Mozilla Mark Up Crowdsources Backing for the Open Web

Mozilla is--and deservedly so--widely recognized for defending open web policies and standards, and now, in conjunction with The Barbarian Group, the company is calling for users everywhere to make their "marks" on the open web concept. Mozilla Mark Up is an online project that asks users everywhere to sign their names and contribute their "marks" to an interactive, graphical collection of yes votes in favor of the open web. It's a small but nicely executed gesture backing important concepts.

The Barbarian Group notes:

"Collaborating with talented artist Evan Roth (yet another reason for us to get excited about this project), Mark Up was born – at once both a beautifully visualized metaphor of everyone’s contributions to the Web and a call for support to keep it open and collaborative. At its most basic level, Mark Up is a collection of user-submitted marks, all connected in a continuous line in 3D space that is symbolic of our message. Using Evan’s Graffiti Markup Language (GML) as the data storage for our Marks, Adam Miller, the lead developer on the team, created the drawing input system that we would use to capture users’ Marks. From there we started experimenting with visualizing the Marks in 3D."

The Mark Up project is backed by noted open standards pundit and law professor Lawrence Lessig. You can cycle through views of "marks" here, and contribute your own mark. If you leave a mark, you can also incorporate a quote, as The Barbarian Group notes here:

"After we had the prototype up and running we added the capability for special marks that could have a quote attached. These would be for notable guest contributors such as Lawrence Lessig, a well-known Internet advocate who also contributed to the Mark Up manifesto."

The code for Mark Up will be distributed as open source, allowing many visualizations of the underlying data. A future community section of the Mark Up site will incorporate many of these visualizations.