A Place to Make Things That Matter
MozFest is designed to be like the Web: a place where you can make things that matter
This was the central message I shared alongside Mozilla colleagues and community members at the 2015 Mozilla Festival in London. Below are my remarks as delivered, part of a MozFest user’s guide for helping festival attendees make the most of the weekend.
Consider this thought experiment.
Imagine for a moment if I were to ask you to power down your computers and to turn off your phones. You don’t have to do it; it’s just a thought experiment. Now consider, with your devices off, would you be more connected to each other or less? Would you have increased your capacity for collective action or decreased it?
MozFest isn’t just an Internet technology conference. Yes, we’re excited about the Internet.
But the best uses of technology inspire us not because of what technology can do but because of what people can do.
From the beginning, MozFest has been about connecting people who leverage the open web to make things that matter.
Yet, the method behind the festival’s madness was not clear to me when my own MozFest journey began three years ago. Like most people, my first encounter felt like loosely controlled chaos. What’s more, I experienced it mostly as an individual. And I engaged more as a consumer than as a co-creator of the shared festival experience.
The next two years, however, I returned with a greater sense of community alongside several travelers from Hive Learning Networks globally, including several from Hive Chicago. MozFest not only shaped what tools and solutions we built but how we built them, with an open and participatory approach. Back home, you could see this in our monthly meetups, in how we support collaborative project development, and in our members’ full embrace of working in the open. You can also see this approach in events like the MozFest-inspired hack day where this photo was taken.
If my experience is to be any guide, in addition to impacting your process, MozFest will also impact your outputs. In the heat and activity of the weekend it can be hard to foresee what your early ideas and prototypes will become. But I’ve seen firsthand what meaningful things are inspired by this festival.
- For example, MozFest 2013 and 2014 sparked a multi-org collaboration to allow teens to use free and open source tools to create georeferenced maps of Chicago’s urban ecosystem. Talk to David Bild about that.
- And that Chicago hackday I mentioned that was modeled after MozFest, it has produced a community-developed web app called RideW/Me that allows youth to locate learning opportunities in the city and to connect with peers to travel safely together to those programs. Want to know more? Talk to Mozilla staffer Robert Friedman and a high school senior, Marina Malone, who represents a new generation of leaders, traveling to London for the first time to share her contributions at MozFest 2015.
The great thing about these and many other examples is that they are more than projects, but are sustained collaborations. It’s about building solutions with your community and not just for it. And we’re proud that this work is being recognized for helping people work better together.
So it’s true what your mom told you.
MozFest really is a place where you can show up with an idea, and leave with a community.
Back to that thought experiment. In moments throughout MozFest’s history, the festival didn’t stop when the wifi went down because the people were still connected to each other.
The method to the MozFest madness is that making things that matter is a humanly networked activity, not just technologically networked.
The designed chaos of the festival is intentional. It’s an invitation for you to shape the experience, and by doing so, to help shape the web.
