Email Appeal Performance During Year-End Fundraising

Mozilla

We sent a total of 7,679,300 email appeals during Mozilla’s year-end fundraising campaign. This post outlines top-line results and compares metrics from 2013 with this past year’s campaign.

Like many large organizations, Mozilla uses email to communicate to a variety of supporters; from people who take action on advocacy campaigns to users of products like Firefox desktop browser. The Mozilla Foundation email list has 1.4 million people. The English edition of the Firefox + You newsletter is sent to an audience of about 1.2 million. Below is an accounting of email performance of both lists during year-end fundraising 2013 – 2014:
Email metrics

Why are click through rates so low?

Fundraising appeals are unique compared to other kinds of appeals. Fundraising appeals always have a much lower click through rate (CTR) and response rate than other types of emails. (Response rate is the number of people who actually complete a request, in this case, made a donation.) Below are aggregate metrics from an industry benchmarking report using data from 55 organizations:
2013_Benchmarks_ReportOn average fundraising CTR is just 8 – 10% of the average non-fundraising email CTR. That’s because clicking on a “read more” article link or signing a petition requires less effort and commitment than completing an online donation. It stands to reason far fewer people bother to dig out a credit card, fill in a form, and donate funds vs. other, simpler actions.
This year the Firefox + You fundraising appeal had a 2.2% CTR. Note this is the only fundraising appeal sent to that list during the entire year. Normal CTR for Firefox + You emails is 6 – 10%.  That’s a very favorable outcome compared to the relative average benchmark (~20% of average CTR for FF+Y vs. ~10% of average CTR for most nonprofits). One reason the FF+Y fundraising appeal performed better than benchmarks could be that most nonprofits send multiple fundraising appeals throughout the year — and they’re often bunched during end of  year fundraising season. That can deflate overall average CTR. The Firefox + You audience gets one fundraising appeal, so there’s a “one chance” novelty users may experience when they see that email in their inbox.
One very important thing to always keep in mind is that every email list is unique. People join a particular list for different reasons. The list might be built over two years or ten years. One list might be made up of people who have very different interests, another might have a more homogenous recipient group. All those factors make each organization’s list unique. That’s why aggregate benchmark reports should be a reference, and each list should have it’s own set of metrics for benchmarks (open, CTR, response, unsubscribe; etc).

Application Window Now Open for Spring Pilot Period

Mozilla

2 responses

You helped us kick off the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund in Chattanooga and Kansas City – now it’s time to submit your great ideas!
The application window for the Gigabit Community Fund’s Spring Pilot Period is now open.  Applications must be received by Friday, March 28, 2014 at 11:59:59 PM PT to be considered for the first round of the Fund.
Review the official Fund Rules, Terms, and Conditions here.
Once you’ve reviewed all of the fine print in the above document,  follow these instructions to apply for the Spring Pilot Period!

1.  Complete the Applicant Form – click here to get started

2.  Compile your Fund Proposal and email it as PDF (no larger than 10MB) to gigabit@mozilla.org.  Your submission must be received by Friday, March 28, 2014 at 11:59:59 PM PT.  Please use Subject = Fund Proposal – [KC or CHA].  In CHA, please copy Lindsey at lindsey@mozillafoundation.org on your submission.  In KC, copy Kari at kari@mozillafoundation.org. 

Fund Proposals should be formatted on standard letter-sized layout (8.5-by-11 inch) with 1-inch margins, with a standard font no smaller than 10 points in size. Use this pre-formatted template to ensure you have all the mandatory criteria and requested formatting.

We encourage you to get involved in your local Gigabit community — we want to help you create a strong submission!   Email us at gigabit@mozilla.org, follow @MozillaGigabit for updates, and check out our wiki for information about upcoming community calls and events.  We look forward to working with you on your proposal!

 

Software Carpentry Week in Review: February 16-22, 2014

Mozilla

“My whole work life the last two years has been trying to achieve what git does”, Daniel Falster on Twitter, quoting feedback from the workshop he taught this week at the University of Technology Sidney.

What’s happening next week

We are holding an online lab meeting for Software Carpentry this week. Everyone is welcome to attend to either of these sessions:

  • this Wednesday, Feb 26, at 8 pm, or
  • this Thursday, Feb 27, at 11 am.

Both are Eastern time and the meeting will last an hour. Feel free to add your thoughts and items to the lab etherpad, and look there on the day for connection details.

Workshops

Three workshops happened this week:

Lesson development

8 pull requests were merged, 15 issues were closed, and 6 issues were opened. In addition to the merges, we had 23 commits made by Justin Kitzes, Raniere Silva, David Rio Deiros, Bill Mills, Greg Wilson, and John Blischak.

You can always help Software Carpentry by contributing to the lesson repository. Take a look to the open issues or open a new one to fix/improve/extend something in our lessons.

Other news

From Training to Engagement

Mozilla

4 responses

I was interviewed about Software Carpentry earlier this week, and the interviewer’s second question was, “Don’t scientists all learn how to program these days as part of their education?” The answer, even today, is “no”: the average scientist might know more about calculus and statistics than someone who did a degree in marketing or graphic design, but she probably doesn’t know any more about how to build software and share data on the web.

Brent Gorda and I started Software Carpentry in 1998 to fix that. Our goal was to teach our colleagues the equivalent of basic lab skills for scientific computing so that they could get more done in less time and with less pain. As the project grew, I realized that this problem wasn’t specific to scientists: almost everyone who uses the web spends hours or days doing things that a few simple programs could do for them faster and more reliably.

Since Software Carpentry became part of the Mozilla Science Lab last summer, we’ve been thinking about how we can turn our training into a starting point for deeper involvement in open, web-enabled science. Our long-term goal is to change the way science is done; it turns out that teaching people the skills they need to make changes themselves is more compelling than preaching open science at them, and more likely to inspire them to create things that we would never have thought of. What we haven’t been doing is following through to show them where to go and what to do next.

Of course, lots of other groups are trying to do things like this for other audiences. In particular, Mozilla’s Webmaker team is a global community dedicated to teaching digital skills. Their focus is digital literacy: they explore, tinker, and create to help people learn how to build a web that’s open and collaborative. Like us, their goal isn’t to create the next generation of professional programmers; instead, we want to democratize these skills so that everyone knows enough to make what they need to solve their day-to-day problems, whatever those may be.

Last year, Webmaker ran its first training session for the mentors who actually do this kind of grassroots teaching. They’re scaling up their efforts this year in a big way: they hope to train 1000 mentors in the coming months, which is almost ten times as many people as we have in our entire instructor pool. Their road map includes a list of upcoming events, all of which are intended to lower barriers to entry so that everyone can make, create, remix and build on the web.

Superficially, Webmaker and Software Carpentry teach different skills—Webmaker focuses on front-end technologies like HTML5 and CSS, while Software Carpentry’s focus is the back-end tools needed to move data around and analyze it—but under the hood, what both really teach is how to think like the web. While specific tools come and go, basic ideas like remixing instead of rewriting and sharing instead of just showing are here to stay, and those are what make the difference.

We believe that we need to build capacity in order to strengthen and accelerate open research. We also believe that open research is just one special case of “open”. Over the next year, we’ll be looking at how we can engage Software Carpentry’s learners in larger efforts, both in science and in society at large. If you’d like to help us, or Webmaker, we’d love to hear from you.

What’s New in Open Science: Updates from our community call

Mozilla

We had our monthly community call last week. (If you missed it you can read the Etherpad notes from the call.) As usual, we asked participants to let us know what they’re excited about — upcoming events, links of interest, projects and tools:

Articles, Blog Posts and Other Things To Read

Tools and Projects

  • There is a major update to Synbiota’s open-science platform, and walkthrough videos are available.
  • At Solvers.io, programmers and other highly skilled volunteers can find great open projects to contribute to, and projects can recruit volunteers. It’s still in development, but if you have an open (science or otherwise) project, they’d love to add it to to their launch list.
  • EcoData Retriever is a tool for downloading, cleaning, and installing ecological data into your database management system of choice. It’s open source, on GitHub and written in Python. You can find out more in this blog post.
  • Brainomics is an ongoing research project with a live demo featuring an open dataset of clinical and neuroimaging data served by Cubic Web, an Open Source Semantic Web framework. For an overview, have a look at the poster. For more details contact brainomics@logilab.fr.

Funds, Grants and Awards

Announcements and Updates

  • The Galaxy community has published the first GigaScience papers using a Galaxy server to help visualize the datasets, workflows, and histories in a publication, and then execute them. Read their blog post for background.
  • e-Biogenouest is a Virtual Research Environment for life sciences communities in Western France. They intend to create a robust production environment as a complete eScience initiative in their region.

Upcoming Events: Open Science IRL

  • #Sciencechat happens every other Wednesday 6PM PST/9 EST. Join a panel of experts on Twitter with the hashtag #sciencechat to discuss the latest in science, reasearch, collaboration, etc. It’s fast paced, but fun!
  • The Citizen Cyberscience Summit is on 20-22 February 2014.
  • The First Open Science Barcamp (and “apéro”) on February 25 in Toulouse, France, organized by Hack Your PhD and Logilab.
  • rOpenSci is having a hackathon at the end of March in San Francisco to build R tools for open science. It’s invite only, but get in touch if you are interested in coming.
  • Mozilla Science Lab is running a Software Carpentry bootcamp for Women in Science and Engineering on April 14-15 in Berkeley — registration is open here.
  • Software Carpentry is also running a series of bootcamps immediately after PyCon (April 14-15) in Montreal — one “regular” bootcamp plus a one-day master class on R for Python users, and a one-day master class on next-generation sequencing (NGS) and other topics in bioinformatics. Please help spread the word to scientists you know in the Montreal region.
  • Software Carpentry’s first-ever live instructor training session is coming up on April 28-30. Registration is only $80. The session will take place in sunny (we hope) Toronto at the Mozilla offices.
  • The reproducibility@XSEDE workshop 14-17 July 2014 in Atlanta will respond to the challenges in the 2009 Yale Data and Code Sharing Roundtable declaration: “demanding a resolution to the credibility crisis from the lack of reproducible research in computational science”.

Building Gigabit Hive Communities in Kansas City and Chattanooga

Mozilla

Earlier this month, we launched the Gigabit Community Fund in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Kansas City.   In both cities, the Fund will support a growing Hive community of teachers, informal educators, nonprofit leaders, and technologists engaged in building new, connected learning experiences with immediate community impact.  It will help turn these two communities with some of the fastest connection speeds in the country into “living laboratories” in which to study how advanced networking can support teachers, improve student learning outcomes, and break down barriers between formal and informal educational environments.

Chris Lawrence, Senior Director of the Mozilla Webmaker Community, kicks off the Kansas City Event.

Chris Lawrence, Senior Director of the Mozilla Webmaker Community, kicks off the Kansas City event.
Photo: Kari Keefe

Appropriately, both launch events took place in public libraries – community institutions that have long connected formal and informal learning spheres.  Along with the National Science Foundation, US Ignite, and the Department of Education, the Chattanooga Public Library and the Kansas City Public Library were critical event partners, helping draw more than 200 participants in each city.

The mayors of each metropolitan region also rallied to make these launch events successful.  In Chattanooga, City Mayor Andy Berke and County Mayor Jim Coppinger spoke to a standing-room-only crowd about realizing the potential of the Gig City’s next-gen network for education and workforce development. In Kansas City, KC Missouri Mayor Sly James and KC Kansas Mayor Mark Holland addressed the public benefit of gigabit applications and emphasized the need for action now to sustain their city’s unique position in helping to lead gigabit development.


Chattanooga facilitator DJ Trischler leads the afternoon brainstorming session.
Photo: Mary Barnett / Chattanooga Public Library


After a morning of speakers and panels focused on the national opportunities created by next-gen networks, the afternoon sessions at both launch events turned to mapping specific community challenges in education and workforce development that the Gigabit Community Fund and a broader Gigabit Hive could begin to tackle. Once divided into six interest-area tracks such as digital inclusion and K-12 education, the 200+ event participants in each city plastered the walls with both specific obstacles (“I don’t know how to integrate coding in my 4th grade classroom”) and broad community hurdles (“not all schools have gig access”). Connecting across tracks, interests, and professions, community members began to form teams to imagine solutions to shared challenges–solutions that could soon become Gigabit Community Fund projects.

Chattanooga participants at work discussing K-12 education.
Photo: Mary Barnett / Chattanooga Public Library


Activated and connected through these launch events, teams are now working to build out these projects for when the Gigabit Community Fund application window opens in late February.  Among many percolating ideas, teams are beginning to explore how to connect schools across the two gigabit cities, how to make museum content available to a broader audience, and how to connect schools with IT support as gig access is expanded.


Mike Brown (L), Alex Greenwood (R), and the Lifelong Learning track at work in Kansas City.
Photo: Brainzooming


Are you interested in helping make one of these projects a reality, or do you have other ideas to share about how to catalyze change for education and workforce development in Chattanooga or Kansas City? Even if you missed out on the launch events, there are still many ways to get involved:

  • Help us drive, design, and develop new Hive communities in Kansas City and Chattanooga! We’re looking for local classroom teachers, nonprofit leaders, informal educators, developers and designers. Don’t worry – you don’t have to know how to code or how to explain advanced networking! You don’t even have to know what a gig is! Email us if you’re interested, and we’ll be happy to help get you connected.
  • Sign up for updates about the Gigabit Community Fund, including news on applications dates and deadlines.
  • Join our monthly community calls and meet-ups to share ideas, ask questions, or offer expertise.

Building Gigabit Hive Communities in Kansas City and Chattanooga

Mozilla

Earlier this month, we launched the Gigabit Community Fund in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Kansas City.   In both cities, the Fund will support a growing Hive community of teachers, informal educators, nonprofit leaders, and technologists engaged in building new, connected learning experiences with immediate community impact.  It will help turn these two communities with some of the fastest connection speeds in the country into “living laboratories” in which to study how advanced networking can support teachers, improve student learning outcomes, and break down barriers between formal and informal educational environments.

Chris Lawrence, Senior Director of the Mozilla Webmaker Community, kicks off the Kansas City Event.

Chris Lawrence, Senior Director of the Mozilla Webmaker Community, kicks off the Kansas City event.
Photo: Kari Keefe

Appropriately, both launch events took place in public libraries – community institutions that have long connected formal and informal learning spheres.  Along with the National Science Foundation, US Ignite, and the Department of Education, the Chattanooga Public Library and the Kansas City Public Library were critical event partners, helping draw more than 200 participants in each city.

The mayors of each metropolitan region also rallied to make these launch events successful.  In Chattanooga, City Mayor Andy Berke and County Mayor Jim Coppinger spoke to a standing-room-only crowd about realizing the potential of the Gig City’s next-gen network for education and workforce development. In Kansas City, KC Missouri Mayor Sly James and KC Kansas Mayor Mark Holland addressed the public benefit of gigabit applications and emphasized the need for action now to sustain their city’s unique position in helping to lead gigabit development.


Chattanooga facilitator DJ Trischler leads the afternoon brainstorming session.
Photo: Mary Barnett / Chattanooga Public Library


After a morning of speakers and panels focused on the national opportunities created by next-gen networks, the afternoon sessions at both launch events turned to mapping specific community challenges in education and workforce development that the Gigabit Community Fund and a broader Gigabit Hive could begin to tackle. Once divided into six interest-area tracks such as digital inclusion and K-12 education, the 200+ event participants in each city plastered the walls with both specific obstacles (“I don’t know how to integrate coding in my 4th grade classroom”) and broad community hurdles (“not all schools have gig access”). Connecting across tracks, interests, and professions, community members began to form teams to imagine solutions to shared challenges–solutions that could soon become Gigabit Community Fund projects.

Chattanooga participants at work discussing K-12 education.
Photo: Mary Barnett / Chattanooga Public Library


Activated and connected through these launch events, teams are now working to build out these projects for when the Gigabit Community Fund application window opens in late February.  Among many percolating ideas, teams are beginning to explore how to connect schools across the two gigabit cities, how to make museum content available to a broader audience, and how to connect schools with IT support as gig access is expanded.


Mike Brown (L), Alex Greenwood (R), and the Lifelong Learning track at work in Kansas City.
Photo: Brainzooming


Are you interested in helping make one of these projects a reality, or do you have other ideas to share about how to catalyze change for education and workforce development in Chattanooga or Kansas City? Even if you missed out on the launch events, there are still many ways to get involved:

  • Help us drive, design, and develop new Hive communities in Kansas City and Chattanooga! We’re looking for local classroom teachers, nonprofit leaders, informal educators, developers and designers. Don’t worry – you don’t have to know how to code or how to explain advanced networking! You don’t even have to know what a gig is! Email us if you’re interested, and we’ll be happy to help get you connected.
  • Sign up for updates about the Gigabit Community Fund, including news on applications dates and deadlines.
  • Join our monthly community calls and meet-ups to share ideas, ask questions, or offer expertise.

A Message from Keith Marzulo, National Science Foundation

Mozilla

Keith Marzulo, Director of the CISE Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) discusses US Ignite and the benefits of gigabit technologies for the kick-off of the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund in Kansas City.

We’re especially excited about the Kansas City learning Hive that Mozilla will be catalyzing since it offers the opportunity of citizen engagement in the process of developing and trying out new approaches to local and national problems. And by connecting with a partner city of Chattanooga, we will be able to establish a community of practice and demonstrate for the nation the potential of these ultra high-speed networks.

Software Carpentry Week in Review: February 9-15, 2014

Mozilla

What’s happening next week

Greg Wilson will be doing a walk-through of the GitHub repository for our lesson materials, this Thursday, February 20th, at 10am, 2 pm, and 7pm, all Eastern time. Everyone is welcome, specially those planning to teach a workshop in the near future. Connection details will be posted on the teaching Etherpad.

Workshops

Four workshops happened this week:

Lesson Development

There was quite an activity in our lesson repository: 14 pull requests were merged, 9 issues were closed, and 10 issues were opened. In addition to the merges, we had 48 commits made by Greg Wilson, Bernhard Konrad, Raniere Silva, Denis Haine, Kwasi Kwakwa, and AnneTheAgile.

Other news

Greg Wilson wrote on the blog about peer instruction, a flipped classroom teaching method in which students discuss together on questions posed by the instructor. Peer instruction is hard to implement in online learning, due to the lack of appropriate software. If you are interested in hacking an online peer instruction tool, contact Greg.

Karthik Ram made a call on the blog for people interested in contributing to the rOpenSci Hackathon, to be held in San Francisco at the end of March. R developers can apply for an invitation to attend, but everybody is welcome to propose ideas to hack on through their GitHub repo.

Remember that we are running our biggest event ever at PyCon 2014 in Montreal next April. In addition to our usual curriculum, there will be two special classes by Prof. Titus Brown on bioinformatics, and by Prof. Ramnath Vaidyanathan on R for Python programmers. Consider joining the PyCon pool of instructors and helpers, and spread the word among your Canadian and East Coast friends. See all the details here.

Please send bootcamp reports, questions, suggestions for quotes, and other updates to igonzalez@mailaps.org.

Webmaker.org work week recap

Mozilla

Following great recaps from Michelle Thorne and Kat Braybrooke, this post is a detailed look at Webmaker’s first work week of 2014.
From Feb 3-7, nearly 40 Mozillians gathered in Toronto. Webmaker is a diverse team – just look at this map of the individuals that make up this group.  An incredible cross section of this team was present – both the Webmaker Product and Community Teams, Mozilla Japan, the Mozilla Foundation’s Engagement Team, Seneca’s Centre for Development of Open Technology, and the Appmaker team.

Before arriving in Toronto, we decided on a set of “Scrums” – buckets of work that tied to our 2014 goals. Each scrum broke down tasks in bugzilla, our issue tracker, and at the beginning of our week printed these tasks on index cards and posted them in the “To Make” column of our scrumboard. Over the week, we moved things to “making” when a member of the work week volunteered to take on the task, and “Made” once it was marked as resolved. You can see a digital version of this scrumboard here on our wiki.

An incredible amount of progress was made, here are just a few highlights of what was accomplished:
Web Literacy UX
Perhaps our most pressing challenge is a way to transform the list of skills identified in the Web Literacy Map into an engaging and delightful user experience.  At the beginning of the week the UX team worked across the assembled gathering and came up with a series of sketches and user flows that Cassie McDaniel documented on her blog.
After these first few days, the team transitioned to prototype mode and built a working version of a reconfigured “explore” section that would surface resources and kits for teaching.  Additionally, they explored how Webmaker might feature mentors and allow other users to nominate exemplary teachers.
webmakerblog-newexplore
You can try the prototype out yourself here – until the link dies!
Webmaker Training
An exciting offering this year will be a formalized version of our “Train The Trainers” program – Teach The Web. Training for Webmaker is a modular offering that mixes online and offline learning to teach mentors 1) our pedagogy and webmaking 2) how to use, remix and create new teaching kits and 3) how to align resources with the Web Literacy Map.  We’ll do a test training from March 17 – 28, and a full offering in may.  You can find more about our training program on our Wiki.

Maker Party
Our largest event of the year takes early planning, and great progress was made.  Save the date, ’cause the party starts July 15th!  The team alsolaid the groundwork for partner and strategy documents, created timeline for events and communications plans and designed the outline of the microsite that will be the hub of the event.  See more on our wiki.
Metrics
This was an incredibly productive track during the work week.  The primary focus was running a multivariate test on our home page with the goal of encouraging more people to click our “sign up” button.  Several changes in text and images were made to the front page.

The results found that we could indeed stand to improve this, though the relatively low quality of the images used in the tests actually reduced interactions.  So – more illustrations not less!  Our intention is to re-run these tests with the goal of a 25% increase in users choosing to sign up for the service.
You can see the fascinating results of the tests here. 
Additionally, we began running experiments on Popcorn Maker and other areas of Webmaker.org to see if we could make some of our actions clearer.  You’ll see some changes around Webmaker – we’re actively working out how to best communicate these changes with our community. You can follow this conversation as it unfolds on bugzilla. If you’re interested to learn more about A/B testing, or to get involved, read this handy guide.
DevOps
JP Scheider, The Mozilla Foundation’s DevOps ninja (Developer Operations) has as as a part of his mandate helping contributors more effectively ship their code into Webmaker.  Something that has made this a challenge in the past is running the entire Webmaker ecosystem on your local machine. It’s a lot of code, and a lot of apps.  Collaborating with other developers, JP made this much easier by allowing the entire Webmaker Suite of apps to be downloaded via Vagrant as a virtual machine.

If you want to contribute code to Webmaker, there’s never been a better time!  Check out the instructions in our Code Contribution wiki.
Another big win from this track was a streamlining of our Amazon Web Services infrastructure, introducing cost savings of thousands of dollars a month. As a non-profit we love to see this!
Web Literacy Teaching Kits and Resources
A busy track that:

  • prototyped an exciting bookmarklet for adding resources to the Web Literacy Map
  • Wireframed a revision of Webmaker Teaching Kits to make them more modular, remixable and useful for educators.
  • Created a production cycle for more regular producing curriculum on Webmaker.org
  • Produced a glossary for Webmaker curriculum to prevent confusion when working internally and externally

3rd party publishing to Webmaker
One piece of our 2014 strategy rests with the MakeAPI – we want external apps to be able to publish here, and we want external sites to be able to display what users have made.
We made a step in this direction with Appmaker – the tool is now publishing to our MakeAPI instance in our staging environment, so we can see what challenges this will surface in our user experience before we ship to production.  Once we’re satisfied, we’ll be much closer to bringing Appmaker into the Webmaker family of tools.
webmakerblog-makeapi
Additionally, the team created the MakeAPI gallery library – by embedding the library into one of your pages, you can easily surface work from Webmaker users on your external site.  You can see the code working here in Thimble.
Localization
Webmaker has taken huge strides forward in it’s localization, and is now the 3rd most popular translation project on the Transifex platform.  An area that has seemed challenging however is offering our work to those locales that sue Right to Left languages – Arabic and Japanese, for example.  It was this challenge that the localization team sought to solve.
By analyzing the CSS for each page and app, the team essentially flipped the direction of each page.  This allows not only text, but navigation and layout options to be native to the users locale.

We’ll need to perform user testing on some aspects of this – for example, we’re in a brave new world with Popcorn Maker – do users expect that videos play from right to left?  We’ll find out soon!
Engagement Ladder
One of Mozilla’s top line goals, across the entire project, is to grow our contributor base by 10x. At the Foundation we care about this deeply, and are optimizing our work to onramp 10,000 contributors to our work this year. To do this, we need to both document what a contributor means, and then monitor and celebrate when this happens.
To do this, we created a list of contributor pathways, with conversion points marked when someone crosses from a user, to a supporter, to a contributor.

We also began working on our “MakerMind”, a dashboard and event system that will notify us when these conversion points are crossed and will eventually send notifications to our users and let them know how they can participate further. This system is built on Amazon’s “Elk Stack” – Elasticsearch, Log Stash and Kibana.

BONUS ROUNDS
Other wins from the work week included a formulation of a new markets working group, a front end best practices roundtable, and an intro to development for Webmaker.  We also saw the unveiling of “Watson”, a prototype for a Webmaker Plugin for Webmaker that lets users collect useful bits of the web for their creative re-use (see the video below), and the re-introduction of code highlighting for Thimble.

Phew! Somehow we also crammed in competitive lumberjacking and tobogganing as well.

See you on Webmaker!