Drumbeat/website/about
Draft 'about' page for Drumbeat website.
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 is Drumbeat?
The Drumbeat community is filled with people who are *doing* things to make the internet better. They may be:
- Creating software that makes accessible blocked and censored content
- 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 a new mechanism to educate consumers about the accessibility and openness of the mobile web
- Simply explaining what a 'better internet' looks like to their class, their friends, their neighbors
Drumbeat helps people like these succeed. The annual Drumbeat Festival showcases their work and connects them to one another. The Drumbeat website and local events provide a place to propose ideas and to attract contributors and supporters who want to help. Drumbeat also raises funds to invest in promising ideas and projects
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.
We believe there are four key characteristics upon which this commons is built:
- 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 will want to evolve to match whatever we use for Drumbeat
Jesse Dylan's youtube video highlights a number of the issues we hope the Drumbeat community will tackle and advance
So what? Isn't the internet already great?
Yes, the internet is already great. But the open, participatory nature of the internet 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? By continuing to invent, innovate and educate using the four 'better internet' characteristics above. That's what Drumbeat is about.