Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla Foundation and program chair of Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival, kindly gave me an interview about Drumbeat and why the Open Web is so relevant.
In three sentences: What is Drumbeat?
Ok. Three sentences. I’ll try
1. Mozilla exists to make sure the internet stays open and awesome.
2. With Drumbeat, we’re moving beyond Firefox to build more things that make the web better — not just software.
3. We’re doing this by reaching out new kinds of people — teachers, filmmakers, lawyers, journalists.
Why is that important?
It’s important because these people — in fact all of us — will have an impact on the future of the web, on what the web becomes.
If we care about the internet for the long run, that means getting people like educators involved in shaping the web in their world. Especially educators who are trying to disrupt and innovate. We can give them open web tools and thinking to help do this, which in turn helps the education web move in the right direction — towards something open, free and hackable.
This same scenario plays out with journalists, artists, filmmakers and so on. We want to help the innovators in these spaces take best advantage of the web, get them on board as our allies.
Which fields is Drumbeat focusing on?
Education and cinema are the two places we’ve put the most attention on in the first year. You can look at:
P2PU School of Webcraft, where we’re helping to build a free online school where web developers teach each other.
And Web Made Movies, a lab where filmmakers and engineers work together invent new kinds of web films.
These are examples of the kinds of things we want to do with Drumbeat. There are dozens more small projects brewing. I think you’ll see some the ones in journalism and art grow bigger next year.
In November you’re planning the Drumbeat Festival. What’s that?
It’s a crazy event where 400 people come to talk about the connections between learning, freedom and the web. And make things. And have fun.
More concretely: we have working on everything from web developer education to open text books to hackerspaces coming. And alot of tech and open source people. The ideas for them to find ways to shape the future of learning together.
It’s meant to be the first of many events like this, where we invite the the kind of people we’d like to bring into Drumbeat, find ways to work together and to work with each other.
Next year, we’ll likely have a different theme. Maybe ‘media, freedom and the web’?
How can the rest of us get involved?
It really depends what your interested in. If you are an educator or filmmaker, the projects I’ve mentioned above are easy entry points. And there will be more entry points in places like journalism, art, etc. coming very soon. Same goes if you’re a web developer or engineer who wants to help on projects like these.
More broadly than this, there want to do local Drumbeat events and a online activities and challenges that almost anyone can get involved in. We toyed with this in 2010, but really plan to go bigger with them next year.
Drumbeat Festival is from Nov 3-5 at Barcelona. The (already pretty sweet) program is further developed in the Wiki. Register for Drumbeat Festival here.
The interview was first published on netzpiloten.de under a CC by-nc-sa license. Photo by Mark Surman (some rights reserved).
