What a weekend! Between 28th and 30th October I experienced my first ever MozFest in Ravensbourne College, London. It was fun, mind-bending, exhausting, heart-warming, frustrating and inspiring – all in equal measure.

I attended MozFest thanks to a bursary from SCL (Society of Chief Librarians), which meant I got to meet and spend time with some new library friends from around the country. Talking library developments is always lifting, but MozFest was a chance to stretch and fuel our conversations.

So, what is MozFest? MozFest (Mozilla Festival) is an annual celebration of the open Internet movement. It’s where passionate technologists, educators, and makers come together to explore the future of the open Web.’ Essentially, thousands of people came together for a weekend of sharing, learning, listening and chatting.

The beauty of MozFest is you can attend a workshop on Open Leadership run by MIT Media Lab with the Mozilla’s Executive Director and then move on to a session where children teach you how to create a symphony using an iPad app.

The participants are truly international, with people flying in from all over the world – we are lucky to have this event on our doorstep, and it surprised me that there weren’t more people attending from the UK.

Three core themes emerged from my time at MozFest:

It wasn’t called ‘Open Web’ for nothing!

There were also some engaging workshops and open sessions, which contributors had pitched well in advance via GitHub. On reflection the sessions I selected were very relevant to our digital and learn in libraries offers:

MozFest was totally relevant to the work we are doing in libraries, in fact our #MozLibs hash tag brought librarians to us, many of whom were running sessions and workshops.

We also had a cult like encounter with the Order of Balance.

The truth is I didn’t even scratch the surface. My big frustration was that even though I filled my head and heart with ideas, conversations and new knowledge I left feeling I’d missed so much!

I’ll just have to go back next year. And I’d encourage everyone to come along too.