Mozilla is planning a first-of-its-kind gathering of practitioners at the intersection of open education, personalized learning, and open internet technology.

The inaugural Drumbeat Festival is November 3-5 in Barcelona, and we at the OpenCourseWare Consortium are thrilled to be participating and hope many of our members will join us for these essential collaborations on the future of both open education and the internet.

The  Festival will not be an ordinary conference, with keynotes and panels. Instead, participants will encounter interactive spaces organized as studios, labs, playgrounds, alternative classrooms and even a few tents in the public square. Each destination will provide room to dive deep into compelling ideas at the intersections of learning, freedom and the web, and proffer opportunities cook up new ones while there.

For those of you working on open courseware projects, the Festival will encourage discussion and collaboration with the goal of further enriching the world of free educational resources. In collaboration with those who provide infrastructure and support to independent learners, you’re invited to participate in activities such as:

• Open text book hackfest — Write, improve and remix open text books
• Global course catalog – Create a global course catalog that creators of open content can drag and drop their courses/books into to automatically tag them with metadata.
• Feedback on how users use tool – Connexions, Flatworld Knowledge, OCW courses. Specific times set aside for demonstrating tools and features, letting people play with them, and getting questions and feedback
• and more!

We encourage you to register, volunteer, or suggest program ideas at http://www.drumbeat.org/festival.