Drumbeat/website/contentstrategy/ideas

Drumbeat IDEAS

Ideas Overview

What can the Mozilla Community do or build to shape the open Internet of the future? Mozilla has a history of "design thinking" that has made browsing better - can this approach also make for a better internet?

With this goal in mind Mozilla Drumbeat will engage with leaders and social entrepreneurs to

1) Identify Challenges: surface nascent challenges to the openness of the web,

2) Crowdsource Solutions: bring the Drumbeat community to bear on articulating, reviewing and providing feedback on solutions to these challenges, and

3) Launch New Projects: attract resources to make the best ideas reality.

Ideas Criteria

Each idea has to:

• Be associated with one or more of the ten broad themes for making the Internet better.
• Must have “open Internet DNA” and values. Relate to “open, participatory, transparent, distributed control,” etc.
• Probably should involve "design thinking." (let's flesh this out further?)
• Should be sufficiently ambitious and forward-thinking. e.g., "How do I make my 'Kill IE6 campaign' succeed?" is probably not the right fit.

Questions:

• Is there a public interest / business model criteria? e.g., RouteBricks may meet our other criteria, but is funded by Intel. Does that disqualify it?

Workflow

1) Clearly communicate the Drumbeat Ideas vision, specific ask and criteria. Probably including a value proposition that helps answer "what's in for them?"

2) Gather suggested ideas / problems into the funnel Probably with a LOW barrier to entry -- gather as many ideas as possible, and make it easy to submit through multiple channels. Not everyone will fully fill out an entire web form. Some idea suggestions will come (as they are already) as comments on a blog post, one-sentence tweets, etc. We need to be flexible with intake.

3) Curate, edit and flesh out ideas & problems that meet the criteria We're suggesting this as a general Drumbeat approach -- combine a low barrier to entry WITH a high level of curation. Not to be elitist -- but to keep ideas on track for Phase One and make it easier for people to submit.

4) Surface and showcase nascent ideas or challenges / problems On the Drumbeat web site and other channels. Use images, crisp copy and emphasize the human element (overlapping with PEOPLE where appropriate) to make the ideas inspiring.

5) Bring community to bear Engage the community to articulate & review the idea or problem. Make it easy for them to contribute to the ideas in small or big ways, and easily vote the idea up or down.

6) Attract resources for the worthiest ideas / problems

Either by:

• Turning them into a full fledged Mozilla design challenge
• Connecting them with volunteers / problem solvers within the Mozilla community
• Attracting third party money or support?
  • By simply raising the profile of the idea or problem, is there the prospect of some third party stepping in to help?
• Other...

• [Let's flesh out this last part so that we can more clearly articulate the value proposition and help the sexiness and viral spread of the ask.]

Three different kinds of "IDEA?"

The are three different types of potential ideas that may flow into the Drumbeat IDEAS stream. (These are useful primarily just for our own internal planning purposes -- they don't necessarily need to be presented this way to users.)

1) “Unbaked” New ideas with little or no existing support. Probably still at the conceptual or problem statement or “wouldn’t it be nice if” stage. Could be as simple as a one-paragraph blog post or pencil sketch.

e.g., “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way for bloggers to route around censorship in places like Iran or China by using a cache tool on their browser?”

2) “Half baked” An idea that real stakeholders are already playing with, working on, or developing in some way -- but that could benefit from an open innovation process and Mozilla community brainpower.

e.g., “We’re working on developing icons that make it easier for consumers to make smarter decisions about privacy terms of service. BUT, we could use some help figuring out how they should work and what they should look like.”

3) “Fully baked” Good, interesting ideas that are already mostly fleshed out or completed. They don’t necessarily need design help -- maybe they just need money or other kinds of support.

e.g., “We just built our own village phone company in Mozambique using an ordinarily router and sim card. But now we could use some money and volunteers to spread to other communities.”

User Stories & Example Tests

[UNDER CONSTRUCTION -- TO COME WED]

e.g., Prof who has idea to... but has no way to build it

e.g., Citizen journalist with a business model idea but now way to test it out

e.g., Icon designers, but need ten different designers to take a shot at it

e.g., Plug JetPack for Learning in here

How Design Challenges at Mozilla Work: A Story

In the Summer of 2009 Mozilla faced a problem. Tabs, which had helped define Firefox, were a victim of their own success. Users frequently had 20, 50 or even more tabs open in their browser. This was negatively impacting performance and making it harder for users to track what they were doing.

To solve the problem Mozilla did what it does best. It crowdsourced the problem. It launched a design challenge by asking everyone and anyone to suggest how Mozilla might "Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we create, navigate and manage multiple websites within the same browser instance?"

The process was simple. To participate in the Design Challenge all you needed to do was:

a) create a mockup of your proposed solution. (Anything from a napkin drawing, to a wireframe, to a polished graphic).

b) create a video explaining your idea(s), presenting the mockup and showing how your idea works.

c) upload your mockup and video to a website such as Flickr, Vimeo or YouTube and tag it with "mozconcept"; and

d) register your entry by email to conceptseries@mozilla.com with links to both your mockup and your video.

From this process Mozilla received 128 concepts which were judged by both a committee and through voting. (Would be nice to talk more about the end result - did any of these become projects in Mozilla?)

Questions for Discussion

The Drumbeat IDEAS life-cycle may end up looking something like:

1) Problem / idea statement: _________________

2) Solution statement: _________________

3) Solution design: _________________

4) Solution: _________________

Questions

• Should "fully baked" ideas just go into ACTIONS?

• Do we have "module owners?" How do we break ideas / challenges into smaller, more manageable pieces and chunks?

• Are there past Mozilla Design challenge success stories that we can look at and draw inspiration from?

• Does Drumbeat's "Ideas" mechanism end after the "solution design" step? How far can we realistically take those?

• For "fully baked" ideas, do we lose the purity of the "design thinking" approach if we simply focus on spreading or scaling? Or risk making the brand too loose or broadly focused? "This cool project is done -- now how do we scale and spread it?" Is that an acceptable problem statement for Drumbeat?

• Will the same methodology and workflow work for all three types of ideas? Should we tailor the response and workflow based on different idea types?
• How do we ensure we’re not diluting what Mozilla Labs are already doing with their own design challenges?
• How do we decide which ideas will be turned into fully formed design challenges?
• How many design challenges can Mozilla realistically support?

• How does “Ideas” relate to authorship and the “fame and fortune” aspect of getting to the event? e.g., does the PROPOSER or author of the idea receive the credit? Or the design challenge winner?
  • Could be BOTH. The Drumbeat narrative could be about connecting people with design challenges or problems they’re trying to solve (like a community technology center organizer in Romania saying: “We could do our work a lot better if we had a solution like ‘x.’” And then connecting that challenge with a developer in Prague or San Francisco who has the answer. Then BOTH of them come to the event together -- providing a uniquely “Drumbeat-ish” narrative of bringing two people together, connecting problems with solutions.