What is the Mozilla Technology Fund?
The Mozilla Technology Fund (MTF) supports open source projects and maintainers whose work addresses pressing issues. As with Mozilla at large, MTF is especially interested in empowering projects that are committed to building trustworthy AI technologies and working toward an AI ecosystem in which principles of accountability, transparency and agency are centered. Our ultimate goal is to help mission-aligned open source solutions grow and become sustainable, so that they can continue to provide valuable building blocks to the wider ecosystem.
Our Mission
Mozilla believes that the internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible to all. Through our programs, research and advocacy, we rally, resource, and collaborate with individual, organizational, and field-level agents of change who are working to ensure that technology is designed for people and not just profits.
Launched in October 2021, the Mozilla Technology Fund invests in the long-term sustainability of open source projects whose work is aligned with Mozilla’s mission and strategy. Our calls for proposals are guided by annual funding “themes,” which are in turn guided by Mozilla’s medium-term strategy and theory of change. The MTF is meant to be a mechanism for Mozilla to give back to the open source ecosystem that birthed it as well as a means to invest in the next generation of projects that will advance our mission in the world. We hope that the technologies that we fund can become durable agents of change in the open source ecosystem and provide ideas, code and infrastructure for others to build on for years to come.
The design of the Mozilla Technology Fund draws from our learnings from previous Mozilla awards programs like the Mozilla Open Source Support Awards (MOSS). MOSS was run as a partnership between the Mozilla Corporation (the stewards of Firefox)—which provided the funding and high-level strategy—and the Mozilla Foundation (Mozilla’s charitable arm), which lent its expertise in grantmaking and mentorship. Unlike many other funding avenues available to technologists that focus primarily on new feature development, MOSS was underpinned by a commitment to making projects and their teams more sustainable. MOSS ran from 2015 to 2020 and made more than $7.8M in awards to over 140 projects; at the end of this period, a holistic evaluation of MOSS concluded several key learnings, which informed the founding of MTF.
The Mozilla Technology Fund was designed to serve as the Mozilla Foundation’s mechanism for technical grantmaking in the era of generative AI and beyond. MTF leverages everything we learned though MOSS—what sustainability for FOSS projects looks like, how to ensure accountability for teams, how to help projects learn from failures—as well as the expertise the Foundation has built around peer-mentorship, expert guidance and other accompaniments that have been successfully used with past fellows and awardees.
Currently, the MTF provides awards of up to $50,000 USD each, out of an annual pool of $300,000-500,000 USD. The first batch of awards (2022) focused on bias and transparency in AI, the second (2023) on auditing tools for AI systems and the third (2024) on AI technologies which are advancing environmental and climate justice. Awardees work together as a cohort over 12 months to complete their projects and have access to Mozilla fellows and staff who are working on these same issues, as well as a wider, global community, through convenings like MozFest. We bring our awardees together as a group monthly, through virtual meetings and aim to convene each cohort in person at least once, ideally in conjunction with a larger Mozilla gathering.