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Drumbeat Berlin – 8 May 2010, Betahaus

Will the web still be open in 100 years? Mozilla thinks it can — and must — be. That’s why we’re starting Mozilla Drumbeat, an invitation to teachers, artists, lawyers, filmmakers and other everyday internet users do things that will make the web better, and keep it open for the long haul. We want you to get involved.

Offline and on, we are building a new community that includes open web geeks, but also teachers, artists and designers, bloggers, lawyers and even enlightened people in government. Come to Drumbeat Berlin and learn how you can help keep the web open, or show others what you’re already doing!

Check out the Drumbeat Berlin Agenda, and feel free to add a topic for discussion like I did.

Come to the Berlin event to learn about, work on, or even propose a new Drumbeat project.

Drumbeat events are:

* Active and participatory: we’re going to be making and building the Open Web. Less talk, more action!
* Inviting to people who love the Web, but may not be geeks. As part of Drumbeat, people can make more than software. Videos, universal subtitling, design projects, training courses, books, and more!
* Opportunities to weave together local networks of creative, Web-loving people and share their exciting local work with the global community.

Come prepared to share your vision for the future of the Web, the challenges you have with the Web in your work, ideas you have for new projects to address those challenges. Most importantly, come prepared to collaborate and build the Open Web!

Register here FOR FREE and let’s Rock ! If you have time, you may visit my article about our first Drumbeat event in Bulgaria !

Drumbeat event in Bulgaria

On the contrary of my initial expectations a lot of people took part in the first Bulgarian /Mozilla Drumbeat /workshop.

The workshop was divided into 3 parts:

0. The first was a 15-minute speech giving a short account on what is open web, what is the Drumbeat mission and why this open web is so valuable;

photo by Lubo

1. All participants were divided into 10 teams and were given 25 minutes to work out an idea;
Photo by niki
photo by Lubo

2. A special jury, selected at random, assessed the projects on one single condition – the projects had to be designed to keep the Internet open.
photo by Niki

From the 300 conference attendees, about 120 joined the 10 teams which had to create an idea to help the open web. All the ideas were great and I hope the team could find some time to upload them to drumbeat.org.

Another interesting event was the DrumBeat competition. There ware 11 teams that had to propose an OpenSource Project idea in about 15 minutes. I was left out for the jury. I was very supprized that 6 or 7 of them had the same bases. If I should summarize the idea I would say “Self driven community knowledge educational program”. Obviously people realize that the current educational system suck and a very interesting and promising idea would be to implement the open community method (like wikepedia) to make better schoolbooks and test for the young generation. This certainly needs more investigation and tough.

The aim was to give significance of the open web values and to make the participants, who were of various ages and field of technological expertise, to contribute to the development of an idea and of course to receive a price. Each member of the two winning teams received a bottle of wine, designed especially for the occasion.

Photo by niki

But …
I do not know if it was a coincidence but two days before the conference we went to an event-performance in the old postal building in Veliko Tarnovo. The event was divided into two parts and the second part was going to be based on the pictures, taken by all the people who had visited the first.

I had a chance to talk to the group of students organizing the event and I asked them if they would like to make a third part – on the Internet, to use the resources of the worldwide net and to visit the Drumbeat workshop as well.

Автор: Кристина Танева

Автор: Кристина Танева

автор: Милица Николова

It turned out that there is a slight difference between wanting and being able to. If we want Drumbeat to make a significant contribution to the open web, we will have to teach the artists, the teachers and all the other target groups how to use the Internet. No matter how good was the idea of the Veliko Tarnovo students, they did not know how to implement it in the Internet. That will change soon, of course, because there are people, willing to help them.