Six months ago, for all the best possible reasons, I rather tore into Mozilla's Drumbeat project. This led to some useful dialogue with the man behind it, Mark Surman. At least, I presume it was useful, since he's still talking to me; indeed, he's bravely asked me to review the progress of the project.
On Open Enterprise blog.
Responding to your 'critique as bug' tweet I realized I never commented back on this (message still sitting in my inbox). So, here we go ...
ReplyDeleteGenerally, awesome suggestions -- in particular the 'make sure each project has says how it helps the open internet' idea. We'll add that to how the totally rebooted website (also a good suggestion) that comes out in January.
From my insiders spot, the connections are pretty clear: P2PU will create an army of web developers building their careers on open tech and hacker culture; Web Made Movies will help open tech and culture take root in the film industry, and hopefully revolutionize story telling in the process; and so on.
One interesting question is whether this analysis simply doesn't come across (a communications issue) or whether it doesn't convince (a difference in perspective and vision)?
On the ACTA, net neutrality, etc, the short story is Mozilla will never take the lead on the policy front. It's not our strength (which is building things) nor our voice (offense vs. defense). We've talked about this before.
The questions here are: what could the Mozilla Drumbeat community *build* that tackles these issues (e.g. I was recently inspired by Gufi.net as net neutrality play)? And where could we play on the offense side (e.g. why the net is awesome, policy makers killing the golden goose w/ ACTA etc.) of the story?
I'd love to chat on these questions at some point, maybe with you as a guest on a weekly Drumbeat community call?
@MArk: I think it's mostly about communication - the strategy seems sound to me (although it makes more sense for Web devs than for filmmakers, IMO...)
ReplyDeleteMaybe Mozilla simply needs to showcase good examples of net neutrality in action - new ways of using the Net etc. Similarly, Mozilla can help fight the idiocies of ACTA by working on the software patents front - bad for Mozilla, bad for everyone.
Happy to chat sometime...