1. Let’s meet up at Mozfest

    Announcing: mySociety will be at Mozilla Festival (MozFest) this year in London!

    Mozfest is the open internet conference which is hosted annually and seeks to bring open web advocates together to collaborate, discuss, and hack together. mySociety previously attended MozFest in 2013, 2014, and 2015 and we’re excited to return this year!

    We’ll be presenting during MozFest Weekend (26-28 October) and are looking forward to sharing our work, learning, and collaborating during the festival. We’ll be presenting in the Decentralisation space about our Democratic Commons work with Wikidata and political data within civic tech.

    Our interactive session will cover the power and possibilities of Wikidata when complete political data is added to the site and continuously updated. Participants will learn about how they can upkeep this data in their own region or how to use it for research purposes. Most importantly, our session will demonstrate how political data on Wikidata can promote active citizenship and civic engagement. We look forward to our session and hope to gain insights from those who attend as well in our breakout discussion session.

    Our presentation Empowering Active Citizens: Political Engagement through Wikidata, will be on Sunday 28 October at 11:00 in room 602.

    Keep up with us on social media for updates throughout the festival — and you can find general festival happenings via @mozillafestival and the #Mozfest hashtag.

    Image: Mozilla in Europe (CC by-sa/2.0)

  2. mySociety at MozFest14

    mozfest crowd

    MozFest14. If you know where to look, a mySociety human is in there. Somewhere.

    We were at the Mozilla Festival again this year. In practice, this meant we had a table at the Friday night Science Fair, ran a session in the Build and Teach the Web track about “Reusable Civic Tech”, and spent a lot of time meeting old friends and making lots of new ones (technically, we call that “networking”). This blog post is a shout-out to all the fabulous people we talked to, demonstrated with, learnt from, and perhaps even drank a cheeky beer with. It was excellent to meet you all.

    Because we’re based in the UK, we’re especially lucky that the Mozilla Foundation’s annual festival was once again held in London. It’s good for us because our friends from the London Mozilla Space are there, and also because this makes it easy for us to get to (unlike so many of the attendees, we didn’t need to travel all the way into the country first). In fact, the unique and lofty Ravensbourne venue is an excellent location for such an event — it’s easy to see what’s happening on the other floors, and it’s easy to wander up and down between them. There is a lot going on to see and do, and, just like last year, even the stairs are productive: we had some serendipitous encounters on our way between floors.

    Our primary activity at the festival was spreading the word about the Poplus federation and its reusable civic tech components. If you bumped into any of us, or if what we were demonstrating tickled your fancy, or if you are even now wearing one of the T-shirts we generously gave out: do please remember to get involved!

    Image credit: Mozilla in Europe CC BY-SA 2.0