Foundation/2014Plans

	MoFo 2014 Plans
	Owner: Mozilla Foundation / Mark Surman	Updated: 2014-01-14
	Working plans for Webmaker, Open Badges and other programs managed by Mozilla Foundation

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The Mozilla Foundation team runs three major initiatives: Webmaker, Open Badges and New Communities. This wiki houses 2014+ goals, roadmaps and status updates for these initiatives. You can find info on other Mozilla-run projects including Firefox on the main Mozilla wiki page.

MoFo 2014 Goals

MoFo's Webmaker, Open Badges and New Communities initiatives support Mozilla's broader mission of building a web where people know more, do more and do better. These initiatives share two goals for 2014+:

• Goal #1: 10x the community actively contributing to our initiatives. With the ultimate goal of getting 1 million new Mozillians by 2023.
  • How?
    • a. put in place clear engagement ladders across all initiatives and
    • b. prioritize lead users 'lead users' who will help us build and teach.
  • Metric:
    • 10k active contributors for MoFo initiatives.

• Goal #2: grow adoption of Webmaker and Open Badges. With the ultimate goal of getting more people to embrace the open technology and culture of the web.
  • How?
    • a. make our tools easier to adopt, use and plug into and
    • b. prioritize lead users 'lead users'.
  • Metric:
    • A majority of active contributors adopting Webmaker and Open Badges as part of their daily work or integrating into their own web sites.

As suggested above, 2014 will include a major focus on lead users: people already excited about our work. Get them to help us build our products, content and community. And, of course, get them to bring their friends.

For more on the overall Mozilla mission that drives these goals, please the Mozilla Manifesto or watch Mitchell Baker's Nature of Mozilla video.

2014 Program Goals and Roadmaps

The wiki pages listed below include detailed goals, roadmaps and status updates for all MoFo run projects. They also include stories that describe each program's vision.

Webmaker

• Top 2014 priority: 10k teachers and mentors contributing to Webmaker
  • Webmaker story: what are we trying to build and for who?
• Main Webmaker wiki
  • 2014 Webmaker roadmap
• Appmaker wiki
  • Appmaker roadmap

Open Badges

• Top 2014 priority: launch BadgeKit, deploy for cities plus Mozilla badges
  • Open Badges story: what are we trying to build and for who?
• Main Open Badges wiki
  • open badges roadmap

New Communities

• Top 2014 priority: replicate Open News model for science and internet policy

• Open News Wiki
  • Open News Roadmap
  • Open News story: what are we trying to build and for who?
• Main Science Lab wiki
  • Science Lab Roadmap
  • Mozilla Science Lab story: what are we trying to build and for who?
• Mozilla Internet Policy wiki / roadmap (coming soon)

MoFo Support Programs

• Engagement
• Operations

Related Posts and Resources

• MoFo Dec 2013 board slide screen cast, including overview of 2014 plans and budget
• All MoFo board slide blog posts
• Main Mozilla Project wiki
• MoFo board

PLEASE MOVE THIS STUFF INTO YOUR PROGRAM PAGES

1. Webmaker Goals & Strategy

Webmaker is a collection of innovative tools and curricula for a global community that is teaching the web. Appmaker, a tool within Webmaker, focuses on the mobile web, building an open ecosystem for authoring, teaching and sharing mobile apps.

Webmaker Goals

1.1 Shape: More people from every corner of the globe are actively creating the web and recognizing the value of open technology.
1.2 Teach: Events, Hives and mentorship programs teach Webmaker's tools and the values of a web that is open and interoperable.
1.3 Build: Webmaker.org, Make API and the Web Literacy Standard support a worldwide web literacy movement.
1.4 Empower: A growing community of mentors from around the world teach the web in their communities and share their stories and resources on webmaker.org.

Appmaker Goals

1.5 Shape: Appmaker has reset the bar, allowing more individuals, businesses and developers to actively engage in and leverage the mobile web with self-authored apps.
1.6 Teach: Making an app is a popular entry point for people to learn that they have agency over their online lives, and well-traveled on-ramps encourage deeper learning about the web.
1.7 Build: Appmaker improves accessibility in app authoring, significantly increasing the number of people making and collaborating on mobile apps.
1.8 Empower: Through component authoring, localizing, and teaching.

Webmaker Story

1. What is Webmaker and why does it matter?
Webmaker is a collection of innovative tools and curricula for a global community that is teaching the web.

2. How will it shape the world by 2016?
Webmaker will continue growing as a vibrant community dedicated to fostering web literacy. We are distinct from the learn-to-code market and by 2016, our nuanced and multi-disciplinary approach to teaching digital skills — one that emphasizes creativity and empowerment while resting on the foundations of the Web Literacy Framework — will put us in a unique class. Across the world, people will naturally reach for our tools when they want to learn and create on the web, and especially when they want to teach others. An ecosystem of Webmaker badges will support learners, allowing them to chart their progress. Events, mentorship programs and the global Hive Learning Network will offer robust pathways to contribution, empowering hundreds of thousands of makers and mentors to build, learn and teach the web.

3. Why will people get involved in what we're doing?
Webmaker offers value to diverse audiences. Growing numbers of educators will use our tools because they help students internalize learning about privacy, collaboration, mixed media authoring and code. Many teachers and mentors want to broaden their own understanding of the web in a social environment that increases their reach, and Webmaker provides a community for such professional development to occur. Learners will engage with our curriculum because it is relevant and fun. We are continually working to make our tools more social and our resources more discoverable to serve learners from all over the world. Tool developers will increasingly use Webmaker because our free and open Make API allows them to target their tools to a growing audience of educators.

4. Why will lead users or partners get involved?
We are a powerful and diverse community of schoolteachers, parents, hackers, informal educators, librarians, media artists, community activists and people energized by fostering a better understanding of the web. By advancing the notion that being a contributor to the web involves harnessing the creativity and culture of the medium, we embrace a broad set of skills and talents. This results in more varied partnerships than platforms that focus solely on code. Many diverse communities care about design, privacy and education. By partnering with leaders in these communities, Webmaker will access greater distribution channels, global audiences and expertise in curriculum. In return, we offer platform that effectively connects a vibrant and global community of people passionate about teaching the web.

5. What we're doing in 2014 to move towards this:
--- We will bring our products to market. We will clarify our lead user market of teachers, segmenting them by geography, demographics and psychographics into actionable users. We will localize and invest in community-building efforts in emerging areas such as Brazil, India and China.

--- We will maintain our existing tools. As Popcorn Maker, Thimble and the X-Ray Goggles become more stable, we will focus on maintaining them rather than developing major new features.

--- We will expand the Hive Learning Project. We will define and cultivate Hive Learning Networks, and promote cross-Hive collaboration with a Hive pop-up event guide and a "Hive in your City" guide.

--- We will introduce Appmaker. Working with our colleagues in Mozilla Labs, we will launch Appmaker as another excellent tool to teach the web. Appmaker will form the first test of our Make API, a federated method for 3rd party apps outside of Webmaker to publish into our ecosystem. The thrill of creating an app will help us reach the broad market relevance we are striving for.

--- We will build world-class curriculum. Using a combination of internal resourcing and community outreach, we will create a curriculum that is both indexable and discoverable. Increasingly, this will be the primary method by which users experience webmaker.org and we will focus our UX efforts in clarifying the learning journey we want our users to take. We will create pathways through this curriculum based on the Web Literacy Framework that we can assess and accredit via Open Badges.

--- We'll help Firefox become a tool to teach the web. We'll provide low-touch yet smart ways, like Dev Tools publishing to Webmaker, to onboard makers through Firefox. We'll also integrate accounts, allowing anyone who signs up to Firefox to automatically sign up to Webmaker as well.

--- We'll bake webmaking into the Million Mozillians effort. Mozilla is putting renewed energy into community building across the project. Through collaborations with teams such as MDN, Reps, SUMO, and Firefox Student Ambassadors, we'll develop contribution pathways from those programs into Webmaker and vice versa.

--- We'll make Webmaker more social. Using a combination of our events platform, self-curated profiles and simple tools that allow users to chat and message, we'll establish Webmaker as a place to collaboratively teach the web.

6. Possible revenue opportunities: As the locus of an emerging web literacy movement, distinct from the saturated learn-to-code community, we are in a unique position to attract funding partners. The UK Big Lottery Fund, the European Digital Education Fund, Telefonica's Think Big program and Brazil's Omidyar have recognized the differentiated offering we provide and our unique ability to deliver it. We will also explore opportunities to attract funding based on the different strands of the Web Literacy Framework, beginning with privacy and collaboration.

7. Why the Webmaker community will succeed:
--- Because Webmaker has clarity on its audience and is primed to go to market.
--- Because we are confidently integrated into a wider Mozilla strategy and will be able to leverage channels, expertise and shared goals.
--- Because our engineering process has matured to the point where we can quickly move from user insight to shipped feature.
--- Because we are localized and can work globally through our own channels and those of our partners.
--- Because we have expertise in events and community organizing: Mozfest, the Hive Network and Mozilla Reps are all primed to onboard users to webmaker.org.
--- Because we have helped build and shape a pedagogy for teaching the web.

2. Open Badges Goals & Strategy

Open Badges re-imagines credentials to support a transformed culture of learning where skills, interests and achievements are recognized and connected with digital badges to share across the web, granting access to jobs, advancement and education.

Goals

2.1 Shape: A distributed credentialing system connects greater numbers of people to open technology and makes learning, employment and identity on the web more interoperable.
2.2 Teach: The Open Badge ecosystem has an abundance of quality opportunities to foster and recognize learning and teaching experiences that align with Mozilla's values.
2.3 Build: BadgeKit forms the core technical infrastructure of a vibrant and interoperable open ecosystem of learning.
2.4 Empower: A thriving community of issuers, endorsers and validators recognizes and reinforces a culture of learning based on shared digital badges.

Open Badges Story

1. What is Open Badges and why does it matter?
Open Badges is a project that re-imagines credentials to support a transformed culture of learning - one where all types of learning, skills, interests and achievements are recognized and connected using digital badges that can be shared across the web to unlock access to relevant job opportunities and advancement.

2. How will it shape the world by 2016?
Open Badges is dedicated to recognizing and connecting learning across all contexts, in and out of school, allowing learners to gain insight into the skills they need in order to accomplish their goals, capture and communicate those skills once they've been obtained, and unlock access to relevant jobs and opportunities for advancement.

The Open Badges community has an audacious goal of a transformed culture of learning, employment and identity across the web. Throughout 2014-2016, Open Badges will support thousands of issuers, endorsers and validators in recognizing learning of all kinds through an open ecosystem of digital badges. Subsequently, millions of learners will be able to build a collection of badges that truly represents their lifelong learning and skills, and connects them to jobs, credit and other advancement opportunities. By the end of 2016, we will see that new culture in action, with open badges issued by over 5,000 organizations, impacting over 5 million learners and workers. Badges will be a key way that individuals represent themselves online, and will be used in many hiring and admission decisions.

3. Why will people get involved in what we're doing?
Mozilla Open Badges includes both an open standard for badges, as well as free software to make the badging experience easy and personal. The shared standard enables openness and interoperability within historically siloed credentialing systems. As a result, badges can operate as the key connector to ignite and support a culture of learning that works like the web. Beyond the tools, Open Badges thrives on an active and growing community who informs and drives this work forward with us.

4. Why will lead users or partners will get involved?
The lead partners for Open Badges, including badge issuers, endorsers and validators, provide valuable ways for learners to build upon and demonstrate what they know and can do. Issuers — often teaching and learning organizations — benefit by plugging into a broader ecosystem of learning. Their learning opportunities, recognition systems and brands will gain exposure beyond their networks, bringing more learners, prestige and endorsement. Endorsers and validators have access to a connected ecosystem where they support and promote specific skills, and exceptional learning opportunities for each skill. Finally, badges are data, and privacy-friendly analytics around impact and outcomes are an attractive driver for these contributors.

Employers will benefit from making hiring decisions based on verified skills instead of, or in addition to, self-reported resumes. Learners will have the ability to stitch together their learning across multiple experiences, access opportunities needed to reach their goals and easily communicate their skills to employers.

5. What we're doing in 2014 to move towards this:
Mozilla's role is to shepherd, protect and promote the open standard for badges, to ensure that badges are interoperable and have currency in the ecosystem, as well as to build the scaffolding needed for a healthy, open badging ecosystem to exist and thrive. This includes open tools to support critical elements of the badging experience, and the common interfaces and channels to ensure that a connected ecosystem of tools, support and services can exist. In 2014, the Open Badges team will build and release BadgeKit, an open tool stack to support the entire badging experience, including defining and issuing badges. We will also launch the Badge the World campaign to invite and support a wide diversity of organizations and global communities into badging. Finally, we hope to engage more deeply with key global organizations like the United Nations, as well as the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, DigitalME, Statewide Afterschool Networks, and numerous K-12 schools, universities and community colleges to develop important badge systems.

6. Possible revenue opportunities:
In addition to a large and growing community of contributors, the Open Badges work requires a solid set of paid contributors as a means to further support the initiative. Revenue opportunities may include offering badge system design services to new issuers, offering services on top of BadgeKit like metadata caching, featured badges and employer tools, and additional philanthropic grants.

7. Why will Open Badges succeed?
We will succeed with Open Badges because they are the credentials needed to meet a rapidly changing world. Credentials have historically been siloed and owned by institutions. The Open Badges project, through sound technology and an open web ethos, is well positioned to shift the learning and credentialing paradigm towards an open ecosystem. In addition, we have the highest level of institutional knowledge and experience with badging in the marketplace, which we can leverage to help organizations build exemplar badge systems and educate the growing community on why open (learning, credentials, etc.) is critical to our future and to posterity.

3.New Communities

Open News Goals

OpenNews is building a thriving community of people writing innovative code in journalism. We are helping those people lead and shape where journalism goes in the future.

3.1.1 Shape: Guided by the OpenNews community, journalism on the web is transforming how we view the web itself.
3.1.2 Teach: Through Source, SRCCON and newsroom outreach, OpenNews is the leading destination for those seeking to understand web development in the newsroom, and for those interested in building web-native news.
3.1.3 Build: Code developed through OpenNews initiatives achieves relevance and is adopted in newsrooms and beyond.
3.1.4 Empower: OpenNews is the central hub for a global community of news developers and programmatic journalists. It attracts and trains new members while developing and supporting existing leaders.

Open News Story

1. What is Open News and why does it matter?
OpenNews is building a thriving community of people writing innovative code in journalism. We are helping those people lead and shape where journalism goes in the future.

2. How will it shape the world by 2016?
We envision a world where there are many more curious, civically minded news coders than there are today. In this world, open source and the values of the web are baked into how journalism works. It’s easy to dive into data, visualize a point, organize a community; it happens every day. Journalism needs these people, practices and technologies if it wants to continue to inform citizens and help communities thrive. To get there, OpenNews will become the connective tissue in the journalism code community. We'll connect people writing innovative code in journalism with their peers so they can learn, solve problems and build new tools together. We'll offer onramps for the community to document, improve and spread the code they write and the practices they develop to the news industry, the open-source software community and the world.

3. Why will people get involved in what were doing?
OpenNews works with a global community of news developers, civic hackers and open-source makers. These are loosely tied communities. OpenNews is the first organization to recognize that reaching out to these disconnected developer communities and organizing them along the lines that engineers and hackers want to engage was a crucial first step in strengthening the overall journalism code community.

4. Why will lead users or partners get involved?
We have designed the OpenNews ecosystem around two core audiences: News Developers and Civic Hackers.

Inside newsrooms, we see our core audience as News Developers. News Developers are the people actually coding inside the newsroom. This community engages with our events (attending & hosting hack days and MozFest), writes for Source (project documentation and learning case studies) and takes part in our biweekly community calls. Over time, this community has become a collaborator with OpenNews, advocating publicly for our programs and helping to conceive of the new projects we’re undertaking. Outside newsrooms, we engage with a broad spectrum of coders that broadly fall into the “Civic Hacker” bucket. These people dabble with open data and open-source software, and build hobbyist-level visualizations and applications. They engage with us at events, read Source and take part in our biweekly community calls. This community is where we find many of our Fellows.

Why these audiences?

These two communities are moving journalism forward on the web. One is doing it inside traditional industry structures; the other is doing it independently. When these two communities collaborate (as we’ve seen through successful open-source projects like Backbone.js, Django and D3), the impact reaches far beyond journalism to the entire web itself. OpenNews regularly enables this collaboration.

5. What we're doing in 2014 to move towards this:
We connect people writing innovative code in journalism with their peers so they can learn, solve problems and build new tools together. We offer onramps for the community to document, improve and spread the code they write and the practices they develop to the news industry, the open-source software community and the world.

We're doing this through the following initiatives:

Knight-Mozilla Fellowships: Our 10 month fellowships connect members of the open-source software and civic hacking worlds into newsrooms around the world.

Hack Days: We offer financial and planning support for organizers of journalism-themed hack days in their community.

Source: We launched our journalism-code hub in October 2012 after extensive collaborative design with the news developer community.

Journalism Code Convenings: The introduction of Journalism Code Convenings, which bring together top talent from the news developer world, our Fellows and leading external community members to collaborate on code that will be widely shared throughout the journalism-code community.

Newsroom Outreach: We're adding in-person learning and discussion opportunities to place our fellows, alumni and other leaders in the community into smaller, less tech-heavy newsrooms.

SRCCON: The Source Conference (SRCCON), a hybrid un-conference and hack day to further engage the communities we intersect with.

Mozilla Festival: This annual Mozilla event, held in London has featured a “source code for journalism” track that attracts both journalism developers and open-source hackers.

6. Possible revenue opportunities: We're already generously funded by the Knight Foundation to work on the core programs outlined above.

Long-term revenue opportunities include:

• expanding our newsroom outreach program and getting separate funding for that
• getting additional funding for expansion of Source
• allowing newsrooms to pay full freight for a Fellow

Short-term (or small amount) revenue opportunities include:

• creating and selling Source Guides to various news technology topics
• advertising on Source

7. Why we will succeed:
From visualizations produced for the 2012 Elections in the storytelling of the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning “Snowfall,” it is clear that we’ve reached the inflection point for web-native journalism. OpenNews is the only organization actively engaging and empowering the people doing this work. We’re the only ones trying to grow the ranks of news developers while also seeding innovative code outside traditional news organizations. While there are other trade organizations that address digital journalism, none are actively organizing developers in the way that these communities natively operate. OpenNews does. When done right, this community doesn’t simply impact journalism in the long run, but the entire web itself. Fundamental architectures of the modern web — Django, Backbone, Underscore, D3 and others — have been built in the newsroom first. Better organizing this community and harnessing its true potential has impact far beyond journalism.

Mozilla Science Lab's Goals

The Science Lab connects the open science community and empowers researchers, coders, funders and other partners to make research more like the web: open, collaborative and accessible.

3.2.1 Shape: The Science Lab and its partners are influencing the culture of science by demonstrating new and open ways to conduct research on the web.
3.2.2 Teach: Researchers have the skills to conduct more science on the web, and are training others with programs like Software Carpentry.
3.2.3 Build: Through community building, educational programs and technical prototyping, the Science Lab supports and strengthens the open research community.
3.2.4 Empower: The Science Lab connects the research community, making science more open, collaborative and reproducible.

Mozilla Science Lab's Story

1. What is the Science Lab and why does it matter?
The Science Lab connects the open science community and empowers researchers, coders, funders and other partners to make research more like the web: open, collaborative and accessible.

2. How will it shape the world by 2016?
The Science Lab intends to transform the culture of science by demonstrating the power of open-source, interoperable technology. Over the next two years, the Science Lab will build prototypes, produce resources and connect researchers and coders to foster the growth of the open science ecosystem. By 2016, this community will include more than 250 networked instructors, equipped with relevant, quality teaching resources.

3. Why will get involved in what we're doing?
Scientific research relies on building upon other people's work, yet researchers are not armed with the tools, resources or culture to work openly. By bringing the characteristics of the web — accessibility, openness and interoperability — to science, the Science Lab will attract innovative researchers and institutions working to advance science both technologically and culturally.

Around the world, a lot of effort is being put into developing tools, practices, implementations and polices around open research. What’s lacking is stewardship, the means for others to get involved (this includes educational barriers) and the linking of disparate communities to work together towards their common goal. The Science Lab is building communities of practice and technical prototypes to show what the web enables. This allows us to support the activity that's currently taking place, and help do it at scale.

4.Why will lead users or partners get involved?
Leaders in the emerging open science community see the Science Lab as a way to amplify their reach and impact. Mozilla's history of working to support the open web, as well as its non-profit status, makes it an attractive partner for the research community. The Science Lab represents the intersection of technical and educational leadership, and offers a powerful demonstration of how Mozilla's values can shape and scale a community.

What we're doing or building in 2014 to move towards this:
The Science Lab is generating awareness around issues in open research by doing, not just showing. The Code Review Pilot and the "Code as a Research Object" project are examples of how we build technical bridges between existing tools and infrastructures in the open, while also generating a discussion with the community and working to test implementations and develop a community standard.

Possible revenue opportunities / short and long term:
We are currently supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on a 2-year grant for the program. We are in discussion to submit for additional funding from the foundation in early 2014, which will secure core funding for the program through 2016. We also are in the process of reaching out to other foundations in this space for core support, as well as programmatic funding.

For our educational work, we are exploring models to help support Software Carpentry through event sponsorship and arrangements with host universities. The aim is to pursue core sponsorship from each event, which will offset the cost of creating and maintaining curriculum, train-the-trainer programs and personnel costs.

Longer term, we are looking to work with foundations and universities to support educational and technical work that will help grow and empower the open research community, as well as build compelling tools and prototypes.

Why will we succeed?
The Science Lab is part of Mozilla's ongoing and evolving mission to shape communities around openness. The Science Lab will serve as a connector for the open science community, helping researchers acquire the skills needed to do more science on the web, build tools to make research more efficient, and foster best practices.

Policy Program Goals

In 2014, we will build a nascent framework and apparatus that exists to respond to policy threats to the open web. Policy Fellows will lead issue-based projects from within regulatory and political bodies to attract continued funding and resources.

3.3.1 Shape: A well-resourced, distributed network of talented individuals protects the open nature of the web against uninformed and potentially damaging regulations and commercial practices.
3.3.2 Teach: The Policy Program uses policy issues to promote a web that is open and protected.
3.3.3 Build: A nascent framework and apparatus exists to respond to policy threats to the open web. Policy Fellows lead issue-based projects from within regulatory and political bodies to attract continued funding and resources.
3.3.4 Empower: A compelling public campaign around privacy with an effective call-to-action engages people on policy issues.