Drumbeat/campaignstorm/We Make the Web/notes

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We Make the Web: Building a community of bloggers, photographers and other 'people who make the web'. Using data to visualize and explain the web they are making.

Summary of Problem / Solution / Impact / Goal

Problem:

  • We want people to “steward the open web,” but most people don’t intuitively understand what this means. It can seem abstract and intangible.
  • Many people see the web as inherently commercial, as opposed to a public commons or asset. They think of the web as something made by others, not by them.
  • How do we measure success in terms of protecting and growing “the open web?” How do we see where it's already growing and thriving? How do we see where it's broken, locked down, or choked off?

Solution:

  • Help millions of people understand the web as a public resource that they create together and have a stake in making better.
  • The people who “make the web” are not just technicians, gurus and developers -- but everday creators who make and share user generated content
  • All of these people “make the web” -- and because they make it, they have a stake in it and own it. Help them too see the web as not just “commercial” like TV -- but as a public commons that belongs to them.

Visualization Tools

  • Use cutting edge visualization tools -- designed and built by our community -- to create a real-time picture of the open web, how we’re all contributing to it, and how it can be made better. Shift the conversation. Help set and define the frame.
  • What are we going to visualize?
    • Show the topology of creativity on the web, and tell this story in real time
    • For example:
      • Help visualize different user generated content flows (e.g., show Twitter flows by region)
      • Real-time graph of user generated content country by country. Show the percentage of UGC vs. pro content vs. government content.
      • Other examples of things we could map and measure? Digital divide? Throttling? Censorship? Speed? Affordability?

Activities / Tactics

  • Visualization Tools
    • Create a living, breathing picture of the world’s open web, to encourage peer-to-peer awareness-raising, skills building, and collaboration amongst groups and individuals working to make the web more open, innovative, and participatory.
    • Engage the creativity of Mozilla community developers and designers to solve this problem in their own way, producing doodles, concepts, demos and mash-ups as part of a global contest or co-opetive festival. Then turn the best results into showpieces for “We Make the Web.”
  • The web as public resource summit (Tympani)
    • Unusual suspects coming together at a big event to discuss what a better, more open web looks like, write the white paper, discuss / hack visualization approaches, etc.
  • E-newsletter (Bongo)
    • “We Make the Web” newsletter about how we can all make the web better.
    • A consumer magazine that helps people make better choices. Oriented towards people who are using off-the-shelf tools, not necessarily hard-core developers.
    • Mozilla’s implicit brand promise: “You can trust us. And if you follow these cool examples, you’ll be doing the awesomest most open stuff.”
  • “Celebrating the Web”
    • Celebrating the self-expressiveness of the web as something that can make us cooler, bring us together, make us kinda famous, etc.
    • Get small-time Internet celebs to help promote. e.g., getting the “Chocolate Rain” guy to sing a song about the open web as a public resource. Celebrate the beautiful triviality of the web and put it into a story about how the open web is making society better.
    • Could be tied into “One Web Day?”
  • Audience research
    • Gather research on public attitudes & values around the web

Criteria

  • Fit
    • Strong fit. Directly relates to the first challenge and story Mozilla Drumbeat wants to tell the world. Addresses the primary challenge of “stewarding the web as a public resource” -- the fact that few people understand what this means. It’s hard to steward what you can’t easily see or imagine -- this visualization project helps solve that problem in a creative and participatory way.
  • Timing
    • Could be started today and deliver results. The resources are there.
    • Good window: lots of challenges related to Internet that are abstract; this helps make them real.
    • Makes sense as a “first thing” to tackle and help announce the broader effort.
    • Stage-able. Can be broken down into specific pieces that unfold over time.
  • Appeal
    • Has broad public and mass appeal. Sexy. Will appeal to core audiences, tech media, etc.
    • Helps a lot of different people and organizations, both inside and outside Mozilla. People working on issues like data and privacy, net neutrality, digital divide all need this kind of data-driven storytelling and simplified visualization.
  • Leverage
    • Easily broken up. Lots of different people and groups to contribute.
    • Significant levels of participation.
    • Leverages open web technologies. Can use and show off a bunch of new technology to help accomplish this project.
    • Lots of people can participate in small ways to help tell the story.
  • Impact
    • Pro: If successful, can help shift the conversation. Allows us to recruit people to show where problems are and take action themselves.
    • Potential platform to tie in other campaigns and actions, from across Mozilla and beyond.

* Fundraising

    • Can engage community to help fund the visualization tool project.
    • e.g., Showcase cool mock-ups and designs the community and thought leaders have come up with, then fundraise around “now help us build it.”


Links and random stuff / potential assets for slides

Existing Internet visualization efforts For showing a few of the existing efforts to visualize the Internet. They're all really technical and kinda dull -- helps show the opportunity to take a more creative, "people-centric" approach?

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/visualizing_akamai.html http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/mapnet/Backbones/ http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/geographic.html http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/visualizing-the-internet http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/

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