Mozilla starts its "Digital literacy" Worldwide

The "Webmaker" event, which will run until September 15, aim to promote the so-called digital literacy that includes the character encoding (or html), the web design and building applications and videos.

The program begins this weekend in Kampala, Uganda, and includes at least 368 events in locations from New York and San Francisco to cities in India, Indonesia and several African countries.

"Digital literacy is as important as reading, writing and mathematics in modern society," he told AFP executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, Mark Surman, in a telephone interview.

Surman noted that this effort is part of a broader effort to help more people online in the objective world, and to teach them to use it more effectively.

The events are related to the "maker movement", which Surman has "the idea that technology should be something everyone can control, not something that companies give us."

This is the third year of the campaign, Surman said, adding they hope to double the level of participation last year, which was about 60,000 people. Participants are mostly locally organized volunteers, with technical help from Mozilla.

This campaign is bigger and broader than the efforts of other organizations to teach children computer codes and is based on the premise that soon most of the world's population will be online, through traditional computers or mobile devices as smartphones.

"At the end of the day, a large majority of the population will have a computer in your hands or in your pockets in coming years," Surman said.

"We have to make sure those 5,000 million people understand what the Web now," he said.

Surman was on his way to Kampala to start the program, which will involve about 500 people. Mozilla presents them as participants help explain the mechanics to make websites and address issues such as privacy and data protection.

"This is a large scale digital literacy. How to build things with code, design, video and photography. And there are a number of creative, social and cognitive tools, such as participation, thinking for design ... These are the skills that you need to find your way in the digital world, "he said.

Mozilla, with foundation grants and donations, invests more than $ 4 million annually in this initiative.

"We want the billions of people on the Internet know how it works to make the most of it," he said Surman.