Mozilla pushes for stronger philosophy on Web

Mozilla whisked the covers off Webmaker today, a new development initiative intended to encourage Web-based development across the globe. The company stated that Webmaker's goal is to, "move people from using the Web to making the Web," in a blog post. Mozilla is encouraging people to participate in a series of coding events it's calling the Summer Code Party, and has partnered with some notable organizations and individuals to further its agenda, including author Cory Doctorow, OKGO musician Damian Kulash, Tumblr, Creative Commons, the London Zoo, and the San Francisco Public Library. Mozilla gains some heightened visibility from the campaign by encouraging people who participate to use authoring tools that it has created, such as Popcorn and Hackasaurus, to do everything from site template tweaks to full-on app building. While the initiative stands to raise the visibility and importance of coding among the general public from a well-known non-profit already established in the field, it also comes just as the company plans to begin unveiling massive challenges to nearly every major player on the Web today with its Boot to Gecko phones, Persona login system, and Mozilla Marketplace for Web apps. Mozilla also announced today the winners of a contest it held called Firefox Flicks, a crowd-sourced filmmaking contest that asked participants to "tell the story of Firefox." Six films were chosen as finalists and shown at Cannes this past weekend out of 400 submissions.