Let’s Build & Teach the Web!
Mozilla Festival, London
2013

In the autumn of 2013, after 6 months of feverish planning, 2,100 technologists from 50 nations descended on Ravensbourne College in London, facilitating 250 sessions and drinking 7,650 cups of coffee during Mozfest, Europe’s biggest open technology festival. This year, I curated one of the festival’s 12 tracks with Laura Hilliger, called ‘Build and Teach the Web‘, to bring together digital makers and educators across disciplines to share tools, curriculums and knowledges. Participants proposed a wonderful set of hands-on workshops and activities, from tactical media green screens to scavenger hunts. We covered all surfaces with post-it notes, and constructed a public board in the style of the Scrum framework, an agile development methodology for achieving tasks together as a team, to keep the proposals organised. The final 7 Scrum themes, ranging from Cultural Archives to Diversity, were finalised through community planning sessions with the track’s 60+ facilitators, and anyone who came by was welcome to add new tasks to the Scrum Board that they wanted to collaborate on. Our aim was to move as many tasks as possible from “To Make” to “Made”, and by the end of the weekend, participants had welcomed hundreds of new recruits into the co-creation process, and shipped over 75% of the tasks together.

Photos (CC-BY license): Mozilla EU, Sammy James Dodds, Irvin Chen.