Session Host Guide

The Three Principles: Participatory, Accessible, Inclusive

At Mozilla Festival, we celebrate the diversity of our global audience, embracing everyone's unique experiences and perspectives. We know that transformative impact requires many people, from many places and spaces, to come together. Our goal is to help you craft sessions that encourage open dialogue and collaboration, welcoming contributions from all, and leaving with powerful outcomes. Your session is an opportunity to invite a community to join you on your journey, and the following three principles will help you do so.

Our core facilitation principles at Mozilla Festival are: Participation, Accessibility, and Collective Wisdom. These principles uplift our dedication to interactive and engaging sessions, distinguishing us from traditional conferences. Here, facilitation revolves around collective creativity, with session hosts actively engaging their audience to co-create, reflect shared values, and pursue common goals.

Mozilla Festival offers the following advice to ensure sessions are participatory, accessible, and built from Collective Wisdom:

Participatory

Hosting interactive experiences for co-creation and togetherness.

4 Tips to Boost Participation:

• Design for co-creation, not consumption: Consider your session participants as co-owners of the session, and think about how you can build ways for participants to shape the session outcomes. This could be through brainstorming, co-creating a document or report or, shared storytelling opportunities. Avoid talking “at” your session participants.
• Consider different “entry points” for participation: While some folks shine in group conversations, others prefer to contribute in different ways, such as smaller group breakout discussions, online polls, ideas on post-it notes, or shared group documents. Design your session in a way that allows different types of people to contribute equally.
• Be intentional about discussion prompts: Instead of asking “Any questions?”, reframe to be more specific. For example, after sharing your ideas, ask participants, “What was missing or overlooked in this conversation that you would add?”, or “How could we take these ideas one step further?”.
• Conclude with clear next steps: Find ways to keep participants engaged with the session topic after your session is over. This could be through sharing additional resources, finding ways for participants to stay engaged with each other, and/or sharing your contact information for further exploration of your session topic.

Accessible

Creating intentional spaces that are meaningful, useful and usable by as many people as possible.

4 Tips for Accessibility:

1. Design with diverse bodies and minds in mind. Ask yourself: Who might be left out by default? Consider mobility, neurodiversity, tech access, and language needs. Plan activities that allow for multiple learning styles, including visual, verbal, tactile, or reflective.
2. Use clear, inclusive language and structure. Write titles, descriptions, and instructions in plain, jargon-free language and as concise as possible, where you can. Avoid acronyms unless explained. Break your session into clear steps or phases so it’s easy to follow.
3. Share materials early, and in flexible formats. Add any slides, notes, or links in advance under the “Resources” section of your session on Pre-Talx. Remember to use accessible formats, like high-contrast text (ex. Black and white), screen reader-friendly files, and alt-text for images). During the session, make sure to repeat instructions both verbally and visually (i.e. have instructions displayed on a slide, or included in a handout).
4. Make tech and tools approachable. If your session uses collaborative tools, introduce them at the start and provide guidance, especially for those who may be unfamiliar with the tool. If possible, always have a low-tech or no-tech participation option to be as accessible and inclusive as possible.

Inclusive

Inviting diverse perspectives for shared understanding and collective power.

4 Tips for Inclusivity:

1. Center communities most impacted by tech harm. Design your session with and for those who are often excluded or harmed by dominant tech narratives, such as Black, Indigenous, disabled, queer, trans, working class, and/or Global Majority communities. An example of a question you might ask yourself: Whose liberation is this session in service of?
2. Establish safety, consent, and care as core practices. Set the tone early with collective agreements, content warnings where needed, and invitations to opt in (or out) of potentially triggering conversations. Verbally and explicitly acknowledge the emotional weight some topics may carry, and create a space where people can show up fully, take space, or leave without explanation.
3. Interrogate your defaults. When designing your session content, ask yourself questions to uncover bias. Ask: Whose knowledge is centered? Whose language is “neutral”? Who is implicitly asked to do emotional or explanatory labor? Choose tools, visuals, and references that decentralize dominant groups.
4. Use language as a tool for inclusion, not erasure. Speak in ways that honor lived experience and complexity. For example, replace extractive terms (like “vulnerable populations” or “minority groups”) with those that reflect agency and context (“communities targeted by surveillance”; “the Global Majority”), and use terms like “folks”, “everyone”, or “all” instead of gendered greetings like, “guys” or “ladies and gentlemen”. Opt for universal or cross-cultural references to ensure broad understanding by all session participants. Language shapes power; use it consciously.

Language Inclusivity

Effective communication and collaboration often depend on language. Some ideas are more easily expressed in certain languages so it's vital to embrace multilingualism with empathy and flexibility.

Mozilla Festival is committed to language inclusivity, offering specialized support and encouraging session hosts to explore how you can facilitate language inclusivity beyond translation. Whether through visual aids or interactive methods, please aim to make your session accessible to speakers of various languages whenever possible.