Drumbeat/website/projects/stopbadware

Title:

StopBadware Stories

Project Headline:

Fight badware, one story at a time

Background:

StopBadware cultivates a network of individuals and organizations that share a common goal of eliminating viruses, spyware, and other bad software. We connect the members of this network with actionable knowledge they can use to fight badware effectively.

By fighting badware, StopBadware and its constituents are helping to build a world in which people are the masters of their own machines. In this world, we each make informed decisions about how and when our hardware, software, and network connections are used.

Short Description

We want to establish an environment in which people worldwide are encouraged to share their encounters with badware and to experience each others' stories. By putting a human face on a problem often seen as technical and impersonal, this project will help StopBadware grow its community, reach new audiences, and advocate for change to reduce the spread of badware.

This project will ask Drumbeat participants to help us create this environment by sharing their own badware stories, helping us build and refine the tools for sharing the stories on our BadwareBusters.org site, viewing and voting on others' stories, and helping to spread the word about our effort. Our goal is to accumulate and, more importantly, share as broadly as possible at least a hundred stories in the next six months. These stories might be funny or sad, successes or failures, videos or text. The goal is to bring to life the statistics around badware, to remind the world that badware is a real problem with real, human impact.

How does this make the web better?:

Badware makes the web less safe, less secure, and less fun. When someone visits a website and her computer gets infected, it can cost money, cause stress, invade privacy, and waste time.

Cleaning up badware on the web will require changes in behavior and attitudes by individuals, businesses, and governments. StopBadware believes that this is possible only through the efforts of many, many people, and this project is one means of building the awareness and interest needed to draw people to the effort.

Some Tags

badware, malware, privacy, security, safety

Participation Ask

There are several ways to contribute:

• Share a story in text, image, or video format. The story can be funny or sad, a triumph or a failure, but it should be a true experience where badware affected your life or that of someone you know.
• Help us build the tools in LittleVoice, the open source community platform (built in Ruby on Rails) that runs our BadwareBusters.org site, necessary to collect, share, and rate stories.
• As the stories come in, we'll need help rating, tagging, and otherwise curating the collection to maximize the value to new visitors and community members.
• Spread the word. Tap into your social networks and help us find new stories, reach new audiences for the best/funniest stories that we've collected, or attract new community members to strengthen the project.

Tools

Until the community builds (using Ruby on Rails) the module in LittleVoice for collecting and sharing stories, stories may be submitted in the following ways:

• Post a text-based story on BadwareBusters.org and include the tag "badware_story".
• Upload a video story on YouTube and submit it to our YouTube group.
• Upload a cartoon, photo, or other static image that tells a story on flickr (please use a Creative Commons license) and include the tag "badware_story".

For those posting videos on YouTube or images on flickr, please feel free to also post on BadwareBusters.org with a link (you may use HTML or textile markup to create a working link) to your story. Be sure to include the tag "badware_story" with your post.

A Clear Measurable Outcome

Generate a hundred great stories highlighting personal experiences with badware.

Audience

Our hope is that the stories accumulated through this project will reach a wide variety of Internet users, from novices to techies, from folks who have been burned by badware to those who don't even know what badware is. These stories will be the living embodiment of the problem we're trying to solve and, we hope, will be an entertaining and effective way to raise awareness of the problem.

Icon

We're working with a designer to update our logo and get a professional icon that's icon-shaped.