From Zoom's Blog originally posted at: https://explore.zoom.us/en/customer_stories/mozilla/

MozFest 2021 offered 530 60-minute sessions over the course of two weeks. The sessions were categorized into various “spaces” – tracks with different primary topics such as “Creative AI” or “Neurodiversity.” Participants chose to attend individual breakout sessions within each track, such as “Trustworthy AI” or “The Internet Health Movement.” Of particular importance to MozFest organizers, was that all sessions had to be participatory.

According to Marc Walsh, digital producer of MozFest, “We tried to avoid sessions that were just one-way presentations. It’s all about interactive conversation and having different voices around the table coming together to talk about a topic.” Walsh explained that his team needed to work out how each session was balanced in terms of giving every participant space to talk and ensuring that there was engagement between everyone in the “room,” though they were not physically there.

Zoom Meetings offered features that were essential to MozFest. “You don’t have to have an individual login to join a Zoom session, and that was really huge for us from an accessibility standpoint,” Gorr said. Zoom’s dial-in feature was critical since many MozFest participants come from areas where internet connectivity is scarce or unaffordable. “We wanted a platform that could include people from all over the world,” Gorr said. “There were attendees from parts of Africa and other remote locations, for example. They just didn’t have the bandwidth to be able to support video on their internet connection.” Gorr also cited Zoom features like closed-captioning and support for sign language interpretation as important options that allowed the entire MozFest community to participate.