As soon as someone says, don't Google something, the first thing to do is rush and check it out. My name is Michelle

Thorne, it is a pleasure to be here, and in the last stages of Republica. For the next few minutes, I want to share a little bit of reflections around web literacy and how we can help the next billion web users to use the web fully. We're also going to be talking about zero-rated apps

and how to be producers on the web. And after this, there's also a lot of beer, so stick around and we will get some beers together. So to quickly start off, so how did I get here? Why are we here today? Or where does this journey

begin? For me, at least, my interest in these topics started with a project you might know called Wikipedia. So about ten years ago, I convinced my mother to take me on the train to Frankfurt, where I heard that the Wikipedians were meeting each other for the first time. And so there was this crazy project, this encyclopedia

where anybody could contribute in their language, their knowledge. And I was like, this is such a beautiful concept. And so we're sitting there having lunch with like Serbian mathematicians and these medical activists in Africa, and they were talking about how they wanted to create a world in which anyone could contribute their

knowledge and help to build this project together. And so for me, Wikipedia really became this starting point to understanding that participation online actually first starts with the ability to read something in your language, and then you discover that through reading

that there's this edit button, this idea that you can actually be able to add to that knowledge. And through that creation, you start to participate in the communities that help to grow and foster that ecosystem. So consumption leads to creation and leads to participation. And I want to talk a little bit about how that journey

I think can inspire us to think about how the next billion web users as they come online can be producers as well. But we face a challenge. So if I told that story today, and if I weren't myself ten years ago, if I were, let's say, a girl in India getting her first

smartphone and coming online for the first time, my mobile internet experience would actually look completely different. I probably wouldn't have access to knowledge in my own language, and I wouldn't even be able, if I could find something in my language, I probably couldn't even add anything to it. My creation and participation

would be extremely limited. And so I want to talk about the challenges of the mobile internet today and how we might be able to solve those. So at the start of this year, nearly one in every three people in the world has an online connection. And that's nearly

double than what it was two years ago. And in a few years' time, we're going to be looking at another billion users coming online. And mobile phones are going to be a huge part of the internet. And as I mentioned, this can be exciting. This is a path to social and economic opportunity. We all know that.

That's why we're here at Republica. We're excited about technology. But also the mobile reality for these people coming online is completely different than the web that we know. And that's disturbing, and that presents a lot of challenges. So the kind of internet that the next billion users are seeing is

not a read-only internet. I don't know if this internet is going to help them improve their lives, if it's going to have things that interest them, and if they're going to have the same opportunities that we had to shape the internet that we know today. The web space of these next billion web

users is really not a space of creation or participation. It's primarily a consumption space. And a consumption space that's not even in their native languages. So we're familiar with permission- free protocols, with the read-write blocks of HTML and open publishing platforms, but this does not

exist in the mobile space. So the promises of the World Wide Web aren't being fulfilled today. So why is this? I'm probably not the first person at Republica, in fact, I know I'm not the first to talk about the fact that there's slowly a growing

number of kingdoms who control the keys to participation online. The walled gardens of our time have actually become walled empires. They've grown in power and in influence. We see that with how Google can exert an enormous amount of influence on the apps that end up in the app store. Apple is doing the

same thing with iOS, Microsoft, and its Windows phones. Today, if people are creating something online, they have to go through these gatekeepers. This is the reality of the next billion web users. And no doubt you're very familiar with the challenges

of the walled garden, so I won't speak much more about that. But I want to talk about a trend you may not be so familiar with. This trend, I think, proposes an equally big challenge for the next generation of creators and producers online. And that challenge is called zero-rated apps. So, you might the best example of what zero-rated

apps looks like is Facebook. So what Facebook does is it makes deals with telcos and says provide our service for free to your users. And in places where data traffic is extremely expensive, this becomes a huge offer for people

to be able to serve and access a service for free, with no extra data charge. That is what zero-rated means. But we can be tempted to say this is a great thing. Access, you know, access to any internet service is a great thing, especially for people that have challenges to

getting online. But what I want to share today is a warning of where that actually might fall short and where we might not be giving people the same opportunities to participate and create that we have when we started to come online. So, zero-rated apps. Yes, there's an

enticement to say, you know, come online, but you're in a sense also being online in an online garden, in a walled garden where you have to pay to leave it. So when you get an

external link, for example, in your Facebook stream that says check out this news article or check out this other site, you then get a chance to go to the walled garden. If you navigate there, you're going to have to pay extra. So, of course, the incentive is to just stay inside the walled garden because cost becomes really prohibitive to travel elsewhere on the web. And this is hugely

problematic. I mean, there's, of course, benefits for people connecting and communicating on Facebook, but there's limits to that if it's the only service that people have access to. And we have data that shows millions of people today already think that Facebook is the internet. And that's a huge challenge to democracy, to civic participation, to just general creativity

and economic success. If people think Facebook is the internet, and zero apps are helping to reinforce that idea, then we're going to look at a very limited future. But, with all things, there's hope. So

zero rated is a threat, is a trend that we should pay close attention to, and I would argue should fight strongly to have more services be provided or to be provided in a more neutral way so there's more competition, more option and choice for people coming online. But what I'd like to share next are three tactics,

in my opinion, that can help the next billion web users to read, write and participate online. Those tactics are local content, tools for creation on the web, and thirdly, participatory learning. So to start out with local content, I

don't know if you guys have ever had this experience of trying to participate in a conversation where you didn't speak the language. So maybe you showed up, I don't know, in a Japanese chat room or sat down with a bunch of people speaking Arabic, and you're just like, I don't know what is going on here. This is the feeling that many people

are experiencing when they're coming online. They don't have content in their language, and so if they're not able to access content in their language, they can't read, they can't listen, they're not able to then later participate. So having content that's available in people's native language is a huge step on their path to creation and participation, and this is

a place where we're lacking immensely. So, for example, going back to India as an example, the top ten sites in India based on traffic, only two of them are fully Indian sites. That's the

top ten sites in India times, and a mobile shopping site called Flipkart. The rest of the top ten sites in India are properties from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Wikipedia. So, we can, when we see this similar trends in language and natively made

sites all over the world, with pretty much only the exception being China, which has enough speakers that it has its kind of own linguistic ecosystem. So we should ask ourselves, are we going to continue to have these non-English speakers be disadvantaged, or can we give them tools to start to create

and see content in their own language? So, Republica's theme is about finding Europe, and I actually think that linguistically speaking, Europe can be a huge leader in this space. So, on one note, a little bit about empire.

Thanks to Europe's previous empires, Europe actually holds the key to many of the world's languages, Spanish, French, Portuguese, et cetera. These are languages that are spoken by huge portions of the population, and Europe can lead the way in fostering content being shared and created in those world languages. That's one aspect where Europe can be a linguistic

leader, but secondly, I think even more compellingly, Europe's identity is strongly based on supporting its minority languages. All the member states have languages that are given rights to be equal citizens in the European space, and in this sense, I see Europe's potential here to really

lead the way in helping linguists, building tools that are localised, practices that are localised, and insisting that languages be treated equally and be treated and foster a culture of multilingualism online. This is really a place I think Europe could lead the way as a union.

In my own work with Mozilla, we also see linguistic inclusion as being a huge enabler. So with the browser Firefox when it was first launched a few years ago, now a decade and a half ago, then we saw that language was actually a key to its adoption.

So really, a lot of underrepresented languages were starting to get started. So people started using Firefox in their language, a product that was talking to them in their language, and volunteers were localising it, and actually, in some cases, revitalising a language that had come under threat in times of technology, they started to revitalise

it by localising a browser into their language. So words started to get new and fresh meanings, and people started to communicate digitally in a language that hadn't been digital before. So in this way, there's a huge opportunity to translate the tools that help people access online, but then once they

get so they feel comfortable coming online, but then once you have the products localised, we also need content and conversations that people can participate in in their languages, and I think this is a place that, in our different capacities, we could contribute to immensely. So that's one tactic for the next billion web users. Local content.

Let me just take a sip of water. The second tactic. Tools to create on mobile. So we really need to invest in ways for people to create online using their mobile device. This is still an area that's quite

in its infancy. So if you imagine a world, maybe, you know, a few years from now, artists and businesses and schools and all sorts of institutions are able to create and control their digital lives from their phone. And this is the thing we don't see happening. It's very crippled right now. It's not happening.

So we want to see this future where people are able to create from their device directly, but how can we actually go about creating that choice and creating that opportunity for them? So in the countries we're talking about where the next billion are coming online, most of the

desktop computers are prohibitively expensive and hard to come by, but your phone and so therefore like, ah, sorry, let me back up. So people are like access, computers are quite expensive and most app development today happens on computers,

on desktops. And these are prohibitively expensive, which means the access to be able to create apps is also prohibitive for many people. So if we think about how perhaps app creation could happen on device, maybe using the touch screen as a way to create apps together, that could be

a way that more people could start to create the services that would serve their needs. So in order to do this, I think we need to invest in these online building blocks, the tools that would enable people to create from their device to create the services that they need every day. There's lots of work

in different aspects on what this could look like. At Mozilla, we're trying a project called Web Maker and the idea behind this is people creating online web content on their phone in a way that helps them first not have to know any code, something that they can quickly move together by touch and then slowly as they start

to gain confidence in this, they see the underlying pieces of the web and start to grow a curiosity and start to tinker with the elements of the web underneath that web content they're creating. So that tool is called Web Maker and I think a way we can contribute to more tools that help creation online is

you can give that tool a try or if you also have ideas for how people can create online using their mobile device, that's a huge contribution to helping the mobile internet be a more creative space. So thirdly, a third tactic to bring to this online citizenry

is around participatory learning. So a theory that I have is that we not only need content, local content and we need tools for people to create in their language and on their phones but we also need to foster a culture of participatory learning.

What that means is people learn best by doing. There's plenty of studies that show that by doing something, by experiencing it, you have a deeper understanding of what that means, a deeper knowledge and almost a visceral sense of those competencies. So when you have to participate in your learning process and take control of your learning process

and that becomes a path to empowerment and to deeper knowledge. And what we see happening in many places, there's a growing learn to code movement but where some of those learn to code efforts come short is they primarily focus on like just rote tutorials so just exercises that you basically

copy paste and fill in the blank and where you're not building something that actually is solving a problem that you have. So in ways you're not fully participating in your learning, you're not saying how I want to remix different skills and competencies to solve a problem and make a project that really is going to address something that I have,

address a need that I have and instead you're in a kind of isolated setting completing tutorials on your own. So the theory that I have is that we need to round out the learn to code efforts and focus on something bigger, which at Mozilla we're calling web literacy.

The idea behind web literacy is that coding is just one small element about how you understand the mechanics and the culture and the citizenship of the web. We actually need to talk about things like how do I manage my privacy? How do I collaborate with others? How do I use open licenses? How do I have a secure online presence?

All of these things start to be start to round out the picture and not have a kind of a crazy focus on just learning code, but actually start to show how you can be a citizen and a participant online. So with these efforts around web literacy and approaching web literacy

through a participatory approach where people are actually learning and making and creating the kind of web that they want to see, I think we start to see a path for how people become more empowered and more engaged in how they act online. So just to round us out,

just to share two initiatives and how this and how we see this web literacy work, at least in the Mozilla context, is starting to take shape. One way is we're offering free curriculum, which has been developed by educators, institutions, partners around the world that is teaching web literacy in a very

participatory way. So we're helping to kind of curate these open educational resources online. You can check out the site on teach.mezilla.org. Feel free to use or add to or comment or critique those activities as we try to help people have these empowering moments with the web as they

start to explore and build the web that they want. We're also trying then to connect networkers and educators with one another. So we see a huge potential for web activists, for people who care about the larger cause of web literacy and around an empowered online citizenry, we see a huge potential to connect those people

as a community of practice. So we have various efforts to have people learning, all professionals learning with each other, sharing these practices, and hopefully improving the tools and their craft as they try to make an impact in their community spreading web literacy. So in particular, I wanted to just give a quick shout out to an initiative we're doing where all these ideas are coming together.

And that's called Mozilla Clubs. And the idea with that is it's a model, it's an open source model, so feel free to hack it and reinvent it and make it your own. But the idea is it's in-person participatory learning where people are creating the web together in a very peer-supported way, in

a way that embraces open practices, and in a way that starts to make things in their own language and following their own interests. And so I think with efforts like the Mozilla Clubs, we can start to see pieces of the web we want starting to light up. So

that's to conclude my talk, where I see a huge shared opportunity. In order to be citizens online, we need the ability to read and write and participate. And in today's mobile internet, we are quite restricted citizens in that sense. And together, by fostering local content,

by creating tools that allow people to make things on mobile, and by teaching the web in a participatory way, we can start to empower an online citizenry that can really fully participate and embrace the web. So let's create that web-literate planet, and let's teach the web. Thank you.

Michel, thank you very much. Are there any questions? Because we have a few minutes left. If you like, just raise your hand. Oh, yeah.

Thanks for the talk. I really liked it. You told us that Wikipedia is on the list of the websites too. Do they do the zero-rating too? Or is this... Yeah. So it's a little hard to hear, but I think you're asking about Wikipedia.

So, yeah, so in the examples about sites that have high internet traffic in India, if you're talking about that example, yeah, Wikipedia is amongst one of them, which I think is great, because Wikipedia is offering things in people's language and is kind of co-owned by a larger global community. So maybe I

should more fully give that a shout-out to being owned by the Indian citizens. But there's also efforts that Wikipedia is doing around zero-rated, like Wikipedia Zero, it's called. And I, there are people from Wikipedia who might be able to correct me, but I was asking some colleagues of mine in Kenya to access Wikipedia Zero on their phone, and they said, although it's supposed to

be, you're supposed to be able to edit and add things to Wikipedia, at the moment, they were only able to have read-only Wikipedia. So I don't know if there's people who have counterexamples, but I think it's actually a huge opportunity for Wikipedia to actually show leadership, the Wikimedia Foundation to show leadership in the zero-rated space by having

their app be, allow people to edit and to add to the comments if it doesn't do that already. Eine Frage wei nacht da Hinten. De herder der grader Aufstit. Thanks for the great talk. Very nice ideas. But I saw already this idea to create stuff on mobile devices,

similarly in the scientific community where there's LabView or Matlab or something, and all of a sudden there's a whole community creating stuff, and then a company is charging 500 euros, 3,000 euros for runtime. I don't hope that Mozilla is thinking of that, but

is there a way to maybe take measures to prevent that this is happening, another way to charge people? That's a great question. I'm not so familiar with those examples, but I think that becomes part of a larger piece of the puzzle, right, which is open ecosystems where we're able to have, if I

understood correctly, talk about runtimes or use of server times that don't Yeah. So I think that's part of the puzzle, and maybe that's a place that you're interested or have ideas about what we need in order to continue the open ecosystem in the mobile environment. I don't have answers, but I think that it sounds like it's a big opportunity.

And it's time for one more question over here. Yeah, hi. Could you name a few skills that you personally would like people to have? Awesome question. Sure, so yeah, for me, some of those skills include remix, so I think

a huge part of being web literate actually means the ability to take different pieces, different content, different ideas, and remix them together and to understand the aesthetics and the power of remix. So I think fully leveraging remix as a skill is a huge opportunity.

I also think collaboration is often an under-appreciated skill, especially in some of the learn-to-code efforts that can go quite short on the practices of collaboration. So I actually think bringing collaboration to the forefront of what we mean by web literate so that we really are

fostering this idea of learning together, working with others, the practices that facilitate that collaboration. So yeah, remix collaboration, design for accessibility, for example, so as you start to make things online, how are you making them in a way that helps others to access them well, to build on them.

If you're interested, actually, on the website teach.mezilla.org, we've outlined a little bit more the competencies that we think, you know, we and stakeholders have said, like, this is the space we want to move in or help foster.