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;

1. All participants were divided into 10 teams and were given 25 minutes to work out an idea;

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.

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.

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.

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.