image by Donald Judge at Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Repeat after me:
“Mozilla Drumbeat Festival is NOT a conference.”
Recently, Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation asked me to act as global coordinator for the first annual Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, slated for November 3-5 in Barcelona.
The theme is “Learning, Freedom, and the Web,” and we are now working hard to create an open space where everyone who comes (up to 500) can be both teacher and learner.
This week, I have been designing our planning framework, and working with Mark and others on the team to imagine how this kind of radically open peer-learning space will work.
We have some ideas and some questions.
From the planning page:
The Festival is not a conference with a structure of tracks, plenaries, sessions, and workshops. Instead, imagine a hybrid network of curated and self-organized groupings that meet and disperse in the spaces provided throughout the Festival…
Each grouping will gather in largely pre-determined times and spaces to move their Festival project from conversation/showcasing to action/state changes. Grouping leaders are responsible for designing an engaging co-learning experience, because people can vote with their feet.
Participants will build their own Festival experience by committing to working with some groupings through the whole Festival and sampling among the others. Every grouping is “in a fishbowl,” transparently available to any Festival participant to experience at their own level of commitment…
Every participant should come committed to playing, working and learning together. Everyone has something to teach. Everyone has something to learn.
We have listed some of the groupings that are already defined here. You can also find a list of confirmed participants and some ideas we have for other open and interactive experiences we are planning.
One problem is that “groupings” is not a very compelling term for what we are trying to create. Here are some ideas we’ve had:
- Tents: fits into the “Festival” concept. However, once we’ve designed the space, there may not be any actual tents.
- Nodes: As in “network nodes.”
- Pods: I’m partial to this one. I like the idea of participants joining a series of pods.
At this point, we’re totally open to recommendations. Use the comments section below to weigh in. Which of these do you like (or hate) and why? Can you suggest another term to describe these ad hoc co-learning groups?
Also, if you have ideas for tents/nodes/pods you would like to propose and design, please let us know. You can suggest one in the comments, and I’ll get back to you, and we’ve also set up a sort of suggestion box called the Drumbeat Festival Awesome Sandbox on the planning wiki that anyone can use to leave ideas for us to consider at this early planning phase. Anyone can sign up for an editing account on the Mozilla wiki.
So, please, be in touch with your recommendations and ideas. My contact information is here.
UPDATE:
Some new ideas have come through for naming the groupings:
- Clusters
- Affinities
- Caucuses
- Classes
- Workshops
- Guilds
