This is my ninth MozFest!! I love thinking back to my first festival, under the tenure of Michelle Thorne and Gunner from Aspiration. Back in 2013, MozFest was two days long and comprised of 1000 people in the giant open Ravensbourne University in London. Sessions, such as ‘Teaching the web to prison inmates in Luzira prison Uganda’ or ‘Metadata for licensing and attribution requirements’ started whenever the facilitator decided, and we organised ourselves on etherpads and wiki pages.

MozFest has always been about evolution, building upon the work started the year before by our incredible wranglers, listening and learning from feedback we received from facilitators and participants, and experimenting with session formats to try to meet the ever changing needs of our community and the work.

We are still evolving today.

How we mobilize and how we connect has to change to meet the challenges of our time, support the needs of our festival community, and evolve with how we live our lives, online and off. The last two years of the pandemic have altered how we work and communicate with each other, and it’s also brought a heaviness to our online community mobilising. So in light of this, MozFest has made some changes to how we mobilise and aim to support you at MozFest this year.

Adapting To Change: What To Expect At MozFest 2022

Today our activism and literacy still centers on internet health, but with a narrower focus on Trustworthy AI (TAI). As the issues on the web advance, so does our thematic focus at the festival. Under our 11 Spaces, you can attend sessions such as Kiswahili Speech Recognition Dataset, Climate Migration, A Feminist Analysis of Digital Rights in Nepal and/or, Why Everyone Should Care About Blackgirlhair.

Last year, MozFest was live for 12 days and the plaza stayed open for 90 days afterwards, and by moving online and lengthening our event, we brought a new and wider audience to participate. So many of you returned to the plaza to catch up on sessions, read the notes and reconnect on Slack right up until June! Momentum was created across the live event, gathering speed right until the end and we want to recreate that again this year, and in order to do so, we’re providing early sessions, a social space and opportunity for participants to connect across topics. From today.

Pre-Festival Season: Fringe Events

In February, our Fringe events go live, which are a selection of workshops, panels, and discussions designed to connect Facilitators and participants together, earlier. This pre-festival season is intentionally designed for our MozFest community to connect early, seek threads across each other's work, and to build momentum and participation. We want you to see MozFest as neither the start nor the end of your work, but instead as a springboard to expand new partnerships and deepen engagement with the work. So that when the Zoom room closes, the collaborations continue.

As part of our Fringe selection, we will host workshops for facilitators designed to best prepare them ahead of their session. We will run platform training for all; including Miro boards for notes, and how to use Mozilla Hubs and Spatial chat for socials and meetups.

The MozFest team will host a series of discussions designed to inspire you, and peak your curiosity.

Our TAI working groups will host sessions aimed at showcasing projects in development from the community such as Visualizing Internet Subcultures on Social Media, A Feminist Dictionary in AI, and A Collaboration with Mimi Onuoha. Our Presenting sponsors Coil and The Interledger Foundation will be hosting a series of web monetized training for facilitators and attendees interested in learning and experimenting with web monetization. More Fringe events will be added daily.

Our MozFest Slack channel is open and we encourage you use the platform to create new connections, whether that's calling for contributors to your MozFest session, or connecting with allies in the #art-and-culture channel, or checking out the popular #jobs-and-opps . Others can stay up to date on Twitter using the #mozfest hashtag. Please use #mozfest on any social media platform where your community gathers. We see great community growth across many other online spaces too!

Festival Week: 7-11 March, 2022

Some might have caught the 5 day reference at the top - Yes we have extended MozFest to accommodate the excellent sessions from MozFest House: Amsterdam - which won't be taking place in the city. Some, not all, sessions will join us over the five days from 7-11 March.

MozFest virtual is designed for you to participate in your own time, when it suits your day.

The Schedule is live over 12 hours, per day, designed to cater to as many time zones of our facilitators and our participants attend in their own time, and in a way that suits our day - whether live in the sessions, watching the live broadcast, or follow up with the recording.

Our schedule is live on our plaza already to give you time to review, and for our ticket holders to create their shortlists of sessions. We have removed the pre-registration cap on sessions, but you are required to indicate your attendance and have the option to add shortlisted sessions to your profile. All session links will be available on the session page 10 minutes before the session starts.

Post-Festival Season: On-Demand At The Plaza

And as our plaza stays open until June 25th, we will continue to offer Fringe events, such as Building Speech Recognition Models for Global Languages hosted by the Common Voice team and our artists will continue to share new work. Post festival, you can catch up on missed sessions through their documentation, recordings or via facilitator meetups. Our Art and Media page will continue to give you access to return to great mixed media art, re-watch some lightning talks and we will continue to offer ticket holders special Dialogues and Debates.

Build Momentum, Reset, and Refocus With MozFest Community

This fight is long, and this pandemic is with us longer than we imagined. As Kristina on the MozFest team has shared, 2022 for us as a team is about resetting expectations, and how we acknowledge and refocus our personal and professional goals. We as a team, with our Wranglers are exploring how we refresh and invigorate our community. So we are experimenting with self care sessions between the workshops. Using the tag Selfcare on the plaza, you will find Meditation class, you can join singing lessons, Bingo and drawing - yes, some are still on Zoom, but we also have audio only sessions, such as our collab with the Lets Get Litical podcast in UK, and Mystique Afrique.

This festival is very different from 2013, but what you can hopefully see is the path of evolution and all the tiny steps we’ve made along the way to lead us to the festival we’ve built in 2022. At the core, we are still very much about, “Arrive with an idea, leave with a community.”

Hope to see you there!