Obligatory Mozfest post

I’m just flying back from Barcelona and I’ve got another 20 minutes to practice my thumb gymnastics, so here’s a brief post about the 15th Mozilla Festival.

Actually, it’s not about Mozfest at all. Because this years Mozfest didn’t really feel like a Mozfest to me. Maybe in other parts of the venue there were people building the future and making the technology that will someday become ubiquitous? Talk is talk and that’s fine, but I didn’t even SEE people with laptops let alone hacking away at things together. I heard, at this Mozfest, about legacies dismissed or forgotten. “Mozfest” stickers were being sold (!?)

This post is about my community. My people. The internet OGs and radically open technologists who, despite waves around at everything still fight the good fight. These people are sitting inside of global NGOs, local governments, fortune 500s, think tanks and so on. Like me, they take the values of open, participatory, community driven, tech for good with them wherever they go.

Luckily for me, Mozilla supported a coincidental meetup for some of the Mozilla Alum spread out across the world. For those of us who could make it to Barcelona, Mozilla sponsored accommodations and a one day alumni event. As always, it wasn’t the organised togetherness that made the event valuable to me (although we did do a Paella Cooking class together that was pretty cool.) It was the moment that a former Mozilla engineer I had never met before and I realised that very obscure 90s references don’t always fall flat. It was the snapshot in the elevator of a former intern laughing about a wild elevator ride from the night before. It was the deep talks with a friend I didn’t manage to keep up with. It was a canoe in the bylaws. The inside jokes, the promises to have each other’s backs. The offers of help.

We said, the Mozilla alumni who were in a circle together all day on Friday, we said that finding the Mozilla community back in the day was when we found belonging. That is still the case, but nowadays it doesn’t have much to do with Mozilla or does it?

We, the Open Web community of ye olde past, are still here. The Old Guard at a societal level. People who believe, still, that the web we want is open, decentralised. People who know how much we’ve won, even if everyone says we lost. We know about the real impact of our lives and careers. We’re still doing the work, with or without Mozilla’s help. We have been and we will continue to do so. Even if Mozfest felt…off… seeing that the Mozilla leadership values and understands the power and influence they helped incubate was a nice way to spend a weekend in Barcelona.