About the Mozilla Festival

Dear Webmakers,

We want everyone to tap the full creative power of the web.

The Mozilla Festival is a magnet for people interested in learning about – and playing with – the future of the web. Mozilla has grown over the past 15 years into an organisation that plugs directly into what the web can and will become. We see the Festival as an opportunity to draw as many interested people as possible into the conversation about what tech can do.

And it’s not just about tech. It’s about anyone and everyone interested in the possibilities the web has to offer, coming together and sharing their skills and expertise.

We want to move people from using the web to making the web.

Part of this move leverages new skills and attitudes. That’s why the Mozilla Festival focuses on small, peer-learning sessions. Another part of this move is about tools and content. That’s why we’re also excited about the sessions that explore the edges of the web and aim to build shared, viable solutions.

The sweet spot is in collaboration across skill-sets and in learning by making. Together.

Mark Surman— Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla

Where

The Mozilla Festival will be hosted at Ravensbourne, a wired media and design campus located in East London next to the O2 concert arena. It spans nine floors, combining maker labs with impromptu classrooms and bleeding-edge tech.

How

We’re replacing darkened lecture halls with nine floors of maker labs bursting with passionate people — all building and teaching the web in real time. To make this work, we need people of all different skills and persuasions.

Goals for the Mozilla Festival

  • Make things with the tools Mozilla and others are creating.
  • Learn who is building what, how we can share and help each other.
  • Imagine making in 100 years: what future are we building?
  • Design the things we want to build next, especially for mobile.
  • Fuel leaders who want to invent, teach and organize.

Themes

Themes we want to explore this year:

The Team

  • Michelle Thorne — Festival Lead

    Michelle Thorne is Mozilla’s Global Event Strategist, aiming to grow communities around open web projects through live events. She helps local organizers host anything from small “kitchen-table events” to larger hack jams and campaigns, which bring together web makers of various stripes to build, make, and learn from each other. She chaordinates Mozilla’s annual festival.

  • Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino — Local Producer

    Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is a product designer & entrepreneur. She co-founded Tinker, a smart product design studio, focused on creating product experiences that linked the digital to the physical. She is now a consultant on “internet of things”, an evangelist for Lirec (an EU-funded project about robots) and partner in design partnership RIG London.

  • Allen Gunn — Agenda and Participation Co-Designer

    Allen “Gunner” Gunn is Executive Director of Aspiration in San Francisco, USA, and works to help NGOs, activists, foundations and software developers make more effective use of technology for social change. He is an experienced facilitator with a passion for designing collaborative open learning processes.

  • Geoffrey MacDougall — Partnerships

    Geoffrey MacDougall leads partnership development for the Mozilla Foundation. He specializes in building relationships across the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. Prior to joining Mozilla, Geoffrey plied his craft in the games and aerospace industries, the non-profit tech community, and the broader UN system.

  • Diana Proca — Volunteer Coordinator

    Diana Proca is an entrepreneur and an event organiser. She founded Work In Startups, a platform that helps startups hire rockstar employees. Previously she has organised multiple events and has been involved in various projects related to the startup scene in Romania, her home country. She enjoys the fast, energising, sometimes geeky technology startup world as she always finds something new and exciting to learn.

  • William Duyck — Mozilla Reps Coordinator

    William “FuzzyFox” Duyck is currently a student at the University of Kent and a long time Mozillian, and more recently a Mozilla Rep. He is a proficient web developer and has a passion for the open web. He dabbles in web design.

  • Tim Hwang — Keynote Curator

    Tim Hwang is the co-founder of The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences, ROFLCon, and the Pacific Social Architecting Corporation. By day, he’s a junior partner at the law offices of Robot Robot & Hwang LLP, a San Francisco-based research and development firm focusing on disruptive technology in the legal industry. Formerly, he has worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He loves ice cream sandwiches.