Oh Deer! MozFest Goes Queer
The Mozilla Festival(or “MozFest”) is all about what you bring to the festival and the connections you make in sharing what you build. For this 2018 edition, we are excited to announce we are bringing queerness into a weekend of learning, creativity, and fun: welcome to the Queering MozFest Experience.
Across and along with the main six spaces — Decentralization, Digital Inclusion, Open Innovation, Privacy & Security, Web Literacy, Youth Zone — we are opening the possibility for a “queer territory”.
What we mean by “queer” is not merely synonymous with “LGBTQI”. Queer positions our gender and our sexuality in a way which questions processes of normalization and marginalization inside the white, ableist, cissexist, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist system. It is about how our bodies and our practices which are deemed abnormal, strange or dangerous still exist, resist and occupy space inside our societies.
So let’s explore what happens when queer meets tech!
To make it happen at MozFest, we are crafting an atmosphere which feels safer for us to share LGBTQI-related topics. We will facilitate the selection and promotion of sessions about LGBTQI-related issues among the six spaces.
We are also providing opportunities for creating queer moments of tension and disorientation across the festival. It could be inspiring, it could be weird. Think about what seems immutable and twist it to try something else: hijack and experiment. We don’t want to Keep It Simple and Straight–forward.
If you are willing to shape and contribute to this queer experience at MozFest, we invite you to submit sessions in the six issues spaces through the Call For Proposals from June 1, 2018 to August 1, 2018.
Let’s…
- explore the tension between the freedom to be open and the right to privacy in the Open Innovation Space
- question what it means to have apps and IoT devices tracking our body activities for our Privacy & Security Space
- find out how to manage online identities in the Decentralization Space
- develop tools and curriculum to communicate queer identity in the Web Literacy Space
- interrogate current approaches to “diversity” in the Digital Inclusion Space
These are only a few examples of how queer topics could intersect with the issues we’re exploring at the festival.
We are also providing a home to host sessions which focus on queer–ing tech, bodies, data, experiences, and art. From this home base, you’ll have the possibility to expand your experience across the building, propose experiments or host a session in a dedicated, safer space. When filling out the Call for Proposals form, make sure to select “Queering MozFest” as a space.
We are very proud and excited to build this new experience at MozFest and looking forward to collaborating with you. Submit a session today! Let’s be proud and hack!
