[davidascher]

Hey all --

David Ascher here, from Mozilla.

Thanks for the interest. We'll put up a technical write-up of Webmaker soon, we've been busy getting the app ready.

As to some of the questions already asked:

This is an open source project (both the Android wrapper, the web app and the backends powering the APIs). Repos are here:

* https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker-android

* https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker-core

* https://github.com/mozilla/api.webmaker.org

When it comes to data privacy, remember that Webmaker is not a social network. It is an easy-to-use publishing platform for people whose only internet access may be from a low-end Android phone. We don't ask for or store real names to create user accounts.

All projects on the platform are publicly accessible/remixable under a CC-license (it's a free, no-ad app -- all we ask from our users is that they contribute to the commons). We currently store all user data on Amazon RDS.

You may be interested in some of the user research we did as part of this project as well:

* http://mzl.la/india

* http://mzl.la/bangladesh

* http://mzl.la/kenya

* http://mzl.la/research

[doublerebel]

I totally get it. This is why I am building Optik. Knowledge publishing should be as easy as posting to Twitter or Instagram. My personal concern is privacy and longevity. How do we ensure that information users rely on remains secure, and also accessible? That is why I believe the Web as designed is a poor interface for this data. We need a better way to navigate and trust the data.

I applaud your efforts and look forward to collaboration. As the internet grows and interfaces become more complex, it becomes harder to avoid creating multiple tiers or classes of knowledge/data access.

Very curious to see how Webmaker will approach spammers vs anonymity and security vs collaboration.