What Does the Net Mean to You?
Mozilla, the global community behind the Firefox web browser, has an idea that we need your help with. We want you to help make openness, participation and distributed decision-making common experiences in Internet life.
To do this, millions of people around the world must understand, embrace and share these values. You, me, our families, our neighbor down the street, our political representatives – millions of us from every walk of life in every wired country can help to protect the Net and make it better.
As an experiment working towards this goal, I am coordinating a program that asks people to share short (very, very short – 3 to 12 second) video statements of how the Net has changed their life. We hope that thousands of videos are made by people all over the world and that, through these videos, we better understand how the openness of the Internet affects us all.
Along with the videos, we’ll ask people to share a little bit of information about themselves and to give their permission to let others use the videos. We want to make it so that creatives, academics and others around the world can use these videos and the background information to create stories, build case studies, illustrate presentations, create art, promote the Net and much more.
Over the next two weeks, I’ll be working with a small group of people (who speak some 20+ languages between them) to test the idea more completely before we make a general call for participation. If you want to be a part of this testing group, please leave a comment on this post or write to me at zak@mozillafoundation.org.
Finally, a few days ago, I made test videos to explore some of the ideas. I’m hoping that others (perhaps even myself) will record much better videos in the future. 
If you want to see the low-quality rough videos, visit http://flickr.com/photos/zak/sets/72157612984690925
Posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 01:19
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January 30th, 2009 at 01:47
“share short (very, very short – 3 to 12 second) video statements of how the Net has changed their life”
that’s *very* short. I imagine that such video messages can only leave an impression in case the content is sufficiently emotional in nature – slogans, one-liners – “Yes we can”…”we Are the people”.
Or maybe that is exactly the intent?
January 30th, 2009 at 01:59
Hi Roland!
I hope to get statements that are elegantly concise. For more complicated issues, I’ll ask people to add a little bit of background text. e.g. If the statement is, “The Net saved my life,” then there should be text to quickly say how.
Maybe 10-12 seconds is too short? We can see as others make test videos. I did a dozen quick tests, using these statements and they all came in under 7 seconds:
* I can keep in touch with distant friends and family for almost nothing (4 seconds)
* I can work from almost anywhere. This is a blessing and a curse. (5 seconds)
* I feel more connected to the rest of the world. (4 seconds)
* I get be a part of really awesome projects like Mozilla. (4 seconds)
* I get hundreds of pieces of junk email every single day. (6 seconds)
* I have fantastic friends all over the world. (4 seconds)
* I spend way too much time in front of the computer. (3 seconds)
* I’ve avoided a thousand hours of commuting. (3 seconds)
* I’ve got a great and rewarding career. (3 seconds)
* I’ve met really incredible people. (3 seconds)
* I’ve stopped watching TV. (2 seconds)
* my hands hurt from too much typing. (3 seconds)
Cheers!
–zak
January 30th, 2009 at 02:12
Hi Zak!
thanks for the swift reply. Thanks too for including the list.
So when I read it, I mostly think: “Why gather this kind of data through video? Why not ask people to write down a one liner?”.
If you’d get people to write down this stuff at once, you’d be in a much better position to analyze the data too (for example, clustering based on keyword). Just a thought.
kind regards,
Roland
January 30th, 2009 at 02:24
Thanks for discussing!
I think that video content will be more compelling than just voice or text alone. We feel a strong emotional connection to faces. I’d like to see how someone looks when they say, “I met my husband online” or “I found my kidney donor online”
As for getting people to write stuff down, I’m roughing out an app to do just that and to make it easy for us to localize the strings. I’ve just started fooling around with http://neteffects.dabbledb.com – there isn’t much to look at publicly, but I have thought about how we can get useful meta-data associated with the videos.
January 30th, 2009 at 03:15
So, I’m assuming that you want videos in many languages, not just English? If you want to publish a video with multilingual subtitles, you could always upload the video to http://www.dotsub.com.
January 30th, 2009 at 03:17
Hey Chuck! Many, many languages – including Esperanto.
(and thanks for the dotsub reminder!)
January 30th, 2009 at 03:30
Nice. Somehow the idea reminds me of Apple’s switch ad campaign (e.g.
. I’d be happy to participate in your beta test.
January 30th, 2009 at 03:39
Zak,
I like your experiment, although I am not a fan of videos. I feel that gathering information through videos is a step behind in the evolution of the net ecosystem.
The main reason I don’t like it? It’s the same reason because I love blogging. In September, I made a presentation about blogging for several colleagues. I had to ask a question “Why do you blog?” And my answer was “because when I blog, nobody can hear my strong foreign accent.”
Since I write much better than I speak, I invite you to make a video, using your beautiful native pronunciation, quoting me saying “because I could find a wonderful job that wasn’t available where I live.”
Cheers
Giuseppe
January 30th, 2009 at 05:35
Zak:
a) can we put ‘em on any video sharing site?
b) how should we tag ‘em?
January 30th, 2009 at 07:25
Hey Brian!
For now, any video sharing site works. Don’t worry about tagging them for now – just send me a URL.
January 30th, 2009 at 08:58
Why stop at the Internet?
January 30th, 2009 at 20:35
Hey Donnie,
Can you be more specific? I’m happy to hear other ideas (and we will likely do more work like this in the future.)
January 30th, 2009 at 21:41
Zak,
More specifically, when I read this:
“We want you to help make openness, participation and distributed decision-making common experiences in Internet life.”
The part that looks awkward and artificial to me is “in Internet life.” I think that Mozilla can broaden this to show people that if it works for Firefox and on the Internet, it can work anywhere. And that should be an explicit focus instead of something people may or may not figure out for themselves.
Your next paragraph can be similarly changed — instead of wired people and on the Net, use the entire world.
January 30th, 2009 at 21:42
[...] spent most of my time developing an experimental program to build a popular movement around the Mozilla values, recording test videos to support the program, testing program ideas on friends, colleagues and [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 22:36
Yer thinkin’ too big. Stop hurting my brain.
Still, I take your point.
How does, “Using the Internet to help make openness, participation and decentralized decision-making common experiences” read to you? That still fits within our strong Net focus while acknowledging that we should work to improve society as a whole.
January 30th, 2009 at 22:40
Zak, I think that better acknowledges the Internet’s role as a tool instead of as the center of the universe (however much it seems that way to us!).
January 30th, 2009 at 22:57
Heresy!
Thanks for the discussion! I dropped a comment about this on Mitchell’s last post on Mozilla’s goals for 2010 (which is where the goal we’ve been discussing comes from.) It isn’t yet approved, but should eventually be available at:
http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/01/05/integrated-revised-2010-goals/comment-page-1/#comment-5055
February 1st, 2009 at 11:21
Good to see this rolling. The text list of examples you give here is really helpful — helps the penny drop. Also, some the rationale you provide in response to comments is clarifying (don’t tag for now). I wounder if it would be useful to do a very short ’step by step’ beta testers post to make it completely a no brainer to participate?
February 1st, 2009 at 11:37
Hey Mark!
I’m preparing a brief guide on preparing the questions and another on producing the videos (at least on a Mac). I’ve asked more video savvy friends for help on other platforms.
February 6th, 2009 at 17:58
[...] week, I wrote about an experimental video program that I am coordinating for [...]
February 7th, 2009 at 19:38
[...] spent most of my time developing an experimental program to build a popular movement around the Mozilla values, recording test videos to support the program, testing program ideas on friends, colleagues and [...]