Mozilla Drumbeat Festival - Learning, Freedom, and the Open Web has a posse

The Drumbeat festival was an intense but enjoyable 3 days.

The sheer amount of interesting people and projects that were available to immerse yourself in was a bit overwhelming at times. That said, the structure of the event made you a participant, not just an attendee, and kept you engaged from start to finish. Mozilla’s Mark Surman laid out a call to action for the event, which really involved applying a hacking, innovative, disruptive mentality to an educational and learning system in need of just that.

The most important take away for me will be the amount of meaningful connections that were made. Meaningful connections happen when people engage in building something together, whether its a tool for automatically attributing Creative Commons licensed material, or building a “sculpture” from a pile of “junk” in front of the hackbus.

Each individual’s Drumbeat experience will be unique, here’s how mine went.

1. Exploring barriers to content reuse, coming up with tools to address the problem

Nathan Yergler CTO of Creative Commons, Molly Kleinman of University of Michigan, Art Neill of New Media Rights, Hans Lemeut of WebArchivists, Timothy Vollmer and Michelle Thorne of Creative Commons as well as others discuss an automated attribution tool for CC licensed content.

Jane Park of Creative Commons facilitated a session about barriers to content reuse. We first broke into groups to identify problems/barriers with content reuse, then reconvened to discuss the main problems. After this we honed in on a single problem/barrier and generating a plan, strategy, or solution to that problem.

There are good notes on the process, problems, and solutions presented here.

Creative Commons Attribution tool - Our group (Led by Molly Kleinman and Jane Park) naturally focused in on Creative Commons licenses as this is a key way content is reused. It was clear that numerous attendees believed attribution was a key barrier. After Molly Kleinman and I identified the numerous existing guides on attribution, we developed an idea for a set of browser and application based automated attribution tools that will help downstream users of CC content easily get embed or plain text code that gives them the key items they need to attribute properly (Title of the work, author’s name, URL for the original work and license information). This is similar to modern citation capabilities in academic and legal databases. Essentially this tool tries to simplify hurdles from attribution as much as possible for the downstream user.

We continued this discussion the second day with Nathan Yergler and a crew from Creative Commons, and Molly Kleinman led work on specifications that were written for a tool in consultation with coders at the event. Targets such as Wikimedia were identified as services who could incorporate such a tool within their application.

In the end the tool was talked about by Mitchell Baker of Mozilla at the close of the event as one of the examples of what had been achieved, and Creative Commons and Mozilla were committed to pushing the project forward.

2. Data Portability

I was thankful to meet and start a collaboration with Hans Lemeut of WebArchivists around Data Portability.

Hans and I developed a statement regarding a potential Drumbeat data portability project that you can find here.

Data portability is a huge topic, so we began to break up the challenge into digestable chunks.

We began to identify various lists and analysis that needs to be done to move concepts around data portability forward. There is already a link to a chart developed by Webarchivists surrounding what certain services allow you to download of your own data.

We also identified questions that the larger open internet community must help answer to move data portability forward. Sessions where users, hackers, lawyers, and others identify the spectrum of barriers and problems with data portability, and then begin to identify the most worthwhile solutions and strategies to pursue them are a key element to moving data portability forward.

You can see our initial outline of a data portability project here, but we need community input.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/Data_portability

We are looking for those interested in pursuing data portability on the open web, you can contact art@newmediarights.org or hans@webarchivists.org to stay involved.

3. P2PU University - "Learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything"

There were great discussions both days about the future of copyright education, for educators and others.

Delia Brown, Australia’s National Copyright Director for the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training, and Youth Affairs facilitated this discussion.

Attorneys, academics, and others discussed the need to localize current course offerings based on the law in specific jurisdictions. Essentially localization requires a legion of knowledgeable local attorneys and others to develop localized resources and facilitate such courses. EFF’s http://copyright-watch.org is a good example of an already existing group of individuals that may be interested in building and facilitating resources around international copyright laws.

P2PU is also looking to identify additonal course offerings in the Internet law space, as well which audiences should be targeted.

I’ve offered P2PU use of New Media Rights’ as well as my own Social Media & the Law materials and class recordings, and am in the queue as a facilitator for future copyright course offerings.

4. The Hackbus & The Laptop Orchestra

This conference was not just about disrupting learning, it was also about learning from each other. I participated in the Hackbus’s flash sculpture mob on the last day of drumbeat, which involved building a sculpture out of scrap wood and random childrens toys in a square in front of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and then running from the fake police who were summoned by Johannes.

Johannes challenges the audience

Art (USA), Valentin (France), and Stephanie (Germany) accept the challenge

Along with watching a series of individuals perform in the laptop orchestra, this was a great way to cap my experience at Learning, Freedom, and the Web (oh, and the after party was pretty great too).

Drumbeat was a chance to build and learn with others across many disciplines, in the interest of the open web and the future of learning.

"sculpture Mob" by Samuel Huron under Creative Commons By-NC-ND 2.0 license.

"sculpture Mob candidat" by Samuel Huron under Creative Commons By-NC-ND 2.0 license.