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MozFest: a seven-day community gathering dedicated to creating a better, healthier open internet

MozFest is an annual, hands-on festival for and by the open Internet movement. Every year, bright minds from around the world build, debate, and explore the future of our lives online. In this publication, everyone is invited to share their thoughts and start conversations.

Celebrating Hackers, journalists, activists, artists and scientists. People who are the strength of the internet health movement and the reason it’s making a positive impact across the globe.

At MozFest 2019, the focus is on the collective power of the internet health movement on making today’s internet more humane. For one full week in London, they will create art to showcase how flawed AI can sometimes be — and then write code to fix it. We’ll brainstorm products and policies that put social responsibility, ethics, and the user first. And they will also envision the challenges and opportunities of the decade to come.

Social Media Use Continues to Rise in Developing Countries but Plateaus Across Developed Ones (Pew Research Center report, 2018)

In recent years, there have been doubts raised about the overall benefits of internet access and social media use. Concerns or no, the share of people who use the internet or own a smartphone continues to expand in the developing world and remains high in developed nations. When it
comes to social media use, people in emerging and developing markets are fast approaching levels seen in more advanced economies. In addition, as people in advanced economies reach the upper bounds of internet penetration, the digital divide continues to narrow between wealthy and
developing countries.

Click here for full report.

A toolkit for researching women’s internet access and use (GSMA, 2018)

In an increasingly connected world, women are being left behind. Although internet access is expanding, there is a persistent digital gender gap. Gender-disaggregated data on internet access and use is critical to measuring and understanding this gap and informing policy and actions to address it. However, this data is still limited. This toolkit seeks to address this issue by providing example research topics and questions that stakeholders can use to understand and measure differences between women’s and men’s internet access and use. Ideally, this will produce more comparable data and contribute to a fuller global picture of the digital gender gap.

The toolkit is the result of a collaboration between Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), the World Wide Web Foundation, the GSMA and Association for Progressive Communications.

Click here for full toolkit.

Universal Service & Access Funds: An Untapped Resource to Close the Gender Digital Divide (Web Foundation Report, 2018)

Achieving universal, affordable internet access is a key social and economic priority for countries around the world. The 193 member states of the United Nations agreed to work toward achieving this target by 2020 as part of the Sustainable Development Goals, and most countries have policies in place to ensure that internet access and use is a reality for all. To this end, many countries have established communal funds dedicated to expanding connectivity opportunities to unserved and underserved communities. These funds, known as Universal Service and Access Funds (USAFs), are typically financed through mandatory contributions by mobile network operators and other telecommunications providers.

Making effective use of these funds is a critical step on the path to realising our shared goal of access for all. We are on track to reach 50% internet penetration in 2018 — an exciting milestone, to be sure, but one that also highlights the distance we have to go. Connecting the last four billion will not happen through market forces alone; it will require targeted efforts aimed at connecting those least likely to be connected, including those in poor, rural and hard to-reach communities. Above all, it will require efforts particularly targeted at connecting women, who comprise the majority of those offline today.

And yet, USAFs remain, for the most part, an untapped resource for working toward these aims. For this research, we set out to find out more about the use of USAFs in Africa — the region with the lowest rate of internet penetration (22%) and the widest digital gender gap (25%). How many of Africa’s 54 countries have operational USAFs, if they have one at all? Are USAF funds being used to close the digital divide and, specifically, the gender digital divide? What can governments and fund operators do to improve the impact of USAF-funded initiatives and accelerate efforts to connect women and close the digital divide?

Click here for full report.

New 2018 Global Digital Reports from We Are Social and Hootsuite

The new 2018 Global Digital suite of reports from We Are Social and Hootsuite reveals that there are now more than 4 billion people around the world using the internet. Well over half of the world’s population is now online, with the latest data showing that nearly a quarter of a billion new users came online for the first time in 2017. Africa has seen the fastest growth rates, with the number of internet users across the continent increasing by more than 20 percent year-on-year.

Much of this year’s growth in internet users has been driven by more affordable smartphones and mobile data plans. More than 200 million people got their first mobile device in 2017, and two-thirds of the world’s 7.6 billion inhabitants now have a mobile phone.

Social media use continues to grow rapidly too, and the number of people using the top platform in each country has increased by almost 1 million new users every day during the past 12 months.

More than 3 billion people around the world now use social media each month, with 9 in 10 of those users accessing their chosen platforms via mobile devices.

Here are the essential headlines for digital in 2018:

  • The number of internet users in 2018 is 4.021 billion, up 7 percent year-on-year
  • The number of social media users in 2018 is 3.196 billion, up 13 percent year-on-year
  • The number of mobile phone users in 2018 is 5.135 billion, up 4 percent year-on-year

Click here for full report.

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