Hive Labs at the Mozilla Festival: Building an Ecosystem for Innovation

 

This weekend marks the fifth year anniversary of the Mozilla Festival - and Hive Labs has a ton of fun design - oriented, hands-on activities to get messy with in person or remotely. We are using the event to explore design questions that are relevant to local communities and Hives and to dabble in building out a community-driven ecosystem for innovation. Here's a few highlights:

Challenges to Enacting and Scaling Connected Learning

This year, the Hive track at MozFest (http://2014.mozillafestival.org/tracks/) is bringing together Hive and "Hive curious" travelers from around the world to incubate solutions to shared challenges in enacting and scaling connected learning. We're working together over the course of the MozFest weekend to collaboratively answer questions that come up again and again in our networks across the globe. One question that Hive Labs is focusing on is: How do we build a community that supports innovation in the education space? 

Action Incubator

We will be hosting a series of activities embedded within the Hive track to think through problems in your Hives and local communities and brainstorming solutions collectively. We will be leveraging three teaching kit's that were made specifically to facilitate this kind of design thinking activity:

• Firestarter: In this activity, participants will identify opportunities and then brainstorm potential design solutions.
• User Testing at an Event: Events are a great time to leverage all of the different kinds of voices in a room to get feedback on an in-progress project or half-baked idea. This activity will help you to test ideas and projects and get constructive and actionable feedback.
• Giving + Getting Actionable Feedback: Getting effective and actionable feedback on your half - baked ideas and projects can be challenging. This activity explores some ways to structure your feedback session.

Art of the Web 

This entire track is dedicated to showcasing and making art using the Web as your medium. Follow the #artoftheweb hashtag on twitter. 

Visualization of the Web Literacy Map by Chad Sansing - 

in response to the #mozfest remotee challenge

MozFest Remotee Challenge

Want to join in on all of the Mozilla Festival action even though you aren't physically at the event? This challenge is for you! We have compiled a handful of activities focused on Web Literacy, supporting community - based learning and making so that you can take part in the conversation and brainstorming at the Mozilla Festival. Go here to start the challenge.

You can follow along all weekend using the #mozfest or #hivebuzz hashtags on Twitter.

How to learn more about Net Neutrality

Like many people, I wasn't really aware of the potential impact that opposers of Net Neutrality could have, or for that matter what net neutrality was, until I was introduced to the topic by John Oliver on his tv show Last Week Tonight. After hearing his explanation and comedic rant, I started to learn more about net neutrality. My colleague, David Steer explains net neutrality as the opinion that 

"Data, regardless of who it is from or who is receiving it, is treated equally by Internet service providers."

I like to think of it as opening up the door for 2 internets - one that comes at a cost, and another that is free. Sounds fine, right? You're like .. ok what's the big deal? I'll just use the free one. But just like many other free services that you have used that all of a sudden put up features behind a paywall, your free offering becomes crap - cluttered with ads, slower to use and just a poor man's version of the prime real estate - this too will happen with the Web. 

I believe that this issue is the most important topic for web users (globally), because without the neutral infrastructure of the internet, many freedoms that we take for granted in this hand crafted community - such as speech - become compromised in a privileged and gated web. Opposition to net neutrality threatens democracy, participation and free speech.  But this isn't a hopeless cause, there is actually something proactive that you can do to protect the Web that you love: you can learn more about Net Neutrality and explain it's importance to your small circle of the world why it's important. The goal is to create an educated groundswell that will be able to defend the open web.

Here are a few concrete ways to learn:

1. Attend the free Net Neutrality global teach-ins offered by Mozilla this week
2. Check out the the Net Neutrality kit
3. Do an activity  - here's a 1 hour activity
4. Join the conversation on discourse

I contributed to these kits by making a few activities:

I fight for #TeamInternet to save net neutrality because: You can make an internet meme explaining why you support net neutrality.

Superheroes for Net Neutrality: Calling all Superheroes! The Legion of Thorn has created 2 Webs - resulting in a dystopian state. Avenge them and defend Net Neutrality by crafting a league of superheroes to join Team Web, and remix a comic book webpage to show how they use their superpowers to save the day. 

This comic remix was made by a 7 year old

Regardless of how you learn about Net Neutrality, take some time out of your day to add it to your information diet.