From Sprinting to Connecting
Weaving strands of openness, privacy, and digital inclusion across Mozilla’s global sprint and MozFest
By Antero Garcia, Stanford University
A year of rising concerns around privacy, voice, and activism in online spaces, much of my work as an educational researcher in 2017 has been focused on how contexts of playful learning can be pushed toward addressing inequities such as concerns around youth inclusion, voice, and advocacy. This consistent through-line has been supported by the allies, networks, and instigative energies of the Mozilla Global Sprint and — several months later — the 2017 MozFest. Building on the lessons built during the Sprint and continuing in the month since MozFest, I want to highlight some of the ways I’ve been building a praxis of play, privacy, and inclusion.
Picking Up From the Sprint
Though a teaching and academic conference schedule meant that I was less present for the Global Sprint this year than I had hoped, the threads from collectively sourced and organized engagement via the Cryptomancer Challenge github highlighted for me the central themes I hoped to carry into the face-to-face learning and hands-on making that would take place at MozFest. As one of the leads for the Cryptomancer Challenge, I was thrilled to see the conversations and production that were built around Chad Walker’s tabletop roleplaying game, Cryptomancer, that explores encryption practices within a fantasy context. [It’s worth also hollering about Chad’s current Kickstarter, Sigmata, focused on roleplaying “ethical insurgency against a fascist regime” in a 1980s American setting.] The ongoing work around Cryptomancer highlights how playing powerful and “real” versions of healthy encryption practices can funnel from virtual spaces to substantiated practices on the internet and in day-to-day interactions. Lessons around the open web not only can be intellectually stimulating and emotionally riveting but they also should be.
While the Global Sprint was a time where I was focused on a specific gaming setting for exploring issues of privacy and security in digital contexts, my session at this year’s MozFest was around exploring experiences of empathy, privacy, and voice within the real world. Working with a current Stanford doctoral student, Chris Proctor, I was fortunate to co-facilitate the construction of interactive fiction texts at the conference. Using Proctor’s own open authoring platform, Unfold.Studio, participants eventually developed stories that were built using Inkle Studio’s Ink language. However, long before jumping into digital contexts, Chris and I worked to have individual write, document, and map alternative and viable narratives of privacy and security in analog settings.
Only partially due to lag revving me up hours prior to when any mortal should be awake, I continually enter Mozfest more energized than perhaps any other singular event in the year. Of course, it’s also an event literally and figuratively caffeinated with opportunity, engagement, and production. Though only an hour, I’ve been reflecting on the lessons of immediately connecting play to reflection and empathy. By anchoring our session in the lived experiences, hopes, and regrets that have been bound in how individuals see and participate in the web, Chris and I have been more deliberately connecting the Global Sprint’s themes of play to innate feelings of empathy as well.
An Open Village
Two years prior to this year’s MozFest, I was lucky enough to help wrangle a section of the conference alongside current Mozillian Chad Sansing and members of the National Writing Project. It was this moment of imagining a literal open and playful space — with a three-dimensional rendering of a detective’s mapping of connections in a complex case — that has been inspiring my continued thinking around education, connected learning, and forms of immersive storytelling.
In both the online interactions of the Global Sprint and within the cheerfully crowded spaces of MozFest, I am continually reminded of the sense of collective community that permeates the vision of a viable, open, internet. Whether it was a robustly active github with contributions, suggestions, and guidance all for improving the learning outcomes for a tabletop encounter, or co-facilitating the construction of interactive fiction texts, the sense of this work occurring collectively was striking.
Like the bubbled surface of the Ravensbourne College campus in London that annually houses MozFest, the possibilities of play, learning, privacy, and openness are porous. Reflecting on the synergies of productive energy and enthusiasm in both the virtual Global Sprint environment and the face-to-face interactions at the ‘Fest, I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s description of the world as a Global Village. As I write this, the U.S. is facing threats to a viable and open web more than ever before. A very dark cloud shadows the practices of privacy and voice that are at the center of our justice-centered work. Perhaps, through instigating lessons of play, we can continue to agitate, write, and play toward continually better web practices and political consciousness.
