We use Bugzilla to work open and get stuff done

Webmaker, like many Mozilla projects, uses an issue tracker called Bugzilla for filing tickets and getting stuff done. These two new pages provide tips and tricks for filing bugs, and for getting the most out of Bugzilla:

1. Bugzilla for Webmaker — the best place to start. How to file a Webmaker bug, plus simple tweaks for making Bugzilla easier to use.
2. Bugzilla for Webmaker: PRO TIPS – for digging deeper. How to make it easier for users to file tickets, tagging, searching and tracking bugs, Frequently Asked Questions and more.

Anyone can create, comment or contribute to a ticket

We work open. Webmaker is an open source, non-profit project powered by a global community of friendly humans like you. Anyone can create a ticket, comment on a ticket, and contribute. Just because it’s called a “bug” doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong. It could just be a to-do, or a suggestion. All your tickets are welcome — don’t worry if you’re doing it right. We’re a friendly community, and we want your ideas!

• We’re getting ready to launch a new curated blog for the Webmaker project at blog.webmaker.org.
• The goal: tell the high-level Webmaker story in a crisp way, highlighting community and ways to get involved. In a more curated, less firehose-y way.
  
• The Webmaker blog will pull from the best of our weekly community calls and your Planet Webmaker posts, distilled into a shorter, more curated form.
• If you have ideas on how to make the new blog better, please share your feedback as comments here — or file a bug here.

What’s the GOAL?

Tell the Webmaker story in a crisp, curated and engaging way. Through 3 – 5 great posts each week. Don’t make people read too much — help them grok the high level story fast.

Key audiences

Key audiences for the blog over the next 6 months:

• Mentors. Techies, educators, teachers, parents, youth interested in teaching and helping people make stuff. Especially digital literacy and webmaking.
• Maker Party participants. People participating in Maker Party 2013. Partners, hosts, the high-level story. Celebrating diverse community around the world.
• Allies. Organizations and supporters in the same big tent as us.
• Lurkers. Casual and curious. Interested in what we’re doing — but not necessarily invested enough yet to sign up or dive in.
• Press — Not so much. blog.mozilla.org is the primary channel for us to reach press.

STRATEGY

• Highly curated. This is the drinking fountain, not the firehose. Planet Webmaker is where we write and post in a high-volume, wide open way about all things Webmaker. blog.webmaker.org will link to and pull from the those posts in a more synthesized form.
• Diversity of voices. The posts need to reflect a *community* of diverse people — not just one or two regular authors. Constantly celebrate and give voice to community. Make community the stars.
• Focused on ways to get involved. Ensure everything comes with great calls to action and easy ways to participate. That’s our secret sauce — an open story shaped by everyone.

CONTEXT

Where else do we blog right now?

1. blog.mozilla.org. Perrier. High-level press announcements. Just the really, really big stuff, alongside other Mozilla-wide announcements.
2. blog.webmaker.org (new). Drinking fountain. Best way to grok the Webmaker story.
3. Planet Webmaker. Firehose. Aggregated blog of the people making Webmaker. Includes everything under the Webmaker sun.

plus also:

• explorecreateshare.org. Focused on Hive NYC — but much of this content is relevant to Webmaker mentors as well. As a test-bed, source of stories and case studies, seeding webmaking networks around the world, etc. We want to re-purporse this content on blog.webmaker.org for a broad Webmaker audience.

KEY CATEGORIES

What are the key meta-stories we’ll be focusing on from now to October?

1. Teaching the web — stories and content relevant for mentors and educators. Digital literacy, broadly defined. Learning through making. Building our global network.
2. Maker Party 2013 – the high level campaign story. News, community, event highlights. Rolling into MozFest.
3. Case studies — stories from the field, highlights of teaching or people using our tools. Humanizing what we’re doing and showing it in action.
4. Best makes – pulling round-ups of the best things made from our gallery and highlighting them, with a call to remix.
5. Webmaker product and tools — announcements around Popcorn, Thimble, webmaker.org, etc. Stressing Webmaker as an open source project. Big leaps forward for our tools and web site and major announcements.
6. Awesome stuff on the web – The coolest creative stuff on the web. Have your mind blown or expanded regularly. Viral bait. Tasty yet smart. Mashable for webmakers.
7. the Mozilla mission — stuff that explicitly connects what we’re doing to the larger context and mission of Mozilla. Often linked to join / donate.

What type of content will we post on blog.webmaker.org?

• The best of Planet Webmaker. Snippets and curation from what other teams are already blogging. Curated, filtered and linking back to Planet.
• Community celebration. For Makers, Mentors and Builders.
• Maker Party and campaign news. In ways that can be served to partners through an RSS feed, etc.
• The Webmaker Hotlist. Our weekly list of the coolest things collected by the Webmaker community each week.
• Ways to get involved each week. Constantly highlight CTAs. End every post with “How to get involved.”
• Weekly updates. The top handful of stories coming out of our community call each week. Packaged as individual posts published over the week.
• Our best content from the Mozilla all-hands meeting. Presentations, etc.
• Product releases and news. Around things like product releases, etc.
• Project planning and strategy. (e.g., roadmaps, board slides, etc)
• Guest posts. From community and thought leaders.
• Best makes. Pulled from our gallery. In round-up form, top 10 lists, or with more supporting context and narrative than our gallery provides.
• Case studies. Highlighting our tools in the field.
• Maker Party report-backs. Photos, recaps, etc from Maker Party events. (Probably using a simple template like this.)

SAMPLE PUBLISHING SCHEDULE

Aiming for 2 – 5 short, quality posts per week.

• MONDAY: Top story #2. Coming out of the previous week’s Webmaker call. Focused on community celebration or CTAs. OR: A guest post, highlighting partners / thought leaders. (e.g., http://blog.webmaker.org/how-my-stem-project-led-me-to-the-white-house )
• TUESDAY: All-hands story or presentation. Could be a lightning talk, Popcorn video, or just text + CTAs (e.g., http://popcorn.webmadecontent.org/yah )
• WEDNESDAY: How to to get involved with Webmaker this week. Our top CTAs, brainstormed from the Webmaker call. (e.g., http://openmatt.org/2013/04/30/get_involved-2/ )
• THURSDAY: Top story #1. Coming out of the Webmaker call. Ideally focused on community. Or could be about planning for the future. (e.g., http://explorecreateshare.org/2013/05/01/new-hackable-teaching-kit-prototypes-for-webmaker/ )
• FRIDAY: Webmaker hotlist. A fun Friday treat. (e.g., http://openmatt.org/2013/05/02/hotlist-6/ )

FAQ

What’s the difference between the Webmaker blog and Planet Webmaker? 
Planet Webmaker is an aggregated blog, or “blog of blogs.” It has about 25+  different feeds pulling into it. blog.webmaker.org will be much more curated and intentional — less content, more concentrated, more “front of the mullet.”

How do I get my stuff on the Webmaker blog? The Webmaker blog will be managed by the communications team. We want to help tell your story! If you’ve got a high-level story you’d like to tell, here’s how to get something added to blog.webmaker.org:

1. Post it to Planet Webmaker. If you’re already on Planet Webmaker, we’ll see it look for ways to include it on the Webmaker blog. (If you’re writing regularly about Webmaker stuff, please make sure you feed gets added to Planet Webmaker. Here’s how.)
2. Share your story on a Webmaker call. Those calls feed directly into our story meetings each week.
3. Propose a guest post.  We want your ideas and stories! Pitch us one anytime. Easiest way: just go ahead and write it on your own blog, then let us know about it so we can  cross-post or link.
4. Got a big announcement or story coming up? File a Webmaker comms bug, to let us know and get the ball rolling.
5. If all else fails… get in touch with @OpenMatt, your friendly blog editor-at-large

What’s Planet Mozilla? How do I get added? Planet Mozilla is an aggregated blog of absolutely EVERYONE working on every aspect of the Mozilla project. It’s the biggest firehose in the Mozilla universe. If you’re working on Mozilla stuff, your feed should be there. Here’s how to get added.

Got more questions? Please add ‘em as comments here.

That’s a small cross-section of the 2300 participants who signed up to participate in Mozilla’s new “Teach the Web” open online course. Here’s a tiny sample of what some of those mentors made to introduce themselves and say hello. Lots more here. Meet the community who will teach the world the web.

Mozilla wants us to take the web to the next level by teaching people about [the] web! All I want to say is just follow the people who contribute to what you like. Magic happens. –Vivek

A few of yesterday’s new MOOC participants adding themselves to a global map

Students today enjoy the connectedness of social networking; it is part of their very being. My goal is to bring my instruction into that cloud to teach the content required in ways that inspire online responsibility and ethics in this new, very public world. –Sheri, Middle School Educator and “Geeky Gramma”

My goal in participating in this MOOC is to shift my paradigm from one of “using” things to one of “creating” things. The power and importance of creativity has been identified as something that we are born with, and over the years as we are “educated” we seem to lose the skill, or the motivation to create. — Doug Walters

I do web programming myself but I do not have prior experience of how to teach it to other other people. –Pekka

Ideally, I’m hoping that the course will encourage me to think about ways I can have my own students write the web and I hope to be able to gather a better sense of what that means. I think that this type of creation lends itself very nicely with the English classroom and I look forward to having resources in my class to be able to experiment next year. — Joel Malley

Get involved

• Join the course. It’s still not too late to sign up — join any time!
• Watch the video from the first live session.
• Check out what people are making. The Google Plus community is full of amazing makes, stories and conversation.
• Join the conversation using the #teachtheweb hashtag on Twitter.

“I’m not much of a maker in the third dimension. Sure, I’ve toyed with some things. I’ve put together Ikea furniture, made meals, sketched/painted on paper and walls, cut and pasted (with scissors & glue) type at a printing press, cut and dyed my own hair, and struggled and failed to create sentences that would bring people to their knees.

The machines began their rise as I was leaving adolescence, and due to such perfect timing, I’ve probably spent more hours late at night trying to figure out why a table or div wasn’t rendering the way I had envisioned in Firefox, or trying a new combination of duotones in Photoshop, or taking yet another picture of a flower just so.

There’s really no reason for such a dichotomous view though. Whether the project involved scissors, code, temperas, or zucchini, we begin with an idea, in my case it is almost always an image, and then we begin orchestrating the steps to putting that image together. We add color, we remove distractions, we re-position shapes, we lightly survey for opinions, we re-align our intention, we backspace, we copy and paste, we try and we try again.

My making comes from an open, curious space. Looking back, rarely is the end-result as I pictured from the beginning, and that never feels like failure.”

• Understanding a DDoS attack with Pong — Vice Magazine’s Motherboard helps you visualize a denial of service attack works. Interesting visual analogies of how the web works.
• new Art, Copy & Code film– great example of “web-made movies” / “web-native cinema” / “social video.” It gathers data like time, location, weather and what’s happening on the web — then weaves them into a video that’s unique every time.

• Here is Today — Simple and beautiful data visualization, putting your day into epic context. Like Powers of Ten for time.
• The Build — Great personal storytelling. These bike-makers make the transition from website into film totally seamless.
• Churnalism – Spot plagiarism or questionable sources in your media diet. Just plug in text or a URL, and this checker will look to see how much of the article is ripped from another source — and what source it’s ripped from.

• Meta-piracy inception. What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy?
  
• Boards of Canada code puzzle. Like an easter egg math or code puzzle. More context and latest developments here.
• Is it worth the time? This handy chart helps you decide.

• Red Panda Gymnast – Red Pandas are also known as “Firefoxes,” so we have a soft spot for them. This one does 300 pull-ups a day.
• The lost city of Heracleion — the discovery of an entire city sunk beneath the waves. Doesn’t have much to do with the web, but the photos are amazing.

1. Join @Mozilla for a global #MakerParty from June 15 – Sept 15. Make, learn and #teachtheweb together. Join the party: https://webmaker.org/en-US/party/
2. Want to teach the web? Join a peer-driven 9-week online course starting May 2: https://webmaker.org/en-US/teach/
3. Make your own teaching kits. Test these new Thimble prototypes for creating your own lesson plans for webmakin and digital literacy: https://webmaker.org/kit-prototypes/
4. Just six months until Mozilla Festival 2013! Tell us what themes you think we should hack on together this year using #mozfest
5. The @Mozilla OpenNews Source project is nominated for a 2013 GEN Data Journalism Award. We’d love your vote: http://app.wizehive.com/voting/dja2013/14522
6. Check out Hive Toronto’s latest plans and funding proposal: http://explorecreateshare.org/2013/04/29/hive-toronto-drafting-core-beliefs-and-proposals-for-funding/
7. Join a new G+ #TeachTheWeb community for designers and makers who want to inspire others through creative uses of the #Webmaker toolset: https://plus.google.com/u/1/communities/113102647862445788660
8. We launched the draft version of the Web Literacy Standard last Friday! Discuss, give feedback, spread the word: http://mzl.la/weblitstd
9. Hey, Mozilla India: join two back-to-back @Mozilla #Webmaker events in Nasik, India http://is.gd/xcPVBu and http://is.gd/XW2E09

In Mark Surman’s recent post about where Webmaker.org is headed, he lays out five key priorities for “Webmaker 2.0”

1. Rebooting the brand to focus on makers of all ages
2. Building a gallery to show all the awesome makes
3. Creating a Make API so anyone can make a gallery
4. Deepening learning with challenges + badges
5. Making it easy to create hackable teaching kits with Thimble

This post is about that fifth element: making it easy to create hackable teaching kits with Thimble. Laura Hilliger, Julia Vallera and the mentor team have created new prototypes toward making this possible — and also updated their thinking and content strategy for hackable teaching kits on webmaker.org going forward. This post shares the prototypes and summarizes the new thinking.

How do hackable kits work?

We want to make it easy for anyone to create their own teaching guides and lesson plans for teaching digital literacy, webmaking or any content relevant to mentors and learners. To that end, we’ve created a set of new prototypes in Thimble. The templates are built around three key teaching elements:

• your learning goals. What are you trying to teach? What will people learn?
• your learning activities. What activities, projects or hands-on making are you going to do?
• additional resources. Cheat-sheets, handy reference guides, further reading, etc.
• tying it all together. A complete kit then ties all these elements together into one handy link.

New Thimble prototypes

Try them out now. Clicking on a template below will open the Thimble editing window, where you edit the content on the left and see how it will look when published on the right.

• Hackable Kit template
• Learning Goals template
• Learning Activities template
• Additional Resources template

• Mentor profile page template
• Cheat sheet template

The templates can also make it easy for people to create multi-page teaching guides. Check out these two examples:

• Kit as multiple pages
• Kit as a PDF

What’s the goal?

These prototypes are just a small first step. By eventually making it easy to display what mentors are creating through a gallery, and surfacing these community-generated resources onto webmaker.org/teach, we can:

• showcase what others are doing. See how other educators and mentors around the world are teaching and making. Sharing great activities and lesson plans.
• enable easier remix and localization. You can just hit the “edit” or “remix” button in Thimble to immediately start translating, moving stuff around, adding your own images and links, etc. When you’re done, you can just hit “publish” and publish to a new, easily shareable URL for what you made.
• make it easy for people to work their own way. The beauty of working in Thimble and simple editable HTML and CSS is that people can create and share however they want. Your Thimble make could follow our existing template — or you could hack it to include whatever you want: a link to your own blog post or web site, article, third-party resources, etc.

We know not everyone likes to edit HTML — and we’re working on alternate workflow for that, like Mentor Mob.  This is just a small first step.

Building Webmaker 2.0

What’s our content strategy for these hackable kits going forward?

1. Move to a “make-based architecture.” Up to now, our teaching resources / “Hacktivity Kits” have been their own separate content type. Moving forward, we imagine kits and educational content to be just another “make,” like any other — tagged so that mentors and educators can easily find them.
2. Simplify our nomenclature and terms. We’re no longer referring to these teaching guides as “Hacktivity Kits” or “Hacktivities” — we’re going to simplify and streamline our nomenclature, using terms that are already familiar to people and easier to localize. (More on that soon.)
3. Test and refine these Thimble templates in our MOOC. Through the launch of our new open online course, we’ll be in close touch with hundreds of educators, techies and mentors that can help us test, refine and create their own content. This will be made easier by new “save” functionality in Thimble — so our target is to have an early alpha version of this feature ready to test by May 23.

“Everything is a make”

They key design principle here is that, going forward for Webmaker.org, everything is a “make” – and it will soon become dramatically easier to see and remix what other people are making with Webmaker tools like Thimble and Popcorn.

Can we flow great content like this into our these new prototype templates?

 How to get involved

• 1) Test the prototypes. Access the protoype kits on Webmaker.org here. Please help test, experiment and make them better. Share feedback through #teachtheweb or file a feedback ticket here.
  
• 2) Join the open online course. Participants in the course will create their own resources and kits, and have a chance to test new alpha features in Thimble.
• 3) Try flowing existing content into the new templates. For example, is it possible to turn this great NY Times education blog post into a hackable teaching kit using our new templates? What would that look like? Please hack and experiment and then report back on your results through #teachtheweb.

Introducing Maker Party 2013

This week we were proud to partcipate in the White House Science Fair—and have President Obama help us kick off our new Maker Party 2013. This June to September, people will get together at thousands of community-led events around the world. Together we’ll celebrate the amazing things we can make and learn through the open, collaborative power of the web.

• Join the party. Sign up at webmaker.org/party. Make something, share it, or teach others what you know.
• Learn more. Read the official Mozilla blog post.
• Get training and support. Our new “Teach the Web” open online course is like “Boot Camp” for Maker Party. Join in discussions and hands-on learning with other techies, educators and mentors around the world.
• Spread the word. By re-tweeting sample tweets like these.
  • Join @Mozilla for a global #MakerParty from June 15 – Sept 15. President Obama just kicked it off at the #whsciencefair: http://mzl.la/party

Join me for “Teach the Web:” a free online course from Mozilla

Read this great story and invitation from Ankit Gadgil, Mozilla community member and Mozilla Rep, inviting you to take part in “Teach the Web“ a new free and open online course from Mozilla starting May 2. Learn more or get started here.

Toward Webmaker 2.0

Building Webmaker as a popular way to make and learn on the web. Mark Surman lays out a crisp five-part vision for what we’re building together between now and June:

1. Rebooting the brand to focus on makers of all ages
2. Building a gallery to show all the awesome makes
3. Creating a Make API so anyone can make a gallery
4. Deepening learning w/ challenges + badges
5. Making it easy to create hackable teaching kits with Thimble

How to get involved:

• 5 great things about Webmaker v2. Read Mark’s full post.
• Check out the April 2013 Mozilla Board Slide presentation
• Webmaker v2 product vision. New features and improvements will roll out weekly over the course of the summer, starting June 15.
• Track progress on Webmaker v2 through this scrumbug and Tumblr
  

Planet Webmaker round-up:

• Mozilla’s Web Literacy standard: first draft released!

• 7 ways to get involved with Webmaker this week

• Hive at the White House Science Fair

• Summary of the Webmaker Mentor Team work week

• Badge system design

• Easy open source workflow

• Thought experiment: letting git normalize whitespace

• #freebassel

As a techie and volunteer teacher and mentor from Pune, India, I’m super excited to be a part of Mozilla’s Webmaker community. Teaching digital skills and helping youth get their first taste of what’s so amazing about making, hacking and coding on the Web are why I love what I do.

It’s so rewarding to see kids’ faces light up the first time they “get it.” The realization that the Web is made out of code they can shape and remix and create themselves is life-changing.

It’s like teaching someone a new superpower!

That’s why I’m so excited to invite you to a new free and open online course from Mozilla on how to teach the Web. I hope you’ll join me and other Mozillians from around the world who are just as committed to digital literacy — it’s a great opportunity to exchange knowledge and work together on how to best encourage the next generation of webmakers.

It’s called “Teach the Web.” It will run from May 2 to June 30. And because it’s an open online course, it’s easy to dive in and connect with others at any time. You can participate in weekly guided discussions, tackle hands-on activities, develop and remix teaching resources, and compare notes with other members of the Mozilla community. Together we will:

• explore new ways to teach digital literacy, tech skills and webmaking
• connect with other techies, educators and mentors around the world
• create your own educational resources that help people learn these skills
• get ready for our global Maker Party 2013. From June 15-September 15 we’ll be hosting thousands of community-led events and parties around the world.

The Web is an amazing resource. It gives us all a chance to be creators, makers and inventors. We can look under its hood, tap into its power, and rearrange its building blocks.

Once we know how the Web works, the world is ours to make.

 

Learn more or get started here. If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with me or some of the other course organizers and Webmaker Mentors using the #teachtheweb hashtag.

Things I made and learned last summer

• on our “memes” newsgroup. memes [at] mozillafoundation [dot] org
• at the start of each weekly Mozilla Webmaker call.
• as comments to this post.

• The White House Science Fair. Mozilla Webmaker goes to Washington to launch Maker Party 2013. (Can someone auto-tune or Popcorn this Obama clip, please?)

• Geekphone. 16-year-old Javier Aguera started Geekphone, which is now selling smart phones that run Firefox OS.
• How to knit a Firefox costume for your Firefox OS phone.

• Buzzfeed does a post made entirely of Popcorn videos. 10 perfectly paired songs with animated GIFs.
• Lego school. Using Lego to teach critical thinking and logic. Wouldn’t you have loved this as a kid?

• Learn how to fix your own gadgets for free. This site shows you how everyday gadgets, how to fix them, and where to find the parts.
• Make Blocks. Design your own robot and they’ll build it for you. Check the download section for a complete part selection.

• Google I/O elucidated. “A series of mobile-first experiments and games focusing on touch interactions, generative audio and the joy of discovery. Inspired by the potential of code and the power of play.”

• “The Verbasizer.” David Bowie developed a text remixing app in the 90s to help create lyrics. (He used it to write ”Dead Men Don’t Talk.”)

• Sports Balls Replaced with Cats

  

  Anything + Cats = Meme