Notes on Drumbeat NYC #1

Drumbeat NYC was this past Saturday at the beautiful TOPP penthouse in SoHo. The event was meant to introduce Drumbeat (the movement), drumbeat.org, and the Open Web Fund to a hundred gorgeous New Yorkers. Along the way, we hoped to bring some new contributors into the fold—people with no previous connection to the open web or the Mozilla mission.

So, how was the first Mozilla Drumbeat event in New York?

It was awesome, by one very important measure. It brought together members of the many “open” communities in NYC—Wikimedians, open education folk, free culture nomads, social justice people, and reps from the entrepreneur and maker communities. It was also an interesting cross-section of people in terms of age, occupation, and gender—just what we’d like to see.

And because we had pizza, donuts, coffee, and beer, everyone’s cholesterol was properly saturated—a must when lethargy is a critical success factor.

Where do new contributors come from?

All joking aside, though. While the event was a great opportunity for New York-area affinity groups to get some face time, it also underlined the need for new, non-geek contributors to get involved. After all, how will we keep the web open for the next 100 years? How will we create a million Mozillians, if not by looking outside of the core community?

Don’t get me wrong. Drumbeat NYC #1 went as well as we could have hoped. But despite extensive outreach to non-geeks, this was a core community event. 

How do you get non-geeks out to a Drumbeat event? How do you motivate the creative impulse necessary for new contributors to kickstart a Drumbeat project? A few thoughts.

First, the biggest lesson of this event was that new contributors won’t come from out of nowhere. Despite heavy promotion, lots of direct outreach to new communities, and the enticement of (quite literally) free beer, most attendees already had a pretty good sense of Drumbeat and the Mozilla mission. Those who were new were there by way of friends—existing contributors who can evangelize and bridge.

This is the biggest conduit for new contributors. Next time, we won’t just ask people to bring a friend. We’ll give them cupcakes, high-fives, stickers, and other positive reinforcement when they do.

The second lesson, to me, is that we actually do need a pretty compelling reason for people to come. Hanging out, unstructured time, and the whole unconference ethos is good—to a point. But the prelude to participation is inspiration, and I think we need a crossover personalities to headline bigger Drumbeat events if we’re going to bring in substantial numbers of new contributors.

Making this stuff sexy

I’m impressed with events like the Oxcars, presented by EXGAE in Barcelona. The Oxcars are a kind of awards ceremony for the free culture/open access projects and personalities. The organizers pride themselves on being “the biggest free culture event ever.” It’s a pretty bold claim, but I can respect it—they make free/open sexy, fun, and accessible to the mainstream. Last I heard they were talking to none other than Shakira to headline their event. That’s just ridiculous.

You’ll never make license compatibility or codec standardization sexy. But you can make the movement sexy.

On that note, we need to telegraph that these events aren’t geek-a-thons. They’re fun and dynamic and inspiring. I like the idea of the jargon horn, for example.

We could have a game show segment where participants are asked to explain key open web principles to the group, without using complex or inaccessible terms. Slip up, and you could be subject to a blast from a specially designated air-horn: the jargon horn.
 Example:

Q: What’s the Diaspora project? A: It’s a open source project to create a federated… ***BRRRRRR!!!***

You could even take all the words that triggered the jargon horn at a given event and make a word cloud—”words which shall never be uttered.” Things like this, when weighed against the risk of being too gimmicky, can go a long way toward making events fun, fresh, and accessible.

We can also entice people to come out by offering specific skill-building, such as lessons on creating and printing 3d objects using the Cupcake CNC from Makerbot Industries. I think we’re a little early for Drumbeat project sprints, but presumably we could hold events with a project-based focus when the community has matured a bit. 

This was our first Drumbeat NYC event, and certainly not the last.

Thanks and links

Thanks go to Twilio and openplans.org for sponsoring and hosting the event, respectively. We’ll be building a community of information warriors here in New York… share your thoughts!

•Drumbeat NYC wiki and notes