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Growing

Aug. 7, 2024
Mozilla

Skreaun troch Mozilla

growing

In 2023, the Mozilla Foundation awarded more than $6.4m in funding and supported 17 fellows working to advance Trustworthy AI and ensure the internet remains a force for good.

At Mozilla, we think about growth in a different way. We measure growth not just by looking at ways to increase the end-of-year numbers, but by refining our focus and building trust both within and across specific contexts, movements and regions.

To us, growth is not just about expansion, but about deepening our engagement with diverse communities, and enabling connection and dialogue among critical movement-actors and stakeholders.

As a result of locally-led movement-building initiatives such as Africa Innovation Mradi, we are building trust among African movements and increasing visibility of our funding opportunities in the region.

That’s why it was so exciting for us to see a 300% increase in applications from the African region in 2023. We funded twice as many projects in the region as well (56 grants in 2023, compared with 25 in 2022).

We received nearly 1,500 applications in response to eight calls for funding: this is nearly triple the number of applications received in 2022. We also saw a significant increase in demand for funding, particularly from communities in the Global Majority: 53% of projects we funded in 2023 were located in the Global Majority.

A look at 2023

Growing our movements’ collective power and ability to reshape the public narrative on AI

Who tells the story about AI? For so long, building and maintaining AI narratives has been the domain of large corporations and powerful authority figures. The predominant narratives about AI in our world can sometimes seem to instill fear, to invoke a sense of inferiority in us, a feeling that we are helpless against an inevitable tide and a much more powerful force.

But movements understand that narratives are more than just stories - they are signifiers of a world-view and a vision for our shared future. That’s why it’s more important than ever that we center diverse voices, experiences and perspectives to reclaim narrative space and lift the veil on AI.

That’s why Mozilla funding is designed to reach the many different corners of our movements. We bring artists, creatives, journalists, policy analysts, policymakers, researchers, technologists, and community advocates together through our funding, so they can interrogate, expose and play with AI in order to give communities a sense of access and ownership.

Creative Media Awardees Lujain Ibrahim and Alia ElKattan designed The Algorithm: an interactive, educational tool which helps demystify social media platform algorithms for regular users. Users help test a fictional company’s social media algorithm, scrolling, liking, and sharing content as they go. All the while, they witness what happens under the hood in real time as the system becomes personalized to them.

In 2023,

  • We convened 104 fellows and awardees across two MozFest House events in Amsterdam and Nairobi. These interactions expand their horizons and redefine their work - as well as ours. When they come together, they build collective political power to achieve our goals and reclaim the public discourse about AI.
  • We funded 11 Creative Media Award projects from seven countries across five continents using art, advocacy, and technology to unpack how AI is - and should be - designed.
  • We expanded our Responsible Computing Challenge from the US to Kenya and India, as part of our work on diversifying who is involved in the design and governance of AI and ensuring that students graduating into the workforce develop the capacity to think about the ethical implications and the social impact of technology;
  • We awarded 18 grants to projects and organizations working at the intersection of society and AI, including the Media Institute of Southern Africa (to develop a regulatory framework for AI in Southern Africa), AI NOW Institute (to create a web repository for AI related policy developments in the US and EU), REAL ML (a network of researchers and practitioners from across sectors dedicated to challenging injustice resulting from technology), and Weaving Liberation (an initiative dedicated to decolonizing the digital rights field);
  • We supported Senior Fellows in work they are leading to challenge dominant narratives about AI and build movements to chart a different course forward, including driving research on how online advertising industries are thwarting women’s reproductive rights, mobilizing awareness campaigns to battle climate disinformation in Brazil, and facilitating harm reduction across online dating platforms that use racialized algorithmic systems;
  • We saw Mozilla Fellows and Awardees - Stephanie Dinkins, Abeba Birhane, Inioluwa Deborah Raji, and Shakir Mohamed - recognized in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI.

Mozilla Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI,Abeba Birhane, is a cognitive scientist by training and an Afrofeminist by choice, and spends much of her time analyzing datasets and uncovering the stereotypes and biases within them. But her work involves much more - it includes advocating for the issue of bias in AI to be taken seriously, engaging with the work of other Black and decolonial scholars, and exposing the harmful impact of bias in AI.

Growing the space for decision-makers in AI design and governance

Our fellows and awardees are agitators, movement-leaders and disruptors who are holding the door open not just for themselves, but for others like themselves. They want more than a proverbial “seat at the table”: they want to create a bigger, more welcoming table, at which you’re encouraged to ask the difficult questions.

We are aligned with our awardees in a shared vision for this world: a world in which diverse, historically excluded communities make the decisions which shape how AI is built and inform its governance.

Our fellows’ and awardees’ work expands across a range of critical issues, and they seek holistic solutions which are meaningful, long-lasting and beneficial to a greater number of people.

Their work represents a range of interventions, from making technology studies more equitable, accessible and available to those historically excluded, to achieving language justice for communities who, for too long, have been left out of enjoying the benefits of innovation.

Mozilla Fellow Tarcizio Silva’s work examining the intersection of racism and AI is helping to shape the policy and regulatory environment around digital platforms in Brazil, including informing multiple policy proposals around Brazil's AI Act and the “Systematization of Contributions to Consultation on the Regulation of Digital Platforms” published by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee.

That’s why, in 2023-

  • The Mozilla Kiswahili Gender Action Plan - driven by Mozilla’s Common Voice Fellows in 2021 - helped to propel Mozilla and other funders this year to think differently about our work, including expanding gender options to the Common Voice platform;
  • We showed how voice technology could be more human centered by supporting eight projects led by African technologists, policy advocates and researchers to address exclusion in mainstream voice AI, with a focus on the Kiswahili language spoken by about 100 million people across East Africa. These projects leveraged Common Voice and focused on advancing financial inclusion, strengthening access to reliable information for smallholder farmers, and protecting legal rights to land ownership for marginalized communities;
  • We supported six organizations across the global majority working on key contemporary challenges in data stewardship through a Data Futures Lab Showcase. Their projects provide a range of solutions, including community-owned internet to communities in informal settlements, accessible agricultural advice via machine learning to farmers, and an independent public complaints platform where citizens can report hate-speech or attacks on journalists; and
  • As part of the Open Source Audit Tooling (OAT) Initiative, we supported a team of leading AI researchers, including Brianna Vechionne, Inioluwa Deborah Raji, and Abeba Birhane, to identify the resources and tools needed to support auditors to analyze algorithmic systems and inform decision making around resources and governance.

As a fellow at Mozilla Rebecca Ryakitimbo has led efforts toward a Common Voice Gender Action Plan, which contains specific gender elements to be considered in the project design and implementation, monitoring and evaluating progress. In addition to this plan being applied in the context of Mozilla’s work, it has also been implemented by other stakeholders, including funders providing essential resources to the field in this space.

Growing our own capacity to identify the most pressing issues, and to understand how it’s all connected

Here’s what listening to our movements has taught us: AI has a profound impact on us as a society, and will shape our future. Because of its rapid proliferation around the world as a way to “solve” and “address” issues, as well as the enormous capital tied to its potential success, AI is a force to contend with. AI-powered decisions shape our day-to-day lives, sometimes without our consent or even our knowledge.

Our current focus on Trustworthy AI at Mozilla stems from the premise — and the knowledge — that AI intersects with all other issues facing us as a society.

This is why, some years ago, we started looking across movements and sectors, to forge new partnerships and to pool our resources with other funders. We believe that if the issues we’re facing are inter-connected, then our responses should be collective.

For example, in 2015, Mozilla joined forces with other major US foundations who came together with a deep understanding that the rapid growth of the internet created challenges and opportunities in every area of contemporary life, touching virtually every area of concern to philanthropy. This commitment established the Netgain Partnership, which supports platform research, regulation and governance, and philanthropic engagement and education.

This approach to join efforts with other funders to have broader and more meaningful impact also led to other exciting funding collaboratives, such as the European AI and Society Fund (a philanthropic venture Mozilla helped establish in 2020 to support European civil society to be active and effective partners in shaping AI policies that serve the needs of people and society); and our partnership with Numun fund (a fund based in the global majority aimed at funding feminist tech infrastructures).

It also led to the creation of the Green Screen Coalition, which is a new group of funders and practitioners working together to build bridges across the digital rights and climate justice movements.

This community-centerned and learning-based approach has enabled us to structure programs responding to emerging issues.

As a result, in 2023 -

  • The Green Screen Catalyst Fund was launched by the Green Screen Coalition to support a diversity of actors from across the globe working at the intersection of climate justice and digital rights to enact change in terms of policy, research and movement-building;
  • Learning coming out of years of collaboration with movement actors in the climate justice movement led us to focus the current Mozilla Technology Fund cohort on supporting open-source AI for environmental justice. Ten grants were awarded to projects in six countries: India, France, Kenya, Paraguay, Uganda, and the U.S.;
  • We partnered with the Aapti Institute and USAID to kick off an initiative to strengthen data stewardship practices in schools across India;

Mozilla Technology Fund awardee Code Carbon is building a code package to help developers estimate their tools’ carbon emissions, and then offers ways to lessen it.

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