Planet Drumbeat

Nathaniel James: Some Announcements: Drumbeat Festival Update 2

July 27, 2010 - 12:57pm

Last week, the core Drumbeat Festival team met, clarified our vision and next steps. Here are some of the big headlines:

We’re happy to announce that Festival partner Creative Commons is providing us with the support of their international program manager, Michelle Thorne. Michelle will work directly with Mark Surman and myself to develop Festival programming. Michelle works in Berlin, which will help us build up participation by European residents.
By the middle of next week, we will start making announcement about confirmed programming. We’ll also lay out a solid timeline, so it will be much easier to build the buzz, backed with clear information regarding registration open dates, the process for submitting ideas, etc...

Drumbeat no FISL, batucando pela internet aberta

July 22, 2010 - 5:49am

A Drumbeat está crescendo no Brasil. Depois de seis eventos em diferentes cidades brasileiras, agora chegamos à Porto Alegre, onde acontece o FISL - Fórum Internacional do Software Livre, com diversas atividades ligadas a projetos da comunidade.

John Britton: Mozilla Drumbeat NYC

July 22, 2010 - 12:39am

August 7, 2010 - 12:00pm - 5:00pm
OpenPlans
148 Lafayette Street
New York, NY, 10013
http://www.drumbeat.org/events/drumbeat-new-york

Join us Saturday, August 7th for a look at some cool people and projects that are keeping the web open. Plus, free pizza and beer!

About Mozilla Drumbeat
Will the web still be open in 100 years? Mozilla thinks it can, and should, and must be. That's why we're starting Mozilla Drumbeat, an invitation to everyday internet users to imagine ideas and projects that build a more open web. We want you to get involved!

We are building a new community that includes teachers, artists,...

Nathaniel James: Policy Ain’t the Only Way to Change the Game

July 21, 2010 - 1:11am

This piece was published as part of a weeklong online dialogue hosted by Arts Journal called “Creative Rights & Artists,” to which I was asked to contribute. Join the conversation here.

——————————–

At the risk of being accused of changing the subject, or worse, heresy, I want to offer the following:

Fighting on the policy front is not the only way for artists (or “creators” going forward) to maintain and expand their creative rights in our communications system.

I’m going to argue that there are many points of intervention when it comes to the evolution of technology in society, that artists are already taking the lead on these other fronts (in addition to policy), and that recognizing and leveraging creators’ strengths outside of policy-focused strategies will make the...

Nathaniel James: Tents, Nodes, or Pods? Drumbeat Festival Update 1

July 16, 2010 - 8:54am

image by Donald Judge at Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Repeat after me:

“Mozilla Drumbeat Festival is NOT a conference.”

Recently, Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation asked me to act as global coordinator for the first annual Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, slated for November 3-5 in Barcelona.

The theme is “Learning, Freedom, and the Web,” and we are now working hard to create an open space where everyone who comes (up to 500) can be both teacher and learner.

This week, I have been designing our...

Open Video Alliance: Registration for Open Video Conference is open

July 14, 2010 - 9:28am

Registration for OVC is now open—sign up before August 1st for lower early bird rates!

OVC is heating up. Keep an eye out for some big speaker announcements, and a preliminary list of accepted sessions, starting next week.

John Britton: Mozilla Summit 2010 Recap

July 12, 2010 - 8:05am

The Mozilla Summit far surpassed my expectations. The event was personal, technical, creative and inspiring all at once.

The Mozilla Summit is an invitation-only gathering of some of the most active contributors in the Mozilla community. This year's theme was "Be More Like the Web".

I was lucky enough to be among those who were invited, due to my involvement with the Drumbeat project. There were a total of around 600 Mozilla community members at the event: hackers, localizers, testers, marketers, and the individuals formerly known as 'users'.

...

John Britton: P2PU is in 'The Hindu'

July 11, 2010 - 7:07pm

P2PU just got coverage in The Hindu, which, according to Wikipedia "is the second-largest circulated daily English newspaper in India." The author, Ajai Sreevatsan, quoted me and mentioned my course "Mashing Up the Open Web."

Video discussions

John Britton, course organiser of 'Mashing up the Open Web,' says time zones are a problem while attempting to simulate a "sit around the fire and learn by discussion" environment virtually. "But lively weekly video discussions (using a combination of Skype and IRC) to review materials and work through the...

Paul Osman: Batucada – Tools & Vision

July 7, 2010 - 11:56am

I mentioned in the announcement of batucada, that we are dropping Drupal for the next phase of development on the Drumbeat website project. We’ve decided to build Batucada with the Python web framework django. There are a bunch of reasons why I think django is a good choice, but the primary one is that people are already using it for a number of Mozilla web projects, including AMO and SUMO. Having other people in the organization who are familiar with the framework is helpful, of course, and it means we can reuse work done elsewhere within the webdev team (particularly in fairly generic areas like localization, caching, etc). It also means that our IT department is already familiar with deployment issues.

Django is also simply a great...

Drumbeat Festival 2010: Save the Date!

June 14, 2010 - 7:56am

The first-ever Drumbeat Festival will be held in Barcelona November 3 - 5, 2010! The festival will gather passionate and practical people who are experimenting, inventing, creating, exploring and building things at the intersection of learning, freedom and the web. Learn more or sign up for festival reminders here.

Planet Drumbeat

#drumbeat