MozFest/2021

MOZILLA FESTIVAL 2021

What Is It

MozFest is Mozilla’s largest public facing event, taking place online and in Amsterdam* in 2021 from March 8th to March 19th. The festival is where all corners of our movement gather together to mobilize around keeping the web open, free, and healthy for all. The festival provides a platform for communities, city governments and global organisations to connect, share their work and collaborate. The search for solutions to local challenges around a healthy internet and trustworthy AI is enriched by perspectives from a global audience. It is a chance for Mozilla to listen to and work across all the different communities to strengthen the internet health movement, and other ally movements. The work from the festival doesn’t end with the event but ripples back across the movement, to be expanded upon and continued across communities and projects.

MozFest is unconference in design, with a focus on participatory engaging experiences. The format is designed to be able to cater for emergent styles, communities, and sessions. The program is community-designed and community-led with a significant focus on diversity across languages, ages, disciplines, identities, and cultures. Focus is on participation, asking for responses, advice, engagement, opinions and collaboration to learn, build, and seek to evolve the work beyond the festival.

On the surface, this re-imagined festival will be the same MozFest we know and love: community curated sessions, art exhibitions, partnered events, and plenty of opportunities to meet new people over a beverage of your choice.

Why Get Involved

MozFest has always been a unique event: part art, tech and society convening, part maker festival, and the premiere gathering for activists in diverse global movements fighting for a more humane digital world.

Your work – whether professional in nature, a personal side project, or anything in between – will reap rewards in a positive environment designed for collaboration and networking. The collective experiences, cultures, and ideas of hundreds of people are all considered in the design of the Mozilla Festival. If you’re looking for a diverse and unique community to work in, you’ll find it at MozFest. The festival harnesses the collective power of unexpected partnerships — from analog artists and public interest technologists to policymakers and queer activists — to creatively disrupt the status quo and reframe and reimagine our online world.

Plus MozFest is a lot of fun! We’ve been known for our interactive sessions that get us away from the keyboard, playing games, and bring art and music into learning how technology affects our lives.

To join the conversation around this year's MozFest, jump in on our Mozilla Festival Slack.

Who Is It For

The Festival is a multi-day event for anyone interested in the healthy future of an open free internet, Trustworthy AI, and wants to play an active role in shaping its future. Last year we welcomed over 3000 participants from over 50 countries around the world to share and contribute to the vision of an internet that is a continued global public resource. It is designed so all knowledge levels, interests, and ages can actively participate in hands-on sessions supporting the work of the broader movement.

Topics & Thematic Focus

Mozilla works for an open, free, and healthy internet. For 2021, Mozilla is focusing its efforts and the movement towards Trustworthy AI. From social networks to shopping sites to voice assistants, Mozilla is particularly interested in how AI is being integrated into the consumer technology we all use every day. We want to ensure that AI is designed with personal agency in mind, emphasising privacy, transparency, and human well being. We will hold companies to account when the AI systems they build or deploy make discriminatory decisions, abuse our data, or harm people.

Festival Formats

We have created 5 session formats where participants can connect, share and collaborate.

Art, Films and Podcasts: Includes art exhibits, film & video, or podcasts. Available for asynchronous self-navigating experiences. Participants can explore these at any time.

Social Moments: Sessions focused on bringing the MozFest community together in a social format. This could include a fitness or yoga session, baking classes or a games evening.

Discussions: Synchronous live sessions which provide space for building shared understanding, comparing diverse experiences and divergent perspectives, sharing knowledge or surfacing collective vision.

Skill Shares: Learning sessions participants can experience on their own schedule with offline documentation and the facilitator being accessible for open office hours or questions for a set period of time.

Workshops: Synchronous live sessions that allow for groups to collaboratively work on a project, learn a new skill together, or co-develop ideas and collectively problem solve.

Schedule

The Festival will take place 8-19 March, 2021. As Amsterdam is our host city for the Festival, the time zone for the schedule will be Central European Time (CET) / UTC+01:00, though due to the online format, sessions will be scheduled across many different time zones based on Facilitator availability. The online schedule of sessions will be coming soon.

Secure A Ticket

For the first time ever, the cost of tickets is a sliding scale, giving you the option to help offset the cost of attendance for those who otherwise could not join. If you secure your ticket by January 31, you’ll receive exclusive first access to early registration for our limited-capacity sessions.

* We hope to host a small taster event in Amsterdam in March, dependent on local COVID pandemic guidelines.