Tag Archives: mozilla festival

How to make your own mini-MozFest

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This new debrief and documentation from the 2012 Mozilla Festival lays out the key ingredients, reviews and recommendations.

Mozilla Festival

How do you turn dull conferences into festival-style jams packed with more hack / less yak? Michelle Thorne’s full “Aftermath Report” from the 2012 Mozilla Festival is so thorough and open, it basically provides an introductory blueprint for others thinking about hosting their own #MozFest-style event. Recommended reading for anyone interested in creative community-powered event design.
Mozfest_11Nov_050

A MozFest Manifesto?

Excerpting from Michelle’s post:

  1. Make everything hands-on, hackable, and collaborative. Participants hack and learn in small, decentralized groups. Sessions focus on solving real problems and teaching applicable skills. The schedule is always evolving in response to participants’ interests.
  2. Learn who is building what, and how they can share and help each other. The opening Science Fair and closing demo party help with this.
  3. Fuel leaders who want to invent, teach and organize. For us, that meant planning sessions with community members to design next year’s Summer Code Party and the growth of the global Hive network.
  4. Design the things you want to build next. For us this year it was two important new verticals: mobile and games.
  5. Use an open submission process. Hold a facilitator “boot camp” before the event. Designate community “space wranglers.” (Lots more detail on all the nuts and bolts in Michelle’s post.)

Mozilla Festival

Reviews from participants

Mozilla Festival
Get involved

  • Host your own Webmaker event. Our handy event kits make it pretty easy.
  • Help turn this into HOW TO documentation. Get in touch with Michelle if you’re interested in helping to turn her post into a more robust HOW TO.
  • Check out the feedback on recommendations for next year’s MozFest. Rough etherpad notes from our last Webmaker community call.

Introducing Popcorn Maker

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(Cross-posted from the Mozilla blog)

Brett Gaylor launching Popcorn Maker at the Mozilla Festival this morning

Today at the Mozilla Festival, we’re extremely proud to launch the 1.0 version of Popcorn Maker, a free web app that makes video pop with interactivity, context and the magic of the web.

Popcorn Maker makes it easy to enhance, remix and share web video. Using Popcorn Maker’s simple drag and drop interface, you can add live content to any video — photos, maps, links, social media feeds and more. All right from your browser.

The result is a new way to tell stories on the web, with videos that are rich with context, full of links, and unique each time you watch them.

The Popcorn Maker story

“Until now, video on the web has been stuck inside a little black box,” says Mozilla’s Director of Popcorn, Brett Gaylor. “Popcorn Maker changes that, making video work like the rest of the web: hackable, linkable, remixable, and connected to the world around it.”

Last year Mozilla launched Popcorn.js, a Javascript library for developers that resulted in ground-breaking productions like the NFB’s One Millionth Tower, PBS and NPR’s 2012 election coverage, and more.

“But until now, the power of Popcorn has been available mostly just to developers,” Brett says. “Popcorn Maker puts that power in everyone’s hands, through an intuitive interface anyone can use. We’re really excited to see what the world will make with it.”

Developed as part of Mozilla’s Webmaker program, Popcorn Maker is a unique collaboration with filmmakers, developers, young media makers, and the Centre for Development of Open Technology at Seneca College, all working to design and build together.

Popcorn Maker is built entirely using open web elements, written in HTML, CSS and Javascript. “It’s essentially a web page that makes other web pages. We think it’s a great example of Mozilla’s larger vision for what web apps can be,” Brett says.

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Building a big tent for teaching the web

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Mozilla, Nesta and Nominet Trust announce new digital literacy partnership in the UK

Today, on the eve of the Mozilla Festival in London, Mozilla is proud to announce a new partnership aimed at spreading digital literacy in the UK.

Mozilla together with Nesta and Nominet Trust are creating a new fund and umbrella group focused on teaching digital making, web literacy and tech.

Our goal: build a “big tent” in the UK, and invite other organizations and community groups to join us. Together we’re offering financial support, shared resources, and the opportunity to collaborate and learn together.

£225,000 are available in the first round of funding to help support organizations and community groups working on digital making in the UK.

Tackling the digital literacy gap

Why now? We believe digital skills and webmaking are vital 21st century skills, the fourth pillar to reading, writing and arithmetic. But we face a serious challenge in making this a reality in the UK and around the world: there’s a digital literacy “gap.”

Youth and digital natives increasingly know how to consume with technology, but lack the skills and knowledge they need to create with it. When it comes to the web, we’re at risk of teaching an entire generation how to read, but not how to write.

New survey results

This is borne out by new survey data from a YouGov poll of UK parents and youth, commissioned by Mozilla:

  • 67% of British 8 – 15 year olds say they’re interested in learning to program and write computer code. But only 3% are currently being given the opportunity to do so.
  • 60% of British parents say they would like their children to learn about coding.
  • Parents now place digital literacy amongst their top four educational priorities, alongside English, Mathematics, and Science.

Join us

That’s why a diverse group of partners are coming together to tackle this challenge, in a fresh new way that stresses creativity and learning by making. That’s the driving ethos behind our Mozilla Webmaker program, and why Mozilla is excited to work with local educators and partner organizations in the UK and around the world.

“By equipping children and young people with the necessary skills early on, we can help them not just to use and consume digital technologies but also to create them – to be Digital Makers,” says Geoff Mulgan, chief executive at Nesta.

Annika Small, CEO at Nominet Trust, says “These skills of content creation, collaboration and communication are vital if young people are to cope with — and contribute to — a rapidly changing, complex global society. The Digital Makers fund is designed to recognise and encourage the development of these critical digital skills both in the classroom and outside school.”

“This is just the beginning,” says Mozilla’s Executive Director, Mark Surman. “The major call to action is: join us. We’ll be working together on details and next steps at this weekend’s Mozilla Festival, a literal example of our ‘big tent’ in action.”

To learn more or get involved in the UK, please get in touch here. Or if you’re interested in our digital literacy work around the world, get involved at webmaker.org.

Introducing the 2012 Mozilla Festival: making, freedom and the web

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Cross-posted from the Mozilla blog.

Join us for three days of inspired making, learning and celebration in London. Today we’re extremely proud to launch the new 2012 Mozilla Festival web site — and invite you to join us November 9-11 in London, UK.

“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 web’s future.” –Mark Surman, Executive Director, Mozilla

Gathering educators, youth, coders, gamers, media-makers and you

This year’s Mozilla Festival will gather more than 800 passionate people with diverse backgrounds and skill-sets. The goal: push the frontiers of the open web, learn together, and make things that can change the world.

Coders, designers, journalists and educators will join with filmmakers, gamers, makers and youth from more than 40 different countries. Together they’ll participate in a series of design challenges, learning labs and fireside chats spread across four floors of the Ravensbourne design and media campus in East London.

Unlike traditional conferences, the emphasis at the Mozilla Festival is on hands-on making and collaboration — rather than passive consumption or listening to other people talk. It’s “more hack, less yack.” And a big tent for everyone — including partners, local communities and you — who shares Mozilla’s vision for a more open, web literate world.

“Technology is at the point where learners don’t just use the tools, but make the tools. This happens at places like the Mozilla Festival, where geeks and practitioners get together.” – Joi Ito, Mozilla Foundation Board Member, Director of MIT Media Lab

This year’s key themes:

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