Mozilla Picks Up the Drumbeat

November 25, 2009

From OStatic blogs

Yeah, the Mozilla folks just keep going. Like the Energizer Bunny of the Web, they’re always up to something new. This time it’s Drumbeat, a sort of umbrella project for various projects to create "tools that enable Internet users to understand, participate and take control of their own lives." The project has been bootstrapping itself and Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Project, posted an update on the progress of the project yesterday.

According to Surman, the year one plans for Drumbeat are solidifying and they’ve picked a number of projects to get started and energize the community. A couple of projects are already listed, including a project to design icons that make privacy policies easy to grasp, and a presentation challenge for people to create and upload presentations to the Drumbeat Web site on their own proposals.

In some ways, Drumbeat is really a meta-project to give a framework to smaller projects that allows anyone to propose a project and try to build a community around it. It’s an audacious idea, but it’s just crazy enough to work — especially with a community the size of Mozilla’s.

Surman says year one is now in progress, and the Website is currently in development. If you’re interested in Drumbeat, check out the year one plans and the discussion forum andGoogle Group.

Not only does Drumbeat sound like an interesting and worthy project to watch in its own right, but it’s also an interesting view into the birth of a project overall. Looking forward to watching Drumbeat evolve in the next year and working to create a "better Internet."

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.