Monthly Archives: August 2011

The evolution of Drumbeat.org

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Last month we asked for your help in shaping the future of the Drumbeat.org web site. As Mark Surman explained, we’re working with Mozilla Labs and Mozilla Research to tie Mozilla’s innovation efforts together — including an overhaul of drumbeat.org and other Mozilla sites aimed at getting people involved.

More than 180 members of the Drumbeat community participated in our survey, sharing their thoughts on:

  • what’s working with the current drumbeat.org site,
  • what’s not working, and
  • where we should focus next.

This post summarizes the survey results. The complete raw survey data is available here (PDF).

How can we amplify Drumbeat’s success online?

Mozilla Drumbeat has been a success. We’ve gathered a great community, demonstrated the value of reaching out to new kinds of audiences, and instilled a participatory, maker-builder spirit through inspiring projects. Drumbeat’s central premise has been proven: we’ve successfully brought together innovators in open web tech with innovators in other spaces like learning and media.

The question going forward is: how can we best support and amplify those successes online, specifically through Mozilla Drumbeat’s web presence?

What you told us about Drumbeat.org

Here are the high level take-aways:

1) You want easy ways to participate and stay informed.

  • When asked *why* they joined Drumbeat.org, the overwhelming response from respondents was: to stay informed and get involved in Mozilla projects.

2) The existing Drumbeat.org site isn’t making that easy enough.

  • Drumbeat.org isn’t yet fully delivering on that need. 56% of users said they’re “just lurking, waiting for something exciting to happen.”  And over half of all users haven’t logged in to Drumbeat.org in their recent memory.

3) We need to provide smaller, easier ways to pitch in.

  • The #1 suggestion on how to enable greater community participation was: “Provide small, easy ways for me to pitch in.”

What’s working?

Here’s what survey respondents said Drumbeat.org is already doing well:

  • Our focus on education & learning. 73% said Mozilla’s community innovation efforts should continue to focus here. And a majority cited education as the most important area for Mozilla to focus on.
  • Reaching out to new kinds of people and projects.
  • Involving the community to make Mozilla grow.

Other direct quotes from respondents on what Drumbeat.org is doing well:

  • “Having all the projects, people and events in one place to browse.”
  • “Providing a way for web builders to connect.”
  • “Collecting open source projects with a real-world impact.”
  • “Cross-promoting the work of colleagues.”
  • “Reaching out to people *outside* of the current community.”
  • “Offering several ways people  can be involved…whether working on projects or just commenting on them  or just watching and learning…”
  • “Advancing Mozilla’s mission (beyond software) by providing a place/platform  for those that share Mozilla’s ideals and overall goals.”
  • “Letting people from different fields and disciplines meet and share their ideas on what the Internet would and should be.”

What’s not working?

  • Helping a million different projects. Only a small portion of respondents are using the site to support their own project (17%). And those that have posted projects there are not finding the site significantly helpful.
  • We haven’t been able to give all projects the attention and support they need. Many respondents cited the need for greater focus. Narrowing the site to deliver on a single core competency, rather than trying to do too much.
  • Other responses on what Drumbeat.org could do better:
  • “Add a search functionality to the site!” (+1,000,000)
  • “There’s too many projects.”
  • “Filtering/selecting/presenting new projects better.”
  • “Many projects are not set up to the point where someone can step in and help.”
  • “Make it clear how contributors can help.”
  • “Figuring out how to keep people active and in the loop.”
  • “There needs to be more of an ability to actually connect with projects and people.”
  • “Don’t take on too many diverse projects (as currently). Stay focused on a single mission and walking path per session.”

What should we definitely *not* do with Drumbeat.org going forward?

A sampling of your responses on what Drumbeat.org should avoid:

  • “Don’t go too wide.”
  • “Don’t try to do everything.”
  • “Dont loose focus. It happens all too often in web projects.”
  • “Don’t accept ideas from everyone without any form of moderation.”
  • “Don’t make everything go through a moderation process.”
  • “Don’t think that you can be completely hands off about new projects and that the good ones will bubble up to the surface by themselves.”
  • “Don’t be too nice about it. Grow a backbone, get tough.”
  • “Don’t try to be a social network. Really. Don’t do that.”
  • “Don’t get too far down the crowdsourcing path. The site has the right balance right now, and it may make sense to pull back a little bit at this point.”
  • “Don’t ABANDON Drumbeat. It´s an excellent work.”
  • “Don’t give up :p”

Where does that leave us?

Given this feedback, what are we committed to going forward?

  • Expanding participation into Mozilla projects. Making it clearer, easier to get involved and make a difference.
  • Continuing to collaborate with people and projects in areas like education and media. That’s clearly working, and we can scale up community participation here.
  • Shining a brighter light on successful projects. Highlighting a smaller number of projects that are succeeding in attracting participation and momentum, rather than flooding users with a deluge of different projects.
  • Clearer, more focused ways to get support for your project. Mozilla’s new WebFWD initiative, for example, is a way for a small number of promising project ideas to get more direct, hands-on support from Mozilla. Like Y Combinator for the open web.

Things we want to hear from you:

  • How do we strike the right balance between being focused versus being open to all? Many respondents cited the need for greater focus. How do we do that while maintaining the right balance of being as inclusive as possible?
  • How should we pick the projects we passionately support? If we do narrow our focus, what criteria should we use for choosing those projects?
  • What’s the best way to provide smaller, easier ways to pitch in? Given that this is the #1 suggestion for improvement, we’ll need to dig into specifics here together. (We had some useful early conversation about this in today’s Drumbeat call — more on this in subsequent posts.)

Good Magazine: Badges will unlock higher-education alternatives

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Is higher education broken?

Good Magazine cites a growing gap between what learners want and what they’re currently getting. Take stats like this from the U.S.:

  • 57 percent of respondents in a recent Pew Research Center poll said they believed that college “fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend.”
  • From 1982 to 2007, median family income rose 147 percent — while college tuition and fees grew a massive 439 percent.
  • For 67 percent of students, that means getting a four-year college degree requires going into debt.

The result is a tough choice:

Buy into an expensive higher education system you believe to be hugely problematic, or suffer the consequences of trying to earn a living without a college degree, which studies consistently show increase a person’s earning power?

Accreditation is the key to making alternatives work

How do we do better and create a “new ecology of learning?” Good’s article lists a range of emerging alternatives, from Mozilla’s collaboration with Peer 2 Peer University to MIT’s free OpenCourseWare initiative, iTunes University and Knext.

But what’s interesting about the piece is the way it seizes on the value of new approaches to assessment and accreditation, like Mozilla’s Open Badges project, as the key to realizing the full potential of efforts like P2PU:

What sets P2PU apart from things like iTunes U is accreditation. Because unless alternative-education users have an official way to present their merit to potential employers, people with traditional degrees are going to continue dominating the labor force.

The Mozilla Foundation and P2PU are developing “badges,” notifiers to potential employers that a person has completed coursework and is capable of doing what they say they can. “Imagine people could earn badges for their learning, skills and achievements regardless of where those occur or how they are achieved,” Erin Knight, a badge and assessment specialist for P2PU, writes me in an email. “And the collection of badges could serve as a living transcript for each learner, telling a much more complete story about that person than traditional degrees or transcripts.” She later adds, “I think this is the future.”

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Hosting a Hackasaurus game jam for kids

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Mind the gap.

As part of this week’s Hackasaurus game sprint, eight rambunctious kids aged 8 to 11 joined us in the new (and still under construction) Mozilla Toronto office. Our mission:

  • Test early game ideas and prototypes. Like X-Ray Goggle training missions, hack mazes, and hackable comic books.
  • Brainstorm totally new ideas. Have them surprise us with cool stuff we’ve never thought of.
  • Stage a mini dress rehearsal for what we want to do on a larger scale at the Mozilla Festival. Bringing kids, game designers and developers together in London for Hackasaurus design jams and hack sprints this November.

1) Icebreaker: Hacking board games

To get warmed up and into the spirit of the thing, Jess had the kids start by hacking some traditional board games.

Kids hacked and reinvented some traditional board games -- like Snakes and Ladders, Monopoly and chess -- changing the rules and game mechanics to make them more fun.

Ways to hack traditional games. The kids came up with a fifth: adding narrative and back story.

Turning Monopoly into "Hackopoly."

In this version, each game piece has unique powers.

2) Testing Hackasaurus game prototypes

Next we tested some early game prototypes for the X-Ray Goggles. Like Atul’s “Parable of the Hackasaurus,”and an early bare-bones “hack maze” prototype Dan Mosedale and David Humphrey put together.

In both cases, players are given a “broken” page and then use the X-Ray Goggles to fix it using simple HTML.

Tristan uses the X-Ray Goggles to fix broken elements on the page. The page responds in real time, counting down the number of elements left to fix.

 3) Kids designing their own game prototypes

Next we divided the kids into three groups:

  1. A “hackable comic book” group. Working on illustrations and early narrative for an interactive comic-book style experience using the X-Ray Goggles.
  2. A “build your own game using Scratch” group. Thinking about how you might incorporate the X-Ray Goggles into the gameplay.
  3. A “hack maze” group. Working on how to create “Portal”-style games where users create and share their own hack mazes.

This group began paper-prototyping a hackable online comic book experience. Players would use the X-Ray Goggles to change the characters and narrative, with remixing elements in HTML and CSS built right into the story.

This group designed their own game using Scratch. In less than 90 minutes, they were able to create their own "zombies vs. machine gun tower" game. They imagined using the X-Ray Goggles to hack leveled-up super zombies back into normal zombies.

Most games have a "training mission" or two to help you figure out how to play. The X-Ray Goggles need the same. Using the "Parable of the Hackasaurus" as a prototype, Atul hacked together this quick training mission (using artwork from the kids) to help users understand how to remix images. Individual training puzzles like these could be linked together into a larger "X-Ray Goggles obstacle course" or "hacker parcours."

What did we learn?

  • Testing and co-designing with kids is *always* a good idea. I was worried that we weren’t ready for real kid feedback. Jess helped me see that was wrong — and I’m totally sold. Testing with users — especially kids — is always going to yield interesting results.
  • It’s important to really listen and ask twice. Some of the kids would give one response in a group, but then give different answers when asked individually afterward. Like anyone, they don’t want to hurt your feelings. They won’t necessarily tell you “I think your prototype is lame” right to your face. So it’s crucial to ask and re-ask in different contexts.
  • Most kids instinctively get and speak game language. They think like game designers. To an even greater extent than anticipated. With complex concepts for character, narrative and game mechanics.
  • Some of our stuff is skewing too young. Two 12-year-olds privately described one of our prototypes as “baby-ish” and “cheesy.” Given that we’re targeting a 10 to 15-year-old age group, this is feedback we need to take seriously, and incorporate into our re-branding efforts in Q4 / Q1. Over-earnestness or babyish-ness is the kiss of death.

Portal gives you tests and progressive levels that require you to learn new skills as you go. An X-Ray Goggles "obstacle course" or set of training missions can do the same.

What ideas should we incorporate going forward?

  • Prioritize the X-Ray Goggle training missions. We’ve added this to the Hackasaurus roadmap for beta in September. The current X-Ray Goggles page makes it easy to install the Goggles — but doesn’t help you figure out how to use them in a scaffolded, self-guided way. We need to add that next.

The basic skills you need to start messing around with the X-Ray Goggles

  • The hackable comic book concept shows promise. Kids immediately got it, and it gave them a chance to get their hands dirty with illustrations and paper prototypes quickly.
  • So do the Tilt 3D and “Portal for the web” concepts. Kids liked the video demo of Tilt 3D, and liked the idea of busting hacks as a way to “unlock” pages and do cool stuff to them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW2eAbr5FBw&feature=youtu.be]

  • Unlocking super-gadgets. One of the best ideas was that busting a hack on a page would unlock a super-gadget — like a flamethrower — that you can then use to “set fire to the web page” you’re on. Or unlocking a Katamari ball you can roll around, or jackhammer you could use to bust up the page. This gives regular incentives to progress through various hack puzzles and pages — unlocking cool new web superpowers as you go.
  • Consider avatars and characters. This was the other idea we’d never really considered — web characters or avatars that run around the page, jump through portals, etc.

More detail on training missions, comic books and hack mazes coming soon

Hack this Game: Portal for the Web

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“Portal” and “Portal 2” are mind-bending and addictive. There’s something magical about firing your first “portal gun,” hacking through the fabric of everyday space to unlock whole new dimensions and possibilities.

What if we could do the same thing to the web? Making it easy for players to “fire a portal gun” at everyday web pages, using the Hackasaurus X-Ray Goggles to uncover easter eggs, solve puzzles and run through “hack mazes.” Using cool new tools like WebGL and Tilt in the background to bring cinematic transitions and game-like effects to familiar web pages. Like “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego” meets the hacking the Matrix.

Hackasaurus game challenge: Build a “hack maze” for the X-Ray Goggles

That’s the Minimum Viable Prototype idea I’d like to submit as part of the “Hack this Game” design challenge and hack sprint. Why is it a good fit for the Hackasaurus project and road map right now? Because it seems:

  • Doable. All we need for a prototype is one or two hack mazes, consisting of three or four web pages a piece. Plus some cool early examples of what the HTML5 transitions and effects could look like.
  • Familiar. Players, game designers and developers are already familiar with the Portal game, making it easier to explain and wrap our minds around.
  • Participatory. In the medium-term, we can make it easy for players to create and share their own hack mazes. This gives Hackasaurs an easy pathway beyond messing around: building mazes and worlds out of your hacks, and sharing them with friends.
  • Builds off what we’ve already got. Hackasaurs are already using the X-Ray Goggles to create and share their “hacks” — remixed versions of everyday web pages. This adds a game layer over top of them, and a more compelling reason to storify and share your remixes with others.
  • Fun (?). That’s the #1 requirement! I don’t think we’ll know whether it’s genuinely fun until we build a prototype. If we succeed, we’ll weave basic HTML right into the game-play, as the means by which players solve puzzles and advance. All sugar, no medicine.

X-Ray Goggles: coolest invention since the Portal Gun?

In the same way that the portal gun alters your sense of reality, so do the X-Ray Goggles — revealing the web as something malleable, tinkerable, made by all of us. With glowing bits of Matrix-like code just under the surface that we can mess and play around with. Safely experimenting, remixing and breaking things to see how they tick.

This turns the open web itself one giant game. We can build on the basic game mechanics of hack mazes to lay the foundation for David Humphrey’s larger vision: turning the open web into one giant gamespace or Alternate Reality Game (ARG).

Running through hack mazes

What would the basic game mechanics consist of? Players would use the X-Ray Goggles to solve puzzles and advance through a hack maze. These mazes can be created by us to start, but ultimately be created by players / educators / game designers / interactive storytellers / anyone.

Spot and unlock hacks to advance. In the same way that Portal presents you with a locked room and a portal gun to try and get out of it, Hackasaurus would give you a familiar-looking web page — but with a difference. One of the elements is different. Something’s been altered or remixed somehow. Maybe the photo on that New York Times page has been changed to a picture of somebody’s Cocker Spaniel. Or maybe the Google logo has been transformed into a sock monkey.

Can you spot the hack — and use the X-Ray Goggles to change it back? Or remix it yourself? Once you do, the page itself can start spinning and twisting and come to life in crazy ways (using WebGL, Tilt and other HTML5 magic behind the screen). A portal opens up around your hack, and it feels like you’re stepping through the guts and DOM of the web page itself. Like seeing the glowing green code behind the Matrix, sucking you through the web to the next page in the maze.

How would players create hack mazes?

What would the basic steps in the user experience for creating a hack maze look like?

  1. Bust a hack with the X-Ray Goggles. Go to any web page and use the X-Ray Goggles to remix something. Change the photo on a friend’s web site. Alter some text on a Wikipedia page, etc.
  2. Repeat. On to the next page. The user making the maze goes to a new page and repeats the process. By repeating this process three or four or however many times, you’ve created a “Hack Maze” — a series of hacks strung together across multiple pages. (Ideally with some kind of X-Ray Goggles “Maze-Maker” functionality tracking the process and making it easy in the background.)
  3. Publish and share your maze with others. Congratulations! You just made a hack maze! Now why not share it with friends? Maybe it’s a “flags of the world” maze or a LOLcats maze or a politically subversive re-imagining of the Tea Party maze. Hackasaurus mazes would be limited only by the maze-maker’s imagination.

Play as participation, participation as play

The best mazes can become popular games and puzzles for Hackasaurus. Hack Mazes could have themes, learning outcomes, or just be hilarious. An educator could, for example, create a Hack Maze on geography, where flags or labels on a map are re-arranged and students have to use the X-Ray Goggles to put them back. Or you could create a Hack Maze for School of Webcraft that teaches the basics of HTML, CSS or Javascript along the way. The beauty is in letting players decide and make up and share their own experiences. Play as participation, participation as play.

Wow factor = bringing familiar pages to life in strange new ways

  • The wow factor will come from using HTML5 effects and transitions to blow players’ minds. Bringing everyday web pages to life in crazy ways no one’s seen before. Pages can change color, spin, and twist apart in three dimensions as you successfully open a portal. Or pages could break into a million pieces like jagged glass, or literally “explode” if you use the X-Ray Goggles wrong. (Check out Tilt or the effects section at Three.js for inspiration.)
  • Make failure fun. Like Jane McGonigal‘s example from “Super Monkey Ball 2,” a which makes throwing a gutter ball hilarious and by extension, makes failing fun. Let’s follow the same principle to make HTML less intimidating and make breaking stuff fun.
  • Make HTML and the web’s building blocks more tangible. Less like code, more like Lego. The transitions and effects — by exploding or stretching the DOM of the page in 3D, for example — can make the web seem more tangible, craft-like and malleable.
  • Play with a Matrix-like sense of uncanny and mind-bending.  Imagine you’re sitting in your living room knowing that *one* element is suddenly different. Maybe there’s a red ruby slipper suddenly hidden in the top drawer of your desk. Or the picture of your family has been mysteriously swapped with a Selleck waterfall sandwich. That’s the sensibility we can bring to players’ own everyday online reality. Imparting a sense of wonder, magic, and Matrix-like mind-bending.

Build this game: Want to get involved?

Hackasaurus will be running an ongoing “Hack This Game” design and developer challenge. To create and share games and puzzles for the X-ray Goggles, making web-making and tinkering fun for kids aged 11 – 16 (and ideally adults as well).

We’re looking to get game designers, web developers and HTML5 enthusiasts together to swap ideas and code. The only restriction: game concepts have to involve the X-Ray Goggles in some way. Here’s how to get involved:

  • Our first Hackasaurus game sprint is happening Aug 8 – 12. With more sprints to follow. See this post for details.
  • If you’re interested in participating at any point, please get in touch through the Hackasaurus mailing list, or join a weekly Hackasaurus community call.
  • Share your prototype ideas and goals for the sprint as comments on this post, or on the Game Sprint etherpad. Linking to your own blog posts, tools, napkin sketches, etc.
  • The Hackasaurus web site and project page have plenty of project links and tools.
  • We’ll turn up the volume and engage kids, game designers and developers at the Mozilla Festival in London this November.