I was thrilled to co-design and co-curate Mozilla Festival’s 2022 Rethinking Power and Ethics Space.

One of the unusual features of Mozilla Festival is its de-centralized, community driven, and federated approach to conference design. Each year, a global community of organizers and leaders (‘Wranglers’) are selected to decide on the topics and themes of the conference. Wranglers are then invited to form the de-centralized teams that design and co-curate the parts of the conference dedicated to each topic (so-called ‘Spaces’).

The team that emerged for me was curious to see what we could do to shake-up the conversation about ethics, governance and power around AI. Rethinking Power and Ethics is the result of our collaboration.

We had an overwhelming response from the community, with 70 outstanding session proposals responding to our call. (We had a challenging time selecting the 20-25 sessions we had slots for at the conference…) The topics we ended up featuring ranged from strategic organizing against border tech, commons approaches to data governance, and ML explainability to storytelling, design futures, investor engagement, and digital extractivism in the Global South. Most importantly,

Learn more

• Rethinking Power and Ethics Space Narrative.
• Blog post inviting submissions to Rethinking Power and Ethics during the call for proposal.
• Video interview (broadcast live on March 11 2022) in which I discuss our space.
• (February 14 2022) Podcast interview where Umut Pajaro Velasquez and I discuss our space with Helen Femi from Let’s Get Litical.