Rewilding the Digital Commons: Leren Labs Heading to MozFest 2026 in Barcelona

Leren Labs will be attending Mozilla Festival (MozFest) 2026, taking place later this week from October 28–30, 2026, at the historic Recinte Fabra i Coats in Barcelona, Spain. Organised by the Mozilla Foundation in partnership with the City of Barcelona as part of Barcelona Open Tech Week, MozFest brings together technologists, open-source builders, researchers, and digital rights defenders from around the globe to co-create an internet built for the public good.

The 2026 Theme: "Wilding" the Internet

In a technology landscape increasingly dominated by centralized corporate platforms, closed AI models, and extractive data economies, MozFest 2026 introduces a timely and necessary provocation: Wilding.

Drawing inspiration from ecological rewilding—where natural systems are granted the autonomy to regenerate through their own balance and diversity—this year's festival explores what happens when we loosen rigid, top-down control and create digital spaces that evolve intuitively and collectively. Across key tracks such as Wilding Systems, Developers Wilding, and Wilding Advocacy, the gathering is centering its debates around:

• Decentralized & Community-Owned Protocols: Replacing walled gardens with federated, interoperable platforms and open networks.
• Public AI & Democratic Governance: Rejecting black-box surveillance architectures in favor of transparent, community-aligned intelligence.
• Cryptographic Provenance & Digital Dignity: Ensuring authentic digital interaction and human agency without erecting new systems of state or corporate exclusion.

Why Leren Labs is Attending: Bringing Provenance to the Wild Web

At Leren Labs, our mission aligns directly with the core ethos of digital self-determination and open infrastructure. As generative AI proliferates across the web, communication platforms face an unprecedented crisis of synthetic manipulation and degraded trust.

Throughout our engagements in Barcelona, the Leren Labs team will be contributing insights from our work on Decast.Live—our decentralized live media verification and identity infrastructure. As discussions unfold across Fabra i Coats, we will focus on three key pillars:

• Provenance Without Surveillance: Demonstrating how cryptographic verification and tamper-proof storage can prove media authenticity and protect journalists and creators—without requiring invasive tracking or compromising source privacy.
• Selective Disclosure & Sovereign Identity: Advocating for verifiable credentials that allow people to authenticate themselves in live digital spaces while retaining full ownership over their personal data.
• Interoperable, Open Foundations: Collaborating with grassroots builders to ensure emerging standards like C2PA and European trust frameworks (such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act) empower independent creators rather than consolidating control within big tech consortia.

Connecting at Recinte Fabra i Coats

MozFest is distinguished by its unique format: rather than passive keynote consumption, it functions as an open laboratory of hands-on workshops, policy debates, and technical labs.

The Leren Labs team is excited to participate in the discussions, testbeds, and collaborative side events happening across Barcelona. We look forward to connecting with fellow open-source maintainers, privacy researchers, civic technologists, and ecosystem partners working to build an authentic, pluralistic digital world.

If you are attending MozFest 2026 or participating in Barcelona Open Tech Week, reach out to connect with our team on the ground. Together, let’s build a digital ecosystem that is decentralized, transparent, and resilient by design.