Co-creating The Mozilla Festival 2019
It has been 3 weeks since the Mozilla Festival took place from 21st to 27th October, 2019 in London, United Kingdom(UK) and I have been reflecting on what it meant to be part of the team that co-created the festival as it celebrated its 10th Anniversary.
My journey in co-creating the Mozilla Festival 2019 began with an invitation to attend the MozRetreat in Barcelona in May 2019. In Barcelona was where a big chunk of the ideation for this years’ festival took place centred around the theme “ better machine decision making” . I honoured the invitation and took up an active role in being a Wrangler in the Openness space.
“The MozFest weekend experience is organised into thematic sections called ‘SPACES’. Each space is a collection of sessions, art installations, and workshops exploring issues and current topics relevant to the internet health movement.” — Mozilla Festival Website
An all week festival, with a weekend full of over 300 interactive sessions with 1000+ people , as you can imagine is a lot of work to plan for, coordinate and make it a meaningful experience for all. This also means that there are various teams handling different things to piece up the festival including production, catering , wrangling, venue management. Integral to the festival is having people from all over the world, from diverse disciplines, with different levels of experience and varied age groups propose a session that they would like to present in the festival. This group of people, in the common MozFest language are called “facilitators”.
As a wrangler my main role for this position was to collaborate in designing the festival narrative and program, curate the sessions, and support the facilitators as they prepare to host their sessions — a co-creator.
Wrangling in the Openness Space
From the 3 day MozRetreat in Barcelona, we had a rough idea on how the Openness wrangling team would look like. Part of the retreat process was to guide all the collaborators to gravitate towards a theme of their choice. We left Barcelona with a solid team of 4 members with a request to Sarah Allen , the executive producer of the festival that we could use one or two more people in our team who didn’t make it to the retreat. By the end of May we had one more addition and towards the end of August one more person joined us making a team of 6 wranglers in the Openness space.
Working Remotely across different Time zones
It was clear what the role would entail , at least for me, since this was my second time but even then I was still jittery about collaboration remotely. Our first important task was to draft the space narrative that would go into the festival’s official website alongside the call for proposals. We had several iterations of it via google docs and eventually settled on what would represent the festival theme in relation to the space. The following weeks involved putting together some important working documents, distributing roles and planning for video calls over the internet to enable smooth running of the team.
The roles amongst us included, communication lead, cross-space collaboration lead, scheduling lead, curation lead and space design lead. It was interesting to get the most agreeable time for a weekly or bi-weekly video meetings as we were spread through 5 different time zones. When some were just beginning their day, others were winding up work hours and others were almost at their bedtime. We did not always have 100% attendance but we made the most out of the time we got by setting deadlines and keeping tabs on them and also having a team calendar on a google sheet where everyone filled up the days/weeks when they were on vacation/unavailable for meetings. During those times we agreed on team members taking up overlap roles to assist the other person.
In between as the call for proposals kicked off a rubric had been put together to help us in grading and curating the proposals. We focused on five key points as we went through each proposal namely: the relevance /overall importance of proposal, the outcomes, originality, opportunity for collaboration, diversity and compellingness. In addition, we had to consider whether one would qualify for a stipend after meeting the other criteria.
For the openness space we had a total of 109 sessions submitted and we could only pick a maximum of 40 or thereabouts and award only 11 stipends. This is one of the crucial yet tedious and sometimes heartbreaking process in the wrangling process. Reading through proposals and grading them against the rubric with an aim to get the best sessions to come to Mozfest, we had to reject some proposals or some couldn’t make it because they did not have funding given that we had a limited stipend allocation. We ensured that at the very least a session is reviewed by three members of the team and where there was no agreement one other person would provide a tie-breaker. Eventually we accepted 41 sessions and 36 of them made it for the MozFest weekend. Those sessions hosted by the various facilitators made the openness space what it was on 26th and 27th October on the 7th floor of Ravensbourne University, London.
An exciting challenge
Through this 6 month engagement as a wrangler, I deepened my skills in program/project planning including learning about innovative platforms that can support this skill such as doodle for scheduling meetings, Zenkit for project management (this is where all the curation was taking place), google docs and google sheets for collaboration and documentation. While I was new to some of these tools, I strived to understand and learn them even as my team members supported me whenever possible. I celebrated the idea that we can get work done across different time zones, several hours away from each other and still connect. This process also inspired me to learn new ways to build effective teams.
Finally, I made friends and acquaintances through it all and the memories of taking part in this exciting challenge of building the internet health movement will be etched in my mind for many more months to come!
