Picture by Brett GaylorIt’s been an eventful November! The Fellowship program showed up strong at MozFest, which took place in London from 6-8 November.
We kicked it off with a stand at the Science Fair on 30 October, where the Fellows briefly shared their work and experiences at their host organizations. Over the weekend all of the Fellows lead engaging sessions; check out some photos here and here, and read about what they did.
All of the fellows ran successful sessions; Amnesty International and Open Technology Institute shared their work too.
Later, we met with Amnesty International for a day of brainstorming on better integrating technology into some of their projects – an activity that could useful for all host organizations.
Check out some other great work from our fellows this month! NetPosi’s latest podcast, and an SMS tool for live updates on your legislator’s votes.
MozFest Sessions:
- Andrea del Rio introduced participants to the Feminist Principles of the Internet, and challenged them to boil them down to tweetable length (140 characters). The super engaged group produced these tweets by the end of the session, and continued their conversation via #mozfeminist.
- Drew Wilson ran two sessions: Day of Action where he shared his web app and invited participants to share thoughts on how it could be used and improved, and Digital Fab and DIY Activism where he brought original stencils for activism and encouraged participants to design their own activist gear.
- Gem Barret taught learners to code JavaScript in just one hour! Her beginner-focused session “Making with Mozilla: Learning and Teaching” mixed offline and online learning, and gave participants a solid footing into the world of dynamic programming.
- Paola Villareal shared her work on police data and racial bias during her “Using Open Source Tools to Analyze Police Data” – participants came up later to express how intrigued they were not only by the implications, but also by Paola’s investigatory approach.
- Tim Sammut and Tennyson Holloway ran “Be Torrific! Promoting Freedom of Expression with Tor” where they taught about 45 participants about how to run, contribute to, and educate others about Tor. For more details on how it went, read Tim’s blog here.
- Tennyson also worked with our Engineer of Speculative/Disruptive Technology, David Huseby, to run the Privacy Lab in the Digital Citizenship space, where people could learn tips on how to better protect their data online from Mozilla Community members, discover the newest features of Firefox with Firefox engineers, talk about privacy tools with EFF experts, and more.
A couple host organizations also shared their work:
- Milena Marin from Amnesty International talked about the importance of technology in human rights work on the main stage. She also ran “Become a Human Rights CSI” where she challenged participants to put together a satellite image map, point out certain landmarks – tanks, buildings, etc. – and then engage in a conversation.
- Georgia Bullen from Open Technology Institute shared best-practices on building a (human) network engaged in protecting the Open Web. The group worked on principles everyone shares, and how to support others in the space.
- Chris Ritzo, Georgia, and Gem (OWF Fellow) – all from OTI – and Fereidoon Bashar from ASL19 co-ran a session on Open Tools for Network Measurement. They demoed their Measurement App and crowd-sourced ideas on how other communities can use this in their campaigns for fair access.
To read more about MozFest 2015 in general – largely considered the most successful MozFest yet – check out this blog.
Other cool things the Fellows have done this month:
- Check out the latest podcast from NetPosi where Drew chats with Zak Rogoff about the free software movement and how it relates to other social movements that are critical of centralized power.
- Discover Tennyson’s new tool to follow your legislator: get an SMS every time they vote!