Press Center

A group of people smiling at the camera, posing with an orange fox mascot
Mozilla Festival 2019 at Ravensbourne University

Format

For the last two festivals, MozFest has been hosted online to continue global participation despite the travel restrictions in place as a result of the global pandemic. Both in person and virtual formats are being considered on a year-by-year basis as travel restrictions are lifted or enforced.

MozFest focuses on participatory engaging experiences. The format is designed to cater for emergent styles, communities and sessions. The entire festival is community-curated, designed, and led with a significant focus on diversity across languages, ages, disciplines, identities, and cultures.

Through various formats - sessions, installations, music, film, poetry - the community shares the biggest topics and issues facing us all online today. The focus is on hands-on participation by asking for responses, advice, engagement, opinions and collaboration. The ultimate goal of any event hosted by MozFest is to learn, build, and seek to evolve the work beyond the festival.

The experience is purposefully designed for emergent hands-on, design-your-own-journey experiences that encourage collaborative exploration.

Utilizing interactive cultural experiences, the event is ‘handed over’ to the participants and seeks mass, collective responsibility for outcomes, findings, and community building.

MozFest is Mozilla’s largest public facing event, where all corners of our movement gather together. The festival provides a platform for communities, city governments, and global organisations to connect, share their work and collaborate, to seek solutions happening in their locales 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.

A virtual world with purple avatars gathered around a firepit
Mozilla Festival Science Fair 2022 in Mozilla Hubs

Style

At the core of this event is the individual experience - no one can attend all events, sessions, or see everything - so it purposefully calls upon self organisation, and active engagement at multiple levels. We actively encourage rough sketch ideas, encourage younger speakers and diverse topics, and we seek surprising moments and layouts that are not typically seen at other tech events. By mixing culture, language, offline activities with hackathons, maker spaces and policy talks, we are deliberately subverting the norm.