Mozilla Festival 2026
In a moment when technology feels increasingly centralized, extractive, and controlled, Wilding, the festival’s 2026 theme, is a provocation: what happens when we loosen rigid systems and create the conditions for communities and technologies to evolve collectively, naturally, intuitively?
Inspired by ecological practices of rewilding, where gardens and forests are left to regenerate through their own intelligence, this theme explores what it means to let our digital worlds grow wilder, more diverse, and more alive. It means community-owned mesh networks, federated platforms, open protocols, community archives and tools built on transparency, trust and mutual flourishing.
At MozFest, Wilding is an invitation to restore balance: cultivating infrastructures rooted in care, mutuality, and collective action.
What to expect
- Debates
- Labs
- Forums
- Showcases
- Talks
- Installations
Festival tracks
- Wilding advocacy: This track explores the limits of traditional advocacy in holding technology systems accountable as power concentrates and resists change. It encourages intergenerational learning and highlights practical solutions for how we can normalize, resource, and upscale alternative, disruptive, and open tools for resilience and resistance, particularly in hypersurveilled environments.
- Wilding knowledge: This track explores how communities are actively developing alternative technologies shaped by their own contexts, needs, and intergenerational lived experiences. It highlights localized, accessible approaches that challenge one-size-fits-all tech models.
- Wilding systems: This track brings together systematic conversations on open source, governance models, platform accountability, and the environmental impact of digital infrastructure. The track looks at how we can move away from centres of control, and towards more accountable alternatives.
- Wilding with nature: This track explores what it means to reimagine technology as deeply connected to the natural world, focusing on regeneration, energy, and our relationship to land and environment. It challenges extractive models of growth by asking how we can build and resource technologies that work with and in favor of natural systems.
- Youth wilding: This track is a space for young people (ages 13–17) to explore, build, and shape the internet and technology through hands-on, creative sessions. It is for beginner-friendly, skill-building workshops alongside youth-led sessions, games, and discussions where young people design and facilitate their own ideas.
- Wilding creativity: This track invites artists across mediums to interpret and challenge AI, data, and digital power, making complex issues more accessible, sensory and felt.
- Founders wilding: This track explores how startups can help “wild” the internet by building alternatives to centralized, extractive platforms through trustworthy AI, privacy-first technologies, and healthier online ecosystems.This space highlights early-stage companies actively developing responsible technologies and the conditions they need to grow and endure.
- Developers wilding: Open source AI is growing in the wild, outside the managed gardens of the hyperscalers and the vendor-locked enterprise stacks. The Developer Track is for founders, principal engineers, safety leads, standards folks, all coming together to figure out together whether what’s growing becomes durable, or gets paved over.