By Mark Surman, Executive Director, Mozilla

This October marks our eighth MozFest. It’s also our most ambitious one yet — more than ever, the movement for a healthy Internet needs a place to convene, organize and act.

At its start, MozFest — then called Drumbeat and nestled in Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art — featured a small band of hackers and makers.

Since that 2010 gathering, MozFest has grown significantly. In size, yes — but more importantly, in scope. In 2011, the festival turned its attention to digital media, welcoming journalists and newsroom coders into the fold. In 2013, we focused on web literacy, inviting educators from around the world to craft tools and curricula for teaching the web. And in 2016, we talked about digital inclusion: who isn’t unlocking opportunity online, why that is, and what we can do to fix it.

This is an evolution that mirrors the growth of the Internet health movement. Today, the concept of Internet health reaches far beyond the realm of open source code: it’s linked to civil liberties and public policy, free expression and inclusion. Discussions about the state of the web include engineers, but now also teachers, lawmakers, community organizers and artists.

This is a positive and heartening development. It’s also a necessary one. The Internet is layered into our lives like we never could have imagined. Access is no longer a luxury — it’s a fundamental part of 21st century life. A virus is no longer a nuisance consigned to a single terminal — it’s an existential threat that can disrupt hospitals, governments and entire cities.

The movement for a healthy Internet is primed to address these problems. But we need a hub to trade ideas, find inspiration, swap code and build solutions.

MozFest is that hub.

Our sessions, speakers and workshops are built to foster collaboration across disciplines, borders and continents. We’re ready to face the biggest issues of the day — from fake news and online harassment to global cyberattacks — together, with an eye toward practical, open source solutions.

The challenges we’re facing are sizable. But we’re prepared to roll up our sleeves and address them head on in London — then return to our communities, classrooms and computers, better equipped to defend the Internet as a global public resource.

What to Expect at MozFest 2017 was originally published in Mozilla Festival on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the projects showcased at the MozFest 2016 Science Fair was an effort to create open maps of rural Tanzania. Janet Chapman ran a session at MozFest to bring new people into the project and expand the map’s content. These areas have never been digitally mapped before so this is an important localisation and digital inclusion effort. We caught up with Janet after the Festival to see how things were going.

So, Janet, how was MozFest for you?

It was brilliant! I’ve been going for a few years but I’ve never been a contributor before. I met some amazing people, hopefully they will carry on working with us. I learned a lot and got some fantastic advice, particularly around mapping. We would absolutely run a session at MozFest again, and we’re hoping to do so next year.

Did you make any progress with your project?

The map is now at 97% complete from 84% previously. You can help us complete the task here. We’re making a printed map to take to Tanzania. We’re still hoping to get at, or near, 100% completion. We’ve also set up a task for the adjoining [geographical] area as well. Our map ends at a bit of an arbitrary place so we’re now going to take it up to Lake Victoria.

What were the benefits of MozFest for you and your project?

I met quite a lot of people who are linked into other networks and were really happy to promote our work. I also met people from the Mozilla Foundation who want to help. We also found some mapping experts who are amazing and will give us some pro bono help. It was a really valuable experience.

Describe how your project will help people in Tanzania.

Ours is a fairly new project so we are at the beginning. In the areas we work there is a limited understanding of maps because people haven’t had access to maps of their areas. We are only just scratching the surface. I was speaking to one of our representatives today who is going to run a mapping project with community change agents in every ward in this area of Tanzania. We’re going to map all the local health facilities, adding locations and labels to indicate whether they have water, electricity, qualified staff, toilets and other amenities. We will also work with the local medical officer to apply gold, silver, bronze labels to the facilities. There will be sessions at regional level with health and education officers, they will be able to see a map to oversee all of their facilities for the first time. Coming directly from MozFest, we will be using a piece of software called Carto to identify gaps in service provision. The healthcare professionals haven’t been able to do this before.

MozFest will have a direct impact on the quality of life of people in Tanzania.

Read Janet’s short article about her MozFest session here. For more information about the project, you can follow it on Twitter here. You can also follow Janet Chapman here.

Mapping Tanzania: A Follow-Up was originally published in Mozilla Festival on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s only been a couple of weeks since MozFest 2016 and it seems like a long time ago. I’ve since launched a new action and am still reeling from the trauma of the American elections. So when I was asked to write about it, it was a good moment to pause and reflect.

I sat down with participants at my session to talk about “threats to the right to link”. With an ambitious title like that, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that we ended up deep in what I like to call “existential threats to the web” — with some pretty profound observations.

But let’s go back to the start. I run a campaign called Save the Link. It’s a networked campaign led by OpenMedia with over 100 groups signed up to launch a platform that we’ll use to campaign against proposals that restrict or censor hyperlinking across the world.

Is the hyperlink really under threat?

You might ask yourself: Isn’t it just part of the web, a piece of online infrastructure? But the backbone of the Internet is being eroded. There are measures across the world aimed at monetising or restricting links themselves: making them copyrightable, ownable, unworkable, or making those who share links legally liable for what’s at the end of them — and even completely banning them from being used.

Big media companies want to control how their content is shared. They want to monetise it, and reduce sharing so you stay on an ever-smaller selection of websites. We hope this initiative will show MEPs and decision-makers everywhere that censorship plans face fierce opposition, and that we expect them to prioritise free expression online.

The campaign is mostly engaged in the EU at the moment, where two new laws on copyright are the latest embodiment of this threat:

Content filtering: These rules force companies to create mandatory content filtering technologies to watch for content uploaded by users, that rightsholders flag that they want taken down. It would create censorship machines and place huge power into the hands of a few media owners.

The Link Tax: These are proposals to charge fees to sites for the snippets of text that automatically appear with links to news. That’s places like Reddit or Google or your blog being charged for using links. It will lead to many sharing sites being closed down because they can’t afford these new hyperlinking fees. And smaller press sites losing out on traffic when search engines don’t want to pay to link to them.

At our session we talked a little about these specific threats — but they had also been covered by our friends at Communia and EDRi, in the other session I co-hosted, and across the ‘Fuel the Movement’ track. So we discussed the best way to map and illustrate threats like this around the world using our new tool at: https://savethelink.org/threats

And then we really delved into one of my questions — how do we fight the global trend of not using links at all — the so-called “silo-ing” or “walled gardens” of the web?

For example, Instagram only links to itself. Facebook tries to reduce links by having content purely hosted on the site,which leaves you trapped on their website and creating frameworks to restrict free expression. This is a real threat and nobody says this better than Hossein Derakhshan in his article for The Guardian about his experiences and why the web needs saving.

There were many questions: How do we include that in the framework? How to fight it even? Should we create a manifesto for linking, a positive framework that encourages us all to link?

How can we make apps connect with each other? We wanted to find a way to show this problem, to visualise it to the world. Perhaps it is a whole layer over the threats map itself, perhaps it is a whole new project and campaign.

There were many interesting thoughts and though we didn’t come up with a way to heal the internet in 45 minutes, it set us off, gave us all new ideas, and inspired me to keep fighting.

So my call to action is:

1. Fight these regulations when they appear through our Save the Link platform. If you are in Europe, you can write to your MEP now to tell them to challenge the link tax and the content filtering proposals.

2. Know of a threat to link? Let us know by emailing ruth@openrightsgroup.org or submitting one at www.savethelink.org/act1.openmedia.org/savethelink

3. Fight the silo-ing. Break the rules. Use the web. Link everywhere! Be generous with your linking!

Ruth Coustick-Deal is a digital activist and is digital rights campaigner for Open Media. Ruth facilitated a session at MozFest about a campaign to Save the Link. In Europe, the hyperlink is at risk because of poorly thought through legislation and campaigns by publishers to restrict hyperlinking.

The Campaign to Save the Link was originally published in Mozilla Festival on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Katherine Maher is Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. She spoke at MozFest 2016 about building for inclusivity online.

Solving Online Harassment was originally published in Mozilla Festival on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, a resource by and for citizen journalists. He spoke at MozFest 2016 about the open source information revolution and Flight MH17.

Open Source and Flight MH17 was originally published in Mozilla Festival on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The digital arts are becoming an increasingly important part of our cultural lives. They challenge our senses of space and aesthetics, of meaning and interpretation. The arts have always pushed boundaries and digital arts are no exception. MozFest 2016 led to a partnership between Mozilla and two of the world’s most respected arts institutions, the Tate and the V&A.The result was MozEx, a grand scale digital installation curated by Irini Papadimitriou of the V&A and Luca M Damiani of the Tate.

Both Luca and Irini have been involved in MozFest before, and have participated in Mozilla’s Open IoT Studio and design sprints, but this was their first time as MozFest wranglers and co-designers. They both have an art and technology background and this really inspired the installation.

Luca said: “Irini and I wanted to create an exciting, engaging and collaborative work which demystifies technology and opens up discussions and exchanges. We have similar aims, similar kinds of practice and was a great opportunity to work together, and how better than to do it than with Mozilla?”

Irini explained: “The work Mozilla does has so many aspects — the Internet of Things, web literacy, accessibility, so we were already working around and exploring these areas, working with artists and other professionals. In a way, all these things came together. Part of the work we both do is about cohesion between art and tech, the more bridges you can build and conversations you can start the better.”

Each of the 54 components of the installation examined one or many of the five key issues facing a free and open internet — web literacy, digital inclusion, open innovation, decentralisation, online privacy and security. This meant there was a need for a wide variety of contributors and perspectives, so Irini and Luca issued an open call for people to get involved. This led to a great diversity of submissions from plenty of artists who hadn’t been linked to MozFest before.

“We wanted to attract artists and also coders,” Luca said. “We also got academics, creative technologists; those interested in art, technology, learning, interactive participation, copyright. It’s rare to be able to combine so many different perspectives together in one place. It’s a really dynamic collection of voices and critical thoughts. A combination of writing, photography, video, audio, mix-media, and Twitter bots gives access to so many different audiences who may relate to different kinds of work.”

Because the focus of the work was an exploration of the five key issues, the digital art was spread around the festival venue rather than grouped together in one space. This connected the festival’s thematic elements , such as web literacy to visual culture, and Dilemmas in Connected Spaces to its surroundings. This connectivity between the spaces was highly reflective of the nature of the festival and the open web community.

“All these different aspects can work really well together,” Luca said. “There are pieces in there about human rights, education, privacy… it all feels like one piece, like one web. Not all the same- there are so many facets — but it comes together as a whole.”

Perhaps the strongest aspect of the installation is the way it reflects the nature of the internet. This is best summed up by Irini’s closing comments.

“People are creating in the space. Where does the exhibition end and the visitors begin? MozEx is a living, breathing thing. It’s a liminal space, people don’t need permission to participate. It flows, grows and evolves.”

You can see the full MozEx installation catalogue on Issuu here.

Peering Behind the MozEx Installation was originally published in Mozilla Festival on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re delighted to announce the dates for MozFest 2017. The festival weekend will take place October 27–29 at Ravensbourne College in London, England.

As part of a global network, Mozilla is working to keep the web decentralized, open and free. We’re building a movement to protect the health of the Internet.

MozFest is an opportunity for the network behind this movement to come together in person. It’s a chance for technologists from Berlin, educators from Cape Town, artists from Shenzhen and activists from Chicago to share ideas, inspiration and code.

For a closer look at MozFest, visit mozillafestival.org. You can also watch our new video, which takes you inside this creative, eclectic event. And, you can watch the speaker series from last year’s festival. Hear what Zeynep Tufekci, Katherine Maher and Chris Soghoian have to say about Internet health.

If you’re as excited as we are about the annual celebration of our community and the greater open Internet movement, please tweet using #MozFest.

Registration will open in the summer. Until then, follow us here on Medium to learn how MozFest 2017 is coming together.

MozFest 2017 Dates Announced was originally published in Mozilla Festival on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the more fascinating aspects of MozFest is the opportunity to take a look at new projects, ideas and products that have a better web in mind. Online privacy and security may not at first glance seem fun to many of us, but that is about to change. A small group of independent game developers came to MozFest to showcase their new video game, which explores these issues in a dynamic and challenging way.

Off Grid has been in development since Rich Metson, one of the game’s designers, saw a talk about how the internet has been mostly lost to big corporations. Rich had never really thought in this way before, so the experience was eye-opening for him. He said: “After hearing Eben Moglen speak at the INET conference, I decided to make a game which captured some of these issues, like net neutrality and security. The Arab Spring was happening at that time and I was learning about hacktivism. I wanted to create a game set in an Orwellian universe where everything was controlled by corporations.”

The premise of the game is relatively simple. Your character is a technophobic father of a hacktivist daughter. At the beginning of the game the security services force their way into your home and arrest your daughter for unspecified actions. Because it is a national security matter, you aren’t allowed to contact her, or tell anyone what has happened. It is up to you, with the help of a friendly hacker, to rescue your daughter. Along the way, you explore key internet issues such as privacy, security and the Internet of Things.

“One of the key messages of the game is that the world is made of vulnerable devices, data is left everywhere regardless of whether you consent or not,” said Rich. “We also wanted to explore hacking in more general terms. The term ‘hacker’ has so many negative connotations. We wanted to break down the concept of hacker as “bad” and take this into a different space where the idea is viewed differently.”

These issues are introduced in subtle and thoughtful ways. For example, when you walk past a soft drinks vending machine, you receive a text message from a cola company. To access certain areas of the game, you need to hack various in-game networks to allow you to infiltrate physical spaces.

For Rich and the team behind the game, MozFest has been a big part of their journey. They started attending in 2014 and found that the audience they encountered at the festival was a huge help. Rich explained: “Other indies go to game conventions, but MozFest was nicer for us because people understood the issues more and could relate. It’s been a launchpad to talk about ideas, game mechanics and where it is going because it is a receptive and relatable audience.”

MozFest also encouraged the team to think about ways that people could adapt and modify the game so it relates to their own experiences. The team then spent the early part of this year refactoring the game to make it ‘moddable’. Players can then share these modifications or ‘mods’ with others. Examples include changing the dynamics of the characters, and the stories, to reflect real world experiences and highlight real incidents, people and organisations. In a mod made for MozFest, Big Brother Watch get in touch and share real world documents with you. As the player, you can choose to review the documents away from the game at any time. Other organisations will be able to integrate their content in their own modified versions of the game to tell their own advocacy stories. To show how this works, the team made a modified version of the game for MozFest’s Privacy Lab, taking people from the panel and turning them into in-game characters.

The main benefits of MozFest for the team have been about building their network. They’ve connected with people from The Guardian Project, the Open Tech Foundation and people from around the world. This network has been very influential and supportive.

“MozFest opened us up to how wide the internet freedom community is and how many interesting things are happening around the world,” said Rich. “From the Localisation floor at MozFest we found open source localisation tools and lots of good advice. We are now working on language localisation and the modification tools allow anyone to be able to do this.”

Off Grid will be launching in the coming year, so keep an eye on the website for more information.

Did you see any innovations at MozFest that caught your eye? Were there any projects or ideas that really made you think? Let us know in the comments. You can follow the latest news from the team on Twitter here.

Going ‘Off Grid’ at MozFest was originally published in Mozilla Festival on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Brian Behlendorf is Executive Director at the Hyperledger Project. He spoke at MozFest 2016 about blockchain.

Bringing Back the Decentralized Web was originally published in Mozilla Festival on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Simone Browne is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She spoke at MozFest 2016 about surveillance and race online.

Watch more MozFest talks at mzl.la/keynotes.

Surveillance and Race Online was originally published in Mozilla Festival on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.