This week: Girls hack. Collusion hits 150K. The New York Times joins Mozilla. “Living Docs” launches. Creating a “Mozilla Webmaker” app. Hackable HTML5 games.  Mother’s Day campaign. Mozilla Event Kit.

Mozilla Webmaker weekly update for Mar 13, 2012

• Complete notes from the Mar 13 Mozilla Webmaker call
• Audio recording of the call
• Join next week’s call! All are welcome.

Girls Learning Code at Mozilla Toronto

Toronto girls are learning how to hack with Mozilla. For March Break, Mozilla Toronto’s community space was packed with girls aged 11 to 14 learning how to hack with Mozilla. Later today they’ll present their work: a web site they’ve made to support their favorite cause.

What interested you in taking this camp?
“It sounded cool and it’s fun and exciting to hack with my friends.”

What do your friends think about this stuff?
“I think they’re jealous because we know how to hack!” “Yeah, we’re becoming cool coders.”

What do you like to do on the web?
“Facebook, You Tube, WorldEducationGames.com… But that site isn’t free any more.”

What tools have you been using so far?
“Using Scratch to make games and animations, and we used Hackasaurus on Facebook and Google too… It didn’t even look like Google any more — we made it look all alien-like.”

Mozilla’s Collusion add-on reaches 150,000 downloads

Who’s tracking you on the web? Mozilla’s Mark Surman talks with TVO about Collusion, privacy, and why it all matters to the web’s future.

 

New York Times joins Knight-Mozilla OpenNews

Four exciting new news partners are joining the project: The New York Times, ProPublica, Spiegel Online, La Nacion. Fellows will spend a year writing code in collaboration with reporters and newsroom developers in these orgs. Applications open April 9.

• New York Times joins Mozilla and Knight Foundation to drive open innovation in new
• OpenNews: Big News in Austin! at SXSW
• Press coverage of the announcement.
• Join the OpenNews community calls. Read up on past notes.

Mozilla launches “Living Docs” with world leaders in documentary

Mozilla is partnering with the world’s leaders in documentary film to produce events, projects and code that revolutionize Web-based documentaries, using new open Web tools like Mozilla Popcorn. The project gathers Mozilla, The Tribeca Film Institute, The Center for Social Media at American University, ITVS and BAVC.

• Mozilla Blog: Mozilla launches Living Docs Project with world leaders in documentary. Plus announcement from ITVS on the project launch.
• Join the interactive doc hack sprint: Hack Sprint at Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto
• Mozilla Popcorn Learning Lab in London, UK. Sunday, March 25.
• Great think piece: Why Filmmkers Are Makers

Hackable games: “Games are where the people are”

Mozilla Foundation ED Mark Surman on the potential for HTML5 to create a new world of “hackable games,” using the web as “level editor.”

These games will let you pull assets and data from across the web into your game world. And, they will let you remix, fork and share to your heart’s content. The result will be fun for people who like games — and huge potential for webmaking and learning.

The first glimpse I got of this was Jono Xia’s RunJumpBuild, a very simple side scroller level editor. While RunJumpBuild is rudimentary at this point, it shows an important idea: web games can pull anything with a URL into a game. A picture. A sound. A video. Data. RunJumpBuild is designed to let people create game levels that are made up of the web.

Creating a “Mozilla Webmaker” app

Mark also presented early plans around creating a  WebMaker app.

We should create an ‘app’ inside make.mozilla.org makes it easy for people to make, remix and share webpages / simple apps. This should be called “Webmaker” or “WebpageMaker.”

Building on what’s been started with LoveBomb and StoryThing, the WebMaker app would be designed to let people:

• Go to make.mozilla.org and make something fast.
• Make something nice based on one of our beautiful, remixable templates
• Learn HTML, CSS and Javascript, on their own, with a group or with a teacher
• Share what you make in a low friction way (ie, don’t need your own hosting)
• Earn badges based on what you make and contribute

Going forward:

• Mark’s draft scope and next steps
• An early “Webmaking Tutorial” prototype
• Atul’s post explaining the thinking behind it
• Early thoughts on user experience from Jess Klein. Including providing users helpful tips and pointers on how to write html and css.

Gearing up for a big Mozilla Summer Campaign (part 2)

Last week we told about how we’re gearing up for a big honking Mozilla summer campaign. This week, we have a roadmap and plan:

• Foundation Summer 2012 Campaign Roadmap
• More context and background: check out Kitchen Table Summer Campaign and Webmaking Day of Action

Mother’s Day Webmaker campaign

We want to run a Love Bomb campaign around Mother’s Day, where participants remix templates to express their love and learn some basic HTML and CSS in the process.

• Check out Jess Klein’s blog post 
• Explore the Roadmap
  

Mozilla Event Kit: prototype and roadmap

As our event kit charges forward we’d like to remind you what kind of fun can be had at a Mozilla event.

• Try out the Event Platform prototype here
• Check out our development roadmap here