Drumbeat/website/about

Second shot at the 'about' page, trying to keep friendliness while pulling on already widely read / supported content.

Mozilla Drumbeat is a global community of people making the internet better. More open. More participatory. More decentralized. More generative. This is the web we want. It's the web we're building.

What exactly is it that you're doing?

The Drumbeat community is filled with people who are *doing* things to make the internet better. They may be:

• Using open source and cheap hardware to create 'village telcos' in Africa
• Inventing a visual language to make it easy for people to understand online privacy
• Running a campaign to promote open web standards by eliminating IE6
• Dreaming up new business models that bring fairness and openness to the mobile web
• Simply explaining the 'better internet' idea to their class, their friends, their neighbors

These people gather at the annual Drumbeat Festival to share ideas and help each other. They also connect online, generating new ideas, working on designs and inviting a much broader community get involved and take action.

What is a 'better internet'?

The internet has become our global commons: a critical public resource that more than a billion people use every day to learn, innovate, trade, befriend and play.

Four key characteristics have helped it become such a rich resource. The internet is

• Open. Built on technologies that anyone can study, use or improve without asking permission.
• Participatory, fueled by the ideas and energy of 100s of millions of people.
• Decentralized in both architecture and control, ensuring continued choice and diversity.
• Generative. Evolving and improving as we each remix existing parts of the internet into something that is our own.

By explaining, protecting and building things around these characteristics, we create a better internet. We make it even richer and more resilient. This is what the Mozilla Drumbeat community is doing.

see also: http://www.mozilla.org/causes/better.html, which we may want to evolve to match whatever we use for Drumbeat

possibly link to Jesse Dylan video in here?

So what? Isn't the internet already great?

Yes, the internet is already great. But its open, participatory nature regularly faces challenges.

Current examples: control over our digital identities and data is centralizing; internet providers are threatening 'net neutrality' and the growing mobile internet is far less open than the one on our desktop. And, simply explaining 'better internet' is a challenge: few people take the time to consider how important and fragile the internet commons is. They simply take it for granted, like air.

How do we ensure the internet remains open and participatory 100 years from now? This is the key question that Mozilla Drumbeat is here to answer.