Drumbeat/campaignstorm/You make the Web

Title

“You Make the Web”

1 sentence summary

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.

Goals

• Help people more clearly visualize and understand the threats to the open web and open Internet, and make their own minds up about the best solutions. Take something that is “very squishy and abstract” and simplify and emotionalize it for busy people.

• It’s hard to protect or grow something you can’t really see. Engage the creativity of Mozilla community developers and designers to solve this problem in their own way, producing concepts, demos and mash-ups as part of a global contest or co-opetive festival.

• Link openness with innovation and healthy growth. Underline the growing importance of the open web to innovation at all levels -- technological, economic, social, environmental -- and help people understand the open Internet’s role as an engine for connection, spreading opportunity, and solving real-world problems.

• Engage online and local grass-roots efforts to build a better Internet and open up digital opportunity to all, based on the idea that the web is ultimately a web of contributions and people -- and we are all one of them.

Audience

• The Mozilla Developer community

• A larger, more mainstream audience as well. Anyone who would consider wearing a t-shirt that says “I heart the Internet” or “I heart the open web”

• People who rely on the Internet for self-expression (bloggers, musicians, artists, hackers)

• People who rely on the Internet to make their living (especially small businesses, freelance creative or tech types, entrepreneurs, social ventures, etc.)

• Global thought leaders and partner organizations

Potential Partners

• Web Foundation
• Berkman Center
• Free Press
• Update w. others -- lots of potential partners & overlapping interest here

Activities

• As an initial project in a broader multi-part campaign, tap the creativity and brainpower of the Mozilla community to produce the world’s most complete picture of the open Internet around the world.

• Engage thought leaders and the Mozilla Developer community to build a web and network visualization tool that helps people “see” -- in a cutting-edge, intuitive and holistic way -- the overall openness, health and growth of the global Internet. Plus threats and areas where it can be upgraded or fixed. Like a global open Internet health monitor.

• People who love the Internet would love this tool -- and would blog about it and share it with their social networks. Could be combined with localized tools or links for climbing the ladder of engagement in your own community.

• Could get high-profile thought leaders and celebrities involved?

• In addition to being a great awareness builder around the open web and Mozilla Foundation, these tools would also be extremely useful to a broad number of partners and other groups. This kind of visual, data-based storytelling will act as a force multiplier for anyone, anywhere working on open web or open Internet initiatives.

• Small local events to engage people in local sprints, brain storms, doodling on flip charts, etc. on how they visualize the web and ways to tackle visualizations of the Internet's overall "health"

• Gather designs, doodles and mock-ups online through Flickr, etc., with tools that make it easy to get involved

• Do a big hack fest and annual event where we bring together people who have the skills to make the best designs and visualizations actually happen

Metrics

• Raise money from Mozilla Foundation supporters to help build it?

• Traffic and media attention to the launch of the visualization tool -- along with mention of memes like “protecting and growing the open web”, etc.

Existing Visualization Examples

John Slater's delicious bookmarks folder: http://delicious.com/quarlas/datavisualization

TwittEarth http://twittearth.com/

50 Great Examples of Data Visualization
Most of these don't fit -- but they get better the further down the list you go. Someone should review and pull out the 5 or 6 that fit best. http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/