As announced in a few places, the Drumbeat Festival – which is a lot like the Mozilla Summit but for non-product-related Mozilla community members – has been scheduled for November 3-5 in Barcelona, Spain.
Mark Surman – Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) – explains “[t]he theme is ‘learning, freedom and the web’ — connecting people on the radical, disruptive edge of learning with people from the open web world.” That’s a bit different than the one for the Mozilla Summit 2010, which is “Be More Like the Web.” How Drumbeat fits into learning and freedom has yet to be seen. Regardless, the Mozilla Foundation continues to grow the community using Drumbeat and spreading it beyond the mostly product focus of the past few years.
You might have noticed that we’ve been avoiding the Drumbeat Festival, which has been blogged about quite a bit, mostly because even those who work on Drumbeat haven’t yet explained exactly what it is beyond vague words like “platform” and “fundraising.” Mitchell Baker – Chairperson of MoFo and the Chairperson and “Chief Lizard Wranger” of the Mozilla Corporation – calls Drumbeat an “initiative for people who want to use the open infrastructure of the Internet to bring openness, participation and individual empowerment to other aspects of online life,” which is a nice way of saying “it’s lots of things for lots of people.”
Whatever it may end up being, if you’re you’re interested in the Drumbeat Festival, we recommend you check out the wiki page as well as the list of potential invites.
