they are already doing that can play into creating the world of boundless creative freedom that we’d like to see.  In the immortal words of President Bartlett, as he gave Sam Seaborn a priceless chess lesson (Season 3, Episode 58), before you make your next move, you need to “See the whole board.”
(more…)

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Tents, Nodes, or Pods? Drumbeat Festival Update 1

Friday, July 16th, 2010

image by Donald Judge at Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Repeat after me:

“Mozilla Drumbeat Festival is NOT a conference.”

Recently, Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation asked me to act as global coordinator for the first annual Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, slated for November 3-5 in Barcelona.

The theme is “Learning, Freedom, and the Web,” and we are now working hard to create an open space where everyone who comes (up to 500) can be both teacher and learner.

This week, I have been designing our planning framework, and working with Mark and others on the team to imagine how this kind of radically open peer-learning space will work.

We have some ideas and some questions.

From the planning page:

The Festival is not a conference with a structure of tracks, plenaries, sessions, and workshops.  Instead, imagine a hybrid network of curated and self-organized groupings that meet and disperse in the spaces provided throughout the Festival…

Each grouping will gather in largely pre-determined times and spaces to move their Festival project from conversation/showcasing to action/state changes.  Grouping leaders are responsible for designing an engaging co-learning experience, because people can vote with their feet.

Participants will build their own Festival experience by committing to working with some groupings through the whole Festival and sampling among the others.  Every grouping is “in a fishbowl,” transparently available to any Festival participant to experience at their own level of commitment…

Every participant should come committed to playing, working and learning together.  Everyone has something to teach.  Everyone has something to learn.

We have listed some of the groupings that are already defined here.  You can also find a list of confirmed participants and some ideas we have for other open and interactive experiences we are planning.

One problem is that “groupings” is not a very compelling term for what we are trying to create.  Here are some ideas we’ve had:

  • Tents: fits into the “Festival” concept.  However, once we’ve designed the space, there may not be any actual tents.
  • Nodes: As in “network nodes.”
  • Pods: I’m partial to this one.  I like the idea of participants joining a series of pods.

At this point, we’re totally open to recommendations.  Use the comments section below to weigh in.  Which of these do you like (or hate) and why?  Can you suggest another term to describe these ad hoc co-learning groups?

Also, if you have ideas for tents/nodes/pods you would like to propose and design, please let us know.  You can suggest one in the comments, and I’ll get back to you, and we’ve also set up a sort of suggestion box called the Drumbeat Festival Awesome Sandbox on the planning wiki that anyone can use to leave ideas for us to consider at this early planning phase.  Anyone can sign up for an editing account on the Mozilla wiki.

So, please, be in touch with your recommendations and ideas. My contact information is here.

UPDATE:

Some new ideas have come through for naming the groupings:

  • Clusters
  • Affinities
  • Caucuses
  • Classes
  • Workshops
  • Guilds
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AMC2010 Report Back 2: School of Webcraft Workshop

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Peer2Peer University WorkshopOn Sunday morning, I led a workshop on the Mozilla Drumbeat project Peer 2 Peer University School of Webcraft.  I was very pleased to have 20+ attendees show up to the AMC Media Lab bright and early on the last day of the conference.  Below are some highlights from the workshop, including questions and critiques, course suggestions and an early start on a new course called Open Web Toolkit.

After a round of introductions and ice breakers (“What’s your favorite thing that you can do with the web – your web super power?”), I started us off with a brief description Mozilla Drumbeat, and then we dug in to discuss the School of Webcraft and begin to brainstorm the kinds of courses and other support that the School will need to be successful.

For the uninitiated, Mozilla Drumbeat is supporting a new Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) project, the School of Webcraft.  While anyone can use P2PU to organize a course on any topic, we are working with them to create their first comprehensive set of courses that will allow anyone (with the connection and bandwidth) to study web development and become proficient in open web technology.

After introducing the concept, I asked the participants to brainstorm potential challenges for this model.  Here are a few main questions that came up:

  • Why should people trust the course content?  I think that once people get used to working through P2PU, they will see that the course content is transparent and open to review and improvement (a little like Wikipedia), and every course organizer(P2PU-speak for “teacher”) will be open to improvements as their courses develop.
  • What about accessibility?  People wondered about issues like basic web access, disabilities, different learning styles, and the range of potential learners’ starting points (think prerequisites).  In that order, I suggested that P2PU won’t solve the web access problem, but that I hope in the long run that we can partner with community technology centers and libraries to provide the necessary connectivity.  I wasn’t aware of P2PU’s strategy for supporting people with disabilities, but would check into it (starting with this blog post, which is going to the P2PU team).  I believe that P2PU course organizers will get better over time at working with diverse learning styles; as a volunteer effort (course organizers are unpaid, co-learners with the other participants), we will probably struggle with this for a while.  Finally, I mentioned that P2PU course descriptions give a pretty clear indication of previous knowledge participants will need to be successful in a course.  Questions around language and culture differences came up, too.  I know that the P2PU team is working hard on these issues, and that we should see courses in Spanish and Portuguese pretty early on.
  • Are P2PU courses focused on book learning or hands-on experience?  Definitely, the latter.  Participants should finish all School of Webcraft courses with at least one project they built for every course and leave the program with a portfolio, a key piece for moving from education to employment.
  • Is the School of Webcraft accredited?  This is a big, big question in the open education movement – how do we compete with the traditional institutions that have a kind of monopoly on accreditation.  It’s also one of the main reasons that Mozilla Drumbeat is investing in Webcraft – we believe that we can organize all the big players in the open source space to create a peer-recognized certification that anyone should be proud to put on their resume.  Apparently, we aren’t without precedent in this area.  One workshop participant pointed out that CompTIA’s certification services began in a similar, peer-driven manner.  If you are interested in the accreditation question, please leave a comment or contact me, as that conversation is ongoing.

Then, with just a little time left, we got onto the really good stuff: brainstorming the kinds of things people wanted to see offered through the School of Webcraft.

(more…)

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AMC2010 Report Back 1: Open Source for Open Communities Session

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

I’m finally getting a chance to reflect upon my experience representing Mozilla Drumbeat at the 2010 Allied Media Conference and to move forward with my follow up plan.

As always, AMC was a powerful experience, and I believe Drumbeat’s debut there went very well.  I only hope my next few posts can capture some of the most important ideas and outcomes.

On Saturday, June 19th, I joined the panel on the “Open Source for Open Communities: How Participatory Technology can Empower Everyone” workshop.  What follows is a quick overview of the speakers, then some highlights from the very participatory discussion that followed our presentations.

Melissa with PixelPowrrr at Participatory TechnologyMelissa (left) introduced her new Toronto-based project, Pixelpowrrr. Recognizing that working with content management systems like WordPress and Drupal can often be expensive, frustrating, and lonely for grassroots organizations without tech support, Melissa and her friends set up Pixelpowrrr as a kind of DIY, community-driven tech support shop for organizers.

Anne Jonas talked about Miro Community, a project she is supporting as a Digital Arts Service Corps member.  Anne is taking Miro’s video technology to its logical next step – supporting people at the local level to use their open source web portal to build video sites that highly relevant to their communities.  While it’s true that anyone can upload videos to YouTube pretty easily, those videos can often get lost amid the sea of LOLcats and celebrity fare.  With Miro Community, anyone can set up a dedicated site for all their “lost videos” and connect with niche audiences.  I think it’s especially important to note that Anne is bridging the technologists at Miro’s Participatory Culture Foundation with their users.  In other words, you can make great open source technology, but it’s also important to invest in “the social layer,” to reach out and support the participants you hope will use the technology.

(more…)

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Drumbeat and P2PU at the 2010 Allied Media Conference

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

I am in Detroit today, getting ready for the 12th Annual Allied Media Conference.

I’m here for my third year in a row, and it’s been a blast watching good friends and old (and new) colleagues come in.  This year, I’m also very proud that the Mozilla Foundation and Drumbeat are sponsoring the conference.

Drumbeat is sponsoring AMC because it is a major gathering place for people who are working at the intersection of community engagement and communications technology.

It is especially aligned with Drumbeat, because AMC has always been about people building, making, and learning to take control of the means of communication.  Through its history, that has meant that people learn and apply skills in audio and video production, “low” tech solutions like printing, and building computers loaded with open source software.  In recent years, there has been a new emphasis in the web as tool and public resource that people “at the edges” should be empowered to shape and mould.  In other words, Drumbeat is going to be right at home.

AMC is also one of the most vibrant conferences I have ever attended, and I go to lots of conferences.  The attendees are young, innovative, and inspired.  The presentations are always participatory, and the main stage literally sings with multi-media presentations delivering music, dance, video, and amazing talks.

I will be presenting Drumbeat and Drumbeat-supported Peer2Peer University’s School of Webcraft with two Mozilla volunteers at Allied Media Conference.  We hope to walk away with ideas for course, new teacher/facilitators, and potential student/participants.

If you are interested in open source, Mozilla Drumbeat’s brand new Open Web Fund and open philanthropy, and/or open education, please follow us and help spread the word.

To stay informed as the conference proceeds, follow me on Twitter @james_nathaniel and the conference at #AMC2010.  Check back here, as I will plan to update my blog frequently with pictures and updates.

If you are in Detroit, come find us at the Mozilla Drumbeat table near the main stage and check out our sessions, listed below.

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Developing a Communications Strategy for Drumbeat Projects #1

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

In addition to my engagement and events work on Mozilla Drumbeat, I have initiated a strategic communications planning process for Drumbeat’s launch through the rest of 2010?

What does that mean?

As we launch the Drumbeat initiative in general and help each of the supported projects progress to success, there are literally a billion people we could be talking to.  How do we decide who we are going to talk to and when, what we want them to know and ask them to do, and which tools and communications channels to use?  To answer these questions we create (you guessed it) a strategic communications plan.

This process is pretty involved, but I wanted to update the community on some highlights.

At the beginning, I decided that instead of trying to drive engagement for Drumbeat in general, we should focus our communications plan on the supported projects.  First off, as a new initiative that absolutely requires a diverse range of engaged participants, we are best prepared to support engagement in our supported projects.  A call for participation is also a promise – it’s a promise that someone will be answering questions, providing a roadmap and resources, and responding to feedback.  In addition to our highly participatory events, supported projects are the place we can keep our promise.

Second, we will of course be doing a lot buzz-building to that vague entity known as “the general public,” and to the slightly less vague entity known as the 0pen community, or the tech community, or the internet community (ok, still a little vague).  But I believe that buzz will be more meaningful if it is tied to projects that are clearly communicating their successes and their needs.  Communicating the projects’ vision to the right people will answer the “So, what?” we’ll hear as we introduce Drumbeat in general.  And communicating project successes will drive new audiences who are ready and pscyhed to move their own Drumbeat projects forward.

Status report:

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been talking to Mozilla staff, the Drumbeat community, and recently leads for each project to get us started on an strong communications plan.

(more…)

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