A storytelling challenge on the Mozilla Drumbeat site caught my eye, but first I needed to understand more about what Drumbeat is. It’s a global community of innovators who are “building a more awesome web and world” by connecting with others, finding projects that need help, or sharing their own projects.

“Mozilla is all about shaping the future of the web for the public good,” the site says, and building more things that make the web better, not just software. They’re doing that “by reaching out to new kinds of people — educators, filmmakers, journalists, scientists, artists — to work together on open projects and design challenges that build a better web and world.”

A challenge just issued on Drumbeat is to explore ways to “enrich news video through things like added context, deeper viewer engagement, and the real time web” and discover “untapped possibilities inherent in many-to-many, web video.”

I was especially intrigued by the list of items suggested as food-for-thought springboards, particularly with Storify very much in the news this week:

• Visit sites like Storify and Paper.li. What might a similar aggregation experience feel like for video?
• Watch how the recent PBS Annotated State of the Union video mixes analysis of the speech with the video itself.
• Check out Arte’s experiments with “semantic” [1] [2]
• Read about The Stream, and consider how social media and live video can complement each other. [I believe The Stream is powered by Storify, as noted in yesterday’s post.]
• Visit the Popcorn.js site and check out some of the examples and documentation. Then, visit Mozilla’s Web of Wonder, and consider how new technologies like WebGL, canvas, and CSS3 can help address this challenge.
• Explore how transcripts, subtitles, and linked text can give users different ways to engage with rich media.

The “Unlocking Video” Mozilla Drumbeat Challenge then asks participants to consider:
What creative storytelling approaches do these new web video tools open up for news organizations?

• How might you tell a story by pulling in video, data and other material from across the web?
• How can semantic video help audiences dig deeper into other forms of context and content?
• How do we create compelling narrative experiences — and avoid overwhelming viewers with too much information?

The challenge is open until May 6, and full details can be found here.