Moving the Web Forward

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This Wednesday, me and a ragtag team of like-minded developers launched Move the Web Forward, an initiative to direct people’s passions into productive efforts that assist not only the web community but the entire web platform. People often feel the need to “give back”, but when it comes to contributing it’s a challenge to find the right place. This is something I’ve seen happen firsthand in the jQuery and HTML5 Boilerplate communities.

The MWF effort was inspired by a tweet by WebKit extraordinaire Dimitri Glazkov.

Me and Divya started brainstorming on an etherpad. We rounded up some folks on Google+ and IRC and started collecting a lot of excellent resources. Soon after a design was in the making and we started working in an open repo on github…

At this point, I want to call out Mat Marquis aka @wilto, in particular, for really taking early ownership of this project and spearheading the design and frontend development. His efforts really made the site communicate its content effectively.

Naturally the site is on github if you’d like to contribute. We have a few issues open that we’ll be improving the site with. (Also, let me just say for projects like this, a cron job to pull latest from Github makes for such a relaxing workflow.)

Thanks to Divya, Mat, Aaron Forsander, Connor Montgomery, Stephanie Rewis (great writeup!), Nicolas Gallagher, Addy, and all these awesome folk. Truly a socially developed site; everyone collaborating on IRC, etherpad and github (with as many having commit rights as possible). Fun project to work on and I hope to see everyone find the right place for them to get more involved in actively making the web as awesome as you want it to be.

Beyond all the people who signed up (with the avatars) on the site to commit to things.. We’ve seen some moves in the community already:

  • Ben Schwarz is joining the CSSWG to redesign how specs look and act
  • Connor Montgomery, wrote up a patch regarding fullscreen support in Firefox
  • Josh Adam is inspired to become better
  • Alex Ball is going to contribute to BuddyPress
  • Lots of folks in the accompanying Smashing Magazine article are ready to dig in.
  • Colin Gourlay will be documenting what he learns more

Published by techsopht