Mozilla Privacy Arcade: A MozSprint Recap
Continuing work begun at the Global Sprint
Hundreds of contributors from around the world shared their time, talent, and expertise with one another as they worked on dozens of open projects during Mozilla’s 2017 Global Sprint. Over 40 people joined the Mozilla Privacy Arcade project to invent adventures, games and puzzles focused on privacy, security, and digital inclusion.
Highlights included:
- A trove of adventure ideas for privacy-themed role-playing game adventures.
- A design document for a third-party tracking game set on Mars.
- A connected device puzzle that encrypts clues in music.
- An offline privacy decision-making game from a host site in Brazil.
In our Offline Games Challenge issue tracker, we also saw a very cool hidden-in-plain-sight password creation game that uses a standard deck of playing cards and a password-guessing game that uses cog-like cipher wheels to decrypt opponents’ passwords.
We’re looking forward to seeing how community members follow-up on their work over the summer. Our MozFest Call for Proposals just opened; it would be awesome to see submissions from community member interested in taking their parts of the Mozilla Privacy Arcade on the road.
We’ll also be curating and editing contributions to the Cryptomancer Challenge into the next issue of Code and Dagger, Cryptomancer’s online expansion publication. Look for a special introduction from Mozilla and lots of connection-making between world-building and privacy and security skills players can use in real life.
Of course we’re looking forward to the next sprint, as well! Here are some lessons learned this year:
- Organize early. It was amazing to see 40 people join the Mozilla Privacy Arcade. However, we’d love to invite and recruit even more people to enrich the diversity and inclusiveness of our project community. For this sprint, we started with 6 weeks of lead-time. For the next one, we’ll begin recruiting several months ahead of time to secure partnerships, sites, and opportunities that make sense to community members who need more notice to engage fully.
- Sustain community. We’ve assembled a fantastic, generous core of contributors. We need to keep in contact with them and support their work on games-based projects that teach privacy and security throughout the year. We need to continue supporting this community so we can recruit more projects, co-leads, and site hosts next time.
- Get better at GitHub. This year, we used GitHub’s issue tracker to collect participants’ work so they could link to any file or platform they liked. We didn’t want people to feel excluded from our projects because they hadn’t learned how to make a pull request. Next time, we can make the same invitation but also provide more documentation and support for forking our repos and pushing new work to them. That way we can help contributors learn a little bit about GitHub and a little bit about working open in a way that empowers them to contribute directly to our repos.
If you’d like to download and play with any of the adventures, games, or puzzles contributors created during #mozsprint, just visit our repos and skim the issues to find links to participants’ work. You can also email project lead Chad Sansing or tweet at @MozLearn with questions about how to get involved with the project, MozFest, or the next Global Sprint.
Finally, please let us know what you think. We’d love to hear your suggestions for improving our projects further.
