When we hear stories about how people are making and learning around the world, it inspires us to be better teachers of the web. Every day we hear from people who are exploring their passion for teaching and making by starting new events, running clubs, and teaching in their communities.
We’re getting better at collecting and sharing these stories, but we need your help! We want you to help document your stories by recording them with this new form.  

When we were building this form we thought a lot about what the elements are of a good story. By looking through blogs and share-outs of community members whose stories have inspired us so far, we identified four questions that a good story answers:

1. Character – Who is the character in this story?
2. Motivation – What is their motivation?
3. Action – What happened/what did they do?
4. Impact – What was the outcome/impact?

Abid Aboobaker is a community member from Kerala India whose blog post about teaching the web inspired us, and is a great example of how these four elements come together to create a compelling story.
On his blog he describes how he started teaching the web after discovering that his father and his father’s friend’s gave their email passwords in writing to the cafe boy at the internet cafes they visited each day. Concerned by their lack of understanding about  privacy he started teaching in his community and visiting engineering students and campuses and encouraging other students to teach.
Character:
In his story both Abid and his father are the central characters and we learn about them through the description he gives at the very start of his blog post, and throughout his writing:

“My father is an active volunteer of an educational organisation.  During the early days of his profession, the medium of communication  was postal mails and he and his friends  were happy with it…So, one day my dad approached me for a new email address, and as a  techie, I had to help him. “

Motivation:
Abid’s motivation for starting to teach is the need for education he discovers in his father’s community:

“”[My Dad’s] reply was, “Sign out?! What are you speaking about? And the password  is safe in my pocket, right? Then how can the internet boy access it again? Abid, you are making things too complicated.” At that moment, I realised that like thousands of old generation men and women, my father too has no idea about signing out or cookies! When I  visited the near by Internet cafes, I realised that most of my dad’s  friends as well as many others, follow the same method of giving the  password to the cafe boy.”

Action:
The action of Abid’s story is his empowering friends and colleagues to be teachers of the web.

“So, I started teaching the Web to students, teachers, auto-walas,  friends, house wives, relatives etc. When I visited and talked at many  Engineering colleges in Kerala, I found that most of the so-called  engineering students thinks that they do not know anything about  technology and are wasting their time in college. When I asked them, “Do  you know Elon Musk, Richard Stallman, Aaron Swartz? (my super heros!)”,  they looked down and said a quiet NO! Next I asked whether they knew  how to shutdown a computer or open a word document, and the answer was a  louder YES!”

Impact:
The last element of a good story is about the impact or outcome of the event or initiative on the narrator and/or the community.  For Abid, he sees the results of his teaching in his father, and when he looks at his greater community.

“Now I feel accomplished when I watch my father proudly teaching his  friends how to sign-out their mail or what a mac book pro is! Today,  when I write this note on Engineer’s Day in India, a feeling of  satisfaction and achievement envelopes me as I realise that I could play  a role in changing many lives.”

It is easy to see why Abid’s story inspired us, and why we wanted to find and hear more incredible stories like this one.
We hope you will take a second to record your story in this form and that you will pass the form along to everyone you know who is making and teaching the web. So that together we can find and share even more amazing stories and make an even stronger community of people teaching and sharing the web together.