Often Community is thought of as a soft topic. In reality, being part of a community (or more!) is admirable, a wonderful effort, both very fun but also sometimes tough and building and mobilising community action requires expertise and understanding of both tools and crowds – all relationships between stakeholders involved need to be planned with inclusivity and sustainability in mind.
This year Mozilla Festival (London, October 24-26), an event we always find very inspiring to collaborate with, will feature a track focusing on all this and more. Called Community Building, and co-wrangled by me and Bekka Kahn (P2PU / Open Coalition), the track has the ambitious aim to tell the story about this powerful and groundbreaking system, create the space where both newcomers and experienced community members can meet, share knowledge, learn from each other, get inspired and leave the festival feeling empowered and equipped with a plan for their next action, of any size and shape, to fuel the values they believe in.
We believe that collaboration between communities is what can really fuel the future of the Open Web movement and we put this belief into practice from our curatorship structure (we come from different organisations and are loving the chance to work together closely for the occasion) to the planning of the track’s programme, which is a combination of great ideas that were sent through the festival’s Call for Proposals and invitations we made to folks we knew would have had the ability to blow people’s mind with 60 minutes and a box of paper and markers at their disposal.
The track has two narrative arcs, connecting all its elements: one focusing on the topics which will be unpacked by each session, from gathering to organising and mobilising community power and one aiming to embrace all learnings from the track to empower us all, member of communities, to take action for change.
The track will feature participatory sessions (there’s no projector is sight!), an ongoing wall-space action and a handbook writing sprint. In addition to this, some wonderful allies, Webmaker Mentors, Mozilla Reps and the Space Wranglers team will help us make a question resonate all around the festival during the whole weekend: “What’s the next action, of any kind/ size/ location, you plan to take for the Open Web movement?”. Participants to our track, passer-bys feeding our wall action, folks talking with our allies will be encouraged to think about the answer to this, and, if not before, join our space for our Closing Circle on Sunday afternoon when we’ll all share with each other our plans for the next step, local or global, online or offline, that we want to take.
Furthermore, we also invite folks who’ll not be able to join us at the event to get in touch with us, know more about what we’re making and collaborate with us if they wish. Events can be an exclusive affair (they require time and funds to be attended) and we want to try to overcome this obstacle. Anyone will be welcome to connect with us in (at least) three ways. We’ll have a dedicated hashtag to keep all online/remote Community conversations going: follow and engage with #MozFestCB on your social media platform of choice, we’ll record a curated version of the feed on our Storify. We’ll also collect all notes, resources of documentation of anything that will happen in and around the track on our online home. The work to create a much awaited Community Building Handbook will be kicked off at MozFest and anyone who thinks could enrich it with useful learnings is invited to join the writing effort, from anywhere in the world.
If you’d like to get a head start on MozFest this year and spend some time with other open knowledge community minded folks, please join our community meetup on Friday evening in London.
As the Open Knowledge Foundation's Events Manager Beatrice leads the team organising OKFestival 2014 (Berlin, July 15-18 – see you there!). Furthermore, she coordinates other Open Knowledge Foundation events working to expand the organisation’s global network through a variety of in person and online actions and formats.
She's also a core member of OpenTechSchool, a community initiative offering free programming workshops and meetups. Follow her on Twitter @beatricemartini.
