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Our Theory of Change

Aug. 5, 2024
Mehan Jayasuriya

Written by Mehan Jayasuriya

The Mozilla Technology Fund seeks to make open source projects stronger by focusing on their community and sustainability. MTF’s funding approach is strongly aligned with Mozilla’s institution-wide Trustworthy AI funding principles and works in tandem with other funding strategies implemented through Mozilla’s larger Fellowships and Awards program.

  • Desired outcome: MTF is working towards a world where AI is more trustworthy and AI-driven products and services center human agency and accountability.
  • Strategic objective: MTF aims to effect lasting change at multiple levels in the AI ecosystem—the development of AI, its maintenance, and its governance—by supporting and sustaining communities who are at the forefront of positively transforming our relationship to AI. MTF funds those open source maintainers who are studying AI, interrogating it, (re)building it, (re)imagining it, and ultimately, making AI work for the public good. MTF believes that working open can be a powerful lever to bring greater transparency, agency, accountability and fairness to the AI ecosystem and can provide the building blocks with which to create future trustworthy technologies.

MTF’s Funding Anchors

The Mozilla Technology Fund invests in projects and maintainers which meet the specific criteria set forth in a call for proposals. Each call for proposals is guided by a funding “theme,” which attempts to locate an area of the open source ecosystem that is currently underfunded, technologically emergent and where MTF’s funding can potentially have an outsized impact. Our themes also target projects that sit at the intersection of technology and society—this can mean projects that grapple with the impacts of AI on everyday life or which propose solutions to some of the biggest challenges of our day, such as climate change. Finally, we try to identify themes where Mozilla’s network—current fellows, staff and partners—can provide valuable input and mentorship.

Underpinning these themes are the following MTF funding anchors, which guide all of the Mozilla Technology Fund’s grantmaking across cohorts:

  • Working open is a transformative practice: We believe that working open can beget greater transparency, agency, accountability and fairness; all MTF projects are required to use a free software/open source license as defined by either the FSF or OSI. We expect all project teams to embrace openness, transparency, and community stewardship as methodology.
  • We fund values-driven teams: The ideal MTF project will shift power from those who possess more to those who possess less, challenge industry norms through the use of transparency, and make a difference in the impacts that technology has on real people's lives. Our hope is that these values will be passed down to any downstream projects which make use of the tools that we fund.
  • Projects that already have momentum are best-positioned to succeed: MTF projects generally must have at least a working prototype in hand. Ideally, we like to see projects that can demonstrate some success in building a community of users and contributors. Projects should be able to clearly articulate what it is they are building, who they are building it for and why those people use their tool. The MTF generally does not fund projects which are at the idea stage.
  • We build better together: MTF projects should already have a core team in place to support the development of the proposed technology. That team should be able to demonstrate a track record of success in building similar projects, ideally in the FOSS ecosystem. As part of their MTF experience, projects will receive peer mentorship from the other project teams and be connected with experts inside and outside of Mozilla to help address their project’s specific needs. MTF encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing through our cohort model and seeks to fund the development of infrastructure that can help encourage greater participation from a project’s community. In the long term, we hope to build a larger community of practice around MTF and other technical grantmaking programs at Mozilla.
  • It is better to build with communities than for them: While the Mozilla Technology Fund is generally open to all applicants regardless of geographic location or institutional affiliation, we are especially interested in receiving applications from the Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA); members of the Global Majority or Global South; ​​Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color; women, transgender, non-binary, and/or gender-diverse applicants; migrant and diasporic communities; and/or persons coming from climate displaced/impacted communities. We believe that technologies that serve specific regions and communities should be the result of deep partnership and collaboration with those communities and ideally, owned and maintained by them.
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2022 Funding Theme