NathanielJames.org

What do you get when you bring together over 50 people from 8 countries, representing a mix of video makers, artists, educators, technology advocates, and open source gurus to talk and take action to protect and expand internet freedom?

The Mozilla team, in coordination with local volunteers, hosted the very first Drumbeat event in Europe at Betahaus in Berlin on May 8th.

At 10 am, we started with a discussion using the interactive spectrogram format.  Spectrograms are like dynamic human graphs, where all participants respond to challenging statements by physically moving to their own position (strongly agree, strongly disagree, etc) on a line, and defending their position openly.  Here are two of our statements:

“Governments should play a central role in keeping the Internet open and free.”

And

“When I use Facebook, I feel regret.”

The spectrogram helps people clarify their thinking about difficult issues while respectfully engaging with different opinions.

Through the rest of the morning, we split into groups to brainstorm some creative ways to describe the open web to diverse audiences, such as “my grandma” or “politicians.”

Come to find out, talking about the open web in ways that make sense to everyday internet users is hard, and I’m always happy when people who speak teach start to think about storytelling and metaphor to reach new audiences.  We saw people try out political campaigns (left) and a little performance art (below) in which robots trying to talk to each other had their conversation interrupted by artificial traffic blocking (read: no net neutrality).

Having established some common language around web openness and internet freedom in the morning, we got down to business in the afternoon, opening the meeting to rapid fire project presentation (aka “speedgeeking”) and open space workshops.

During the speedgeeking session, I represented the Universal Subtitles project, an initiative to build tools and communities that can provide video translations for any language, for any video, anywhere on the web.   8 people signed up to help out with the technology and to offer translation skills.

During the open space workshops, I sat in with Tobias Eigen of Kabissa to discuss supporting Drumbeat across Africa.  We’re going to start an outreach and working group to make it happen.

Then, we had some tasty German beer (below).

This is what Drumbeat events are all about, translating our values into action and building community, so I was really happy to help out.

If you attended Drumbeat Berlin, please help us document your experience.  Leave a comment here about what you took away from the event or go to our wiki page and enter your notes, pics, and videos.  Anyone can sign up for an account on the wiki, and you can let me know if you need help editing the page.

More local Drumbeat events are being planned for Paris and Sao Paolo.  I am ramping up outreach to seed Drumbeat events across North America.  If you want to get involved, please let me know.

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UPDATE: I am re-posting this piece in order to test the http://planet.drumbeat.org/ blog aggregator.