Bookoftheweb

The Open Internet Toolkit Campaign Resources for Building Internet Literacy

A Book Sprint is planned for May 9 - 11 2011 in Toronto.

Please have a look at the Topics and Inspiration for more on our thinking about the content and approach.

Archived Version of the Earlier Project Vision

More details on next week's sprint for the open internet toolkit

Thank you for being part of this experiment in envisioning a better future for the web. You will be working together to blow each other's minds with your crazy, amazing ideas about how to promote digital literacy. We're so grateful that each of you have taken the time to be part of the conversation, and so excited to have this chance to be in a room with all of you and see what we cook up together.

So what are we cooking, exactly? That's up to you. We're asking you to help create a toolkit or playbook that can support educators in their work communicating information, skills and values for an open web. And while we're writing for educators, part of what we're writing is copy that they can remix and use with a general audience.

Our three days will involve some brainstorming, some conversation and a lot of rolling up our sleeves to just write. By the end of those three days we want to have three resource guides -- you can think of them as chapters -- that cover three different topics. Those might grow into a book, or we might build each one to stand on its own: that vision will evolve through our conversation and work together.

Here are some more details on what we hope to tackle.

The challenge

How do we help a large, general audience understand:

• What makes the Internet special?

• How does the Internet work?

• How can they make informed choices about how to use the Internet?

The vision

The purpose of The Book of the Web project is to ensure that every single Internet user has the conceptual building blocks needed to be a smart, creative web citizen.

By creating this kind of universal awareness and understanding, we hope to:

• Help Internet users gain the confidence to make decisions about what tools to use and how to behave online.

• Include an ever-expanding number of people in the stewardship for the web, by helping them understand how their online choices affect the overall health of the web.

• Make meaningful conversations about the Internet as widespread and exciting as conversations about politics, religion or business.

The book is intended to serve two types of readers: 1. People who will use it as a playbook, like folks involved in consumer education programs, tech and media literacy, or tech book authors and bloggers. 2. People who want to understand the web better, including people who are already heavy tech users (like gamers and social media users) as well as tech-positive people who make more moderate use of the web.

The project

This week we begin the work of writing an open source marketing playbook for Internet literacy. This book will provide organizations and educators with messaging and resources they can remix to deliver digital literacy campaigns and education. The purpose of the sprint is to create an initial set of demonstration chapters that will provide useful content and help a larger audience understand how The Book of the Web can support their work.

In the course of this week we will:

• Write three chapters that will become part of Open Internet Toolkit (the toolkit formerly known as "The Book of the Web")

• Refine the chapter template and project vision statement

• Identify the topics that should be covered in future chapters

Please have a look at the Topics and Inspiration for more on our thinking about the content and approach.

We hope you will take the chapters we write this week (and later, the book as a whole) back home to your own work or organization. Turn it into campaigns, newsletters or courses: whatever serves your goals and needs. Then tell us how you're using it so we can keep developing the messaging and materials that are useful to leaders like you.

What happens after the sprint?

• These chapters will be designed and circulated online as PDFs and as an ebook.

• We will refine our project vision statement based on the outcome of the sprint.

• We will create a revised chapter template based on your work.

• We will encourage digital literacy organizations to use these initial chapters as remixable fodder for their campaigns, and to share insights on how we can make BOTW as useful as possible.

• We will plan a follow-up sprint to complete a full-length book.

PARTICIPANTS

Ryan Merkley Eric Squair Phil Haid

Book Sprint Organizers

• Mark Surman
• Adam Hyde
• Alexandra Samuel
• Allen Gunn