Drumbeat

Hackjam Parking Lot

December 19, 2011 education, techie

This past week, we ran a Hackasaurus/P2PU hackjam to implement functional changes to the P2PU platform and create challenges curriculum for Hackasaurus. It was a whirlwind three days. While we had specific goals, we also had a lot of ideas that aren’t in scope for this phase of the Challenges Project. Those ideas deserve some

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10 Days til MOZFEST!

October 25, 2011 #mozfest, education, techie

I’m volunteering at the Mozilla Festival in London on November 4th to the 6th. I’m pretty excited about it. I had a lot of fun last year, learned a lot of interesting tidbits, and met some wonderful, awesome, fantastic, strange people. We brainstormed. We talked. We made some neat things, had some unique conversations, and

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Response to Mozilla as teacher

September 13, 2011 education, techie

Inspiration for this post is: Mozilla as teacher by Mark Surman When I read the first line of Mark’s post “We need to teach the world to code,” I was immediately wary of the wording. It’s true that a basic understanding of HTML and CSS will go a long way in helping people rearrange the

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Game Mechanics and Participation

August 30, 2011 techie

Let’s start with a stat: A shitload of people are playing games. Ok, it wasn’t a stat, but in 2007 Comscore found that 217 million people are playing online games, and that was before all those people got addicted to Zynga’s Facebook games. “Yeah, but those are just games, what does that have to do

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Friendly Tips for Keeping your Contributors

August 18, 2011 education, techie

One thing that I constantly hear colleagues in the Open Web community talking about is the lack of participation on the part of the user. They talk about losing participation rather quickly. Open projects are constantly trying to get people involved, but how are they doing it? They usually have a webpage and people from

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Newsle Pitch

August 5, 2011 techie

The 2 Minute Pitch The Problem Newsle addresses the problem that people aren’t very curious about what’s going on in the world. They’re curious about what’s going on in their world and how something affects them. The solution is a web-based platform that allows the organization and categorization of news to be crowd sourced and

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Feedback Session

August 4, 2011 techie

Last night I had a Feedback session with my fellow MozNewsLabbers. It was fantastic. They pointed out both the problems that I was already aware of (too much functionality, need for focus) and added some new ones (“Yeah, that won’t work on a mobile device.” Thanks Ted!) I maintain that these ideas are in flux

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Overstimulating a User

July 28, 2011 techie

Sounds kind of sexy, right? Overstimulating the user? Well, it’s not. It’s not sexy at all, it’ll lead to the systematic exodus from the usage of your app. This weeks talks from Shazna Nessa (Director of Interactive at the AP) and Mohamed Nanabhay (Head of Online at Al Jazeera English) highlighted some very important problems

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Melt My Brain

July 21, 2011 techie

I’ve been called a “new media expert”, “technologist”, “programmer”, “web guru”, “creative software ninja”. I have a degree in design, but am a self taught webist. I love the Open Web, and I spend a lot of time staying up to speed on what’s new and exciting. I can make the code do what I

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Open Web and Why YOU Should be Paying Attention

June 8, 2011 disappointing human actions, rants, techie

Facebook opts you automatically in with their new facial recognition software, Apple is going to start taking 30% of revenues from developers, the US Border Patrol is searching and seizing laptops without a warrant, the government is entering people’s social network accounts. Not to mention the ridiculous media coverage of stuff none of us care