Drumbeat -> Next. Would love your thoughts?
Mark Surman
I've been thinking (and talking w/ people) a bit about what comes next
for Drumbeat:
Mark Surman
I've been thinking (and talking w/ people) recently about where we go
next w/ Drumbeat:
http://commonspace.wordpress.com/drumbeatnext/
... especially as we move closer to 2011 / Drumbeat year two.
I'm planning to lead a discussion about this on the next community call.
But I'd also love to hear thoughts here on the list.
You guys have all helped Drumbeat. Interested to hear what you think is
working, what we should do more of and what new things we should do.
- ms
PS. FYI, this is feeding into a Mozilla board meeting discussion in
mid-September.
Mera Szendro Bok
I really enjoyed your blog post on the future of Drumbeat. When will the
next phone call be ? I would love to hear the discussion and add some
insight from my event and community organizing experience. I agree with you
that it's critical to capture people's attention on these open web and open
source topics, and the language and outreach design are crucial to the
movement and takes real time and strategy. As a lead up to the San Diego
Drumbeat event <http://www.newmediarights.org/drumbeat>, I am
single-handedly organizing a 10 Tactics
<http://www.informationactivism.org/en>movie screening. To check out the
full film view: http://www.informationactivism.org/en/viewonline
Essentially the movie is about how human rights advocates have used online
tools and outreach tactics to engage in info-activism i.e. using information
to create action. We aim to show the film and inspire locals to focus
on submitting
Drumbeat projects<http://www.newmediarights.org/nmr/san_diego_drumbeat_project_page>that
would enhance the local and global community for our Drumbeat event.
You might have heard of this campaign, that has been lead by the Tactical
Technology Collective (TTC). This movie has been screened
globally<http://www.informationactivism.org/en/screenings>and TTC
offered some great material (see the bottom links) for organizers to
work with. The reason I mention 10 Tactics is because they seem to have
really gotten people motivated and inspired to hand out real materials and
show the film. Drumbeat could learn a lot from the widespread build-up of
this campaign.
They send organizers entire packages that contain hard copy material of the
below guides including how to spread one's message, to use mobile technology
for outreach, how to secure your information (when possibly reporting on
human rights violations) :
*Message in a box*: http://messageinabox.tacticaltech.org/ (I'm enjoying
this one the most at the moment)
New tools guide to online advocacy:
http://www.onlineadvocacy.tacticaltech.org/
Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information
Design: http://www.tacticaltech.org/infodesign/<http://www.tacticaltech.org/infodesign/>Maps
for Advocacy:
http://www.tacticaltech.org/mapsforadvocacy/
Security in a box: http://security.ngoinabox.org/
Mobiles in a box: http://mobiles.tacticaltech.org/
*Have a great holiday weekend,
Mera*
--
Mera Szendro Bok
Communications and Information Officer
New Media Rights
3100 5th Ave. Suite B
San Diego, CA 92103
619-591-8870
me...@newmediarights.org,
www.newmediarights.org
Follow New Media Rights on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/NewMediarights
Become a fan on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/newmediarights?ref=ts
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http://www.youtube.com/user/newmediarightsstudio
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Matt Thompson
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/WeeklyUpdates
They're normally every Monday at 8am PT / 11am ET. But this Monday is a holiday in North America, so we're skipping a week.
--Matt
B. Kip
A few thoughts (it turned into a bushel of them, so first a brief summary):
Conceptual Ideas:
-important to balance emphasis on discovering new ideas and helping
chosen projects acheive goals- particularly important not to shut out new
ideas and possibilities when narrowing the focus
-foster a community where people help each other achieve their goals
Structural Ideas:
-peer coaching/mentoring
-P2PU school for open web project leaders
-project clusters- encourage similar/related projects to connect and
share ideas
-'marketplace' to match what people can offer with project needs
-create pools (corps?) within Drumbeat- with tools and support
structured to specific needs
-entry
-development
-launch
-possible additional pool- brainstorming- ideas only
Here are the details:
I think it's important to find the right balance between the different
emphases proposed: the focus on currently successful approaches ('mashups'
with existing 'big ideas') and that on finding new promising ideas. As Mark
suggests, running an innovation challenge around a specific topic could be a
better way to get people thinking than simply saying 'give us your ideas',
however I think it is also important to maintain space and tools that enable
completely new ideas to appear as well. Watching the ideas that come in can
help identify new trending topics to focus on, and enough freedom for things
to develop as they will might reveal new strategic working concepts like the
'mashups' one that was found.
Besides the things Mark suggests in his post I think it would also be good
to work on fostering a community of people who are not only focused on their
own projects but also invest time and interest in helping each other.
I think there are a variety of people attracted to Drumbeat. On the one
hand you have people with experience and fairly well planned or sometimes
even already established projects who come to Drumbeat to get help with
building them and increasing their impact. On the other hand there are also
people who are new to working on the web and have little experience or
knowledge about how to start and build a project that can succeed. These
latter people may still have good ideas, but on their own find it very
difficult to make something of them.
If Drumbeat can bring people together in a way that those with expertise can
help those who are learning, it will help more projects to achieve success.
One way to do this might be to establish some kind of peer mentoring
system. Another might be to duplicate the P2PU School of Web Craft model
with another one focused on helping people gain the skills and knowledge
needed to build successful projects. Some topics might be:
-using Drumbeat and other existing web tools- Twitter, WordPress, etc.
-communicating on the web
-project planning
-community building
Project Clusters:
It might also be good to implement a way to encourage those with similar
and related projects to connect and share ideas. This could lead to
collaboration between projects, with participants forming a larger
community. It might even lead some projects to combine their efforts into
one project.
Some benefits of this might be:
-sharing ideas helps projects improve
-working together increases activity on each project
-reducing duplication of effort when multiple projects have
similar tasks, eg: building one database shared between projects rather than
three that duplicate the same content
Creating a 'marketplace' where people can advertise specific skills and
experience they have to share and for projects to post what they need help
with could also be useful. If this were connected with the signup and the
project creation processes it could encourage a high level of participation.
Multi-level Structure:
Might it be beneficial to group projects at different levels of
development into a few different pools (this being Drumbeat- "corps"?) with
slightly different structures and procedures? Some benefits of this system
might be:
-projects at each level get tools and support structured to their
specific needs
-new projects don't need to compete with established ones for resources
and attention
-resources can be allocated as wanted between discovery/development of
new ideas, and helping promising projects achieve their goals
Outline:
Entry Level Pool
-tools and structure focused on turning ideas into startup projects
-all projects in this pool treated equally- don't sort by popularity
or apparent potential
-help/advice getting started for those who need it
Development Level Pool
-starting to pick out projects that have what it takes to go further
-focused on building startups into solid, substantial projects with
active communities
Launch Level Pool
-for projects that prove themselves capable during the development
phase
-focused on preparing projects for independent functioning while
still enabling them to contribute back to the Drumbeat community
Possible addition- Brainstorming Pool:
To this it might be worth considering adding a fourth pool-
Brainstorming, in which anyone can propose ideas and anyone can comment on
them. With tagging (by both proposers and commenters) it could be easy to
peruse the pool for ideas that relate to your interest.
Some benefits of a brainstorming pool might be:
-new ideas could be easily proposed for consideration
-it could used by people interested in starting a project but
lacking ideas of their own
-it could used by projects to find ideas that help improve on
what they are doing
-it could used by projects as a way to find people who have
interests similar to what they are doing
Some drawbacks might be-
-lower level of commitment than starting project- will collect a
lot of orphan ideas with no one to implement them (maybe not a bad thing)
-people may not consider as carefully as projects- lower quality
ideas- can be mitigated by right structures for submitting ideas, eg: form
requiring answers to specific questions.
Well, maybe that's enough for now :-)
Brad Kipfer
The New Social Web Project
https://www.drumbeat.org/project/we-need-free-and-open-social-network
Mera Szendro Bok
I started organizing on Drumbeat that that larger calls were on Mondays
early, I was hoping that I would get lucky and that the phone call would be
later (for those of us on PST). I'll try to rise and shine early for this
one.
Mera
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