Wikimedians at Mozilla Festival 2025: Building an Inclusive, Resilient, and Rights-Based Digital Future

Spain, Barcelona, Interior of the Sagrada Família. Image by Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How can we reimagine the digital world so that it serves everyone, not just the powerful few?

This is the question Wikimedians are bringing to Mozilla Festival (MozFest), which is taking place in Barcelona, Spain, from November 7–9, 2025. MozFest is a global gathering that brings together technologists, policymakers, activists, artists, and educators to shape a healthier internet and a more just digital future.

At MozFest, Wikimedians are participating in four key sessions that reflect the Wikimedia movement’s values: openness, accessibility, and community governance. Each conversation examines how free knowledge, inclusive design, and public interest technology can help build an internet rooted in human rights, equity, and collective power.

We hope you’ll join us to rethink the defaults of technology governance and ensure that the internet remains open, participatory, and resilient.

Wikimedia sessions at MozFest 2025

Resisting in Parallel: How Communities Build Digital Safety in Hostile Systems

🕒 7 November, 17:15–18:15 CET 📍 Zone B — Room B2 | Track: Unlearning Default Security Hosts: Laura Vidal (Curious Shapes/Wikimedia Foundation) and Daria Cybulska (Wikimedia UK)

What happens when the very tools meant to protect us become tools of control?

From Latin America to Central Asia, digital technologies are essential for communities to stay connected, informed, and safe — but they are also weaponized by authoritarian regimes to surveil, intimidate, and silence dissent. This session draws on firsthand research, lived experience, and grassroots documentation to explore what digital repression looks like — and how communities push back. Repression doesn’t just monitor activists, journalists, and civil society groups. It reshapes the language they can use, the platforms they rely on, and even their sense of safety in exile.

Participants will engage in a structured conversation where we’ll map shared patterns across regions and reflect on how communities adapt not only their tools, but also their strategies, language, and collective imagination. This session offers a grounded, transregional perspective on digital repression — and highlights community-driven ways to make security possible even when nothing feels safe.

The Role of the Internet in Building Climate-Resilient Communities

🕒 8 November, 10:15–11:15 CET 📍 Zone B — Room B3 | Track: Unlearning Tech Immateriality Hosts: Sadik Shahadu (Dagbani Wikimedians User Group) and Shadrach Ankrah (Africa Rural Internet and STEM Initiative (AFRISTEMI))

This session will examine the important role of the Internet in fostering climate-resilient communities, particularly in areas that are extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including disasters. While it is often understood as immaterial (being in the cloud, etc.), the Internet relies on vulnerable infrastructure that can be disrupted by the impacts of crises, such as climate change, leaving communities disconnected when they need the Internet the most.

We’ll explore how robust digital infrastructure and emergency telecommunications are crucial for human safety, disaster response, and long-term adaptation. The session will also cover the Internet’s role in proactive climate action and community resilience building. This includes access to online education for continuous learning during disruptions, remote work capabilities for economic stability, and digital tools for community organizing and resource sharing.

Finally, the session will cover how governments, civil society, the technical community, and the private sector can work together to ensure that the Internet truly serves as a foundation for strong, adaptive communities capable of facing future climate challenges.

Reimagining Tech for Linguistic and Disability Inclusion

🕒 8 November, 16:00–17:00 CET 📍 Zone C— Room C3 | Mozilla Festival Partner Track Hosts: Sadik Shahadu (Dagbani Wikimedians User Group) and Dr. Gina Moape (Centre of Augmented Intelligence and Data Science)

The default design in the current technology ecosystem is deeply shaped by Western-centric norms, able-bodied and neurotypical user assumptions, high-bandwidth environments, and English as the dominant language. These defaults create structural barriers that marginalize millions, especially those with disabilities and speakers of non-dominant languages. Accessibility is often an afterthought, and multilingual support is rarely prioritized, despite the global linguistic diversity and the digital divide in rural or underserved areas.

This session will interrogate these embedded design defaults and present a conceptual framework for inclusive, locally grounded, and user-centered design that actively centers language equity and accessibility for people with disabilities. Participants will engage with case studies, personal narratives, and design prompts that surface alternative approaches and challenge the one-size-fits-all mentality. The final conceptual framework will be documented and distributed openly to designers, developers, policy advocates, community organizations, and educational institutions working toward more inclusive technology systems.

The Wikipedia Test: A Tool for the Public Interest Internet

🕒 9 November, 16:00–17:00 CET 📍 Zone F — Room F1 | Track: Unlearning Power in Tech Governance Hosts: Albert Cañigueral (Barcelona Supercomputing Center), Pablo Aragón (Decidim), and Ziski Putz (Wikimedia Foundation)

This workshop will highlight the importance of online platforms such as Decidim and Wikimedia, as well as institutions like the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, all of which provide information or essential resources that serve the public good and leverage digital technologies in the public interest.

Participants will learn how to apply the Wikipedia Test, an advocacy tool developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, to assess the impact of new technology policies on the public interest internet. Specifically, whether legislation will harm or promote these successful examples of community-led platforms that provide a digital public good. Feedback from participants will help improve the tool, making it more beneficial for digital rights defenders globally.

Let’s connect at MozFest 2025!

Whether you’re exploring the Wikipedia Test, reimagining accessibility, or learning from communities resisting repression, we invite you to join us at Mozilla Festival 2025.

Together, we can reframe technology as a shared public good — one that uplifts, informs, and connects.