Heldôfbylding

Sustaining

Aug. 7, 2024
Mozilla

Skreaun troch Mozilla

While movement-building work has many phases, one of the most important is to ensure the resilience and sustainability of our movements beyond a grantmaking cycle. Movement leaders and their communities must have the long-term security they require to innovatively address the issues they’re facing, push-back against powerful authorities and continue to thrive socially, politically, culturally and economically.

That’s why our grantmaking strategy supports innovative and bold efforts in a field where long-term, flexible funding is scarce and often requires communities to subject their ideas to rigid boundaries and conditions designed by the funder.

Our funding to technical and civil society projects remains agile and builds on the principle of sustainability - because our funding processes are co-created and refined in a collaborative process with cohorts themselves, and alumni.

Algorithm watchdog and Mozilla Technology Fund awardee Tracking Exposed investigates influential and opaque recommender systems like TikTok. Their reports were picked up by several media outlets, sparked a letter to the US Senate, and helped pave the path towards TikTok Congressional Hearings. This scrutiny kept TikTok continually on the back foot and forced them to change or clarify their content policy. These impacts have also helped them raise more funds to make their software more robust.

Mozilla Tech + Society Fellow Amarela has deconstructed and reconstructed traditional “digital security” frameworks, replacing it increasingly with “digital care”. Amarela, through doing extensive research about Brazil’s expanding surveillance infrastructure and its impact on activists, and training activists on digital security, has developed more holistic and sustainable approaches to safety for feminist and LGBT movements, embedded in every-day care practices.

Sustaining movements as they build trustworthy AI

We’re not just funding new tech needed for a human-centered internet and trustworthy AI - we’re working to ensure that technical communities become more sustainable and resilient as they look ahead, resulting in long-lasting and effective solutions.

Technology projects suffer from a lack of resources for areas of work often deemed unglamorous, and are yet essential. Mozilla aims to fund the ongoing maintenance, community stewardship, and growth and security infrastructure necessary for open source projects - and the people behind them - to thrive long-term. Our technical grantmaking is made holistic by our commitments in the areas of convening and knowledge-creation and knowledge-sharing.

In 2023, we (re)invested through our programs to support and sustain open source technology communities grappling with key AI issues. In addition, we are investing in community-led and community-built tech infrastructures through our investment in Fellows and Awardees which creates a pipeline of responsible business and technology leaders for the future.

That’s why, in 2023 -

  • We awarded $2.7 million total in prizes through the Responsible Computing Challenge to institutions embedding ethics into computing education across three regions: 15 universities in the United States, 11 of which are Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs); 10 universities in India; and 8 universities in Kenya;
  • Through theMozilla Technology Fund, we supported technologists building open source auditing tools, in order to establish greater transparency and increased accountability for AI’s functions and impact - our second year funding projects in that problem space;
  • Based on lessons learned in other data donation programs, the Data Futures Lab supported five ambitious projects building crowdsourcing datasets for the public good. From a browser plug-in which enables users to redact slurs and abusive content, archive problematic content, and collectively push back against online gender based violence, to refining a popular open-source tool to track network interruptions around the world, these projects are addressing issues like health research, online gender-based violence, and broadband inequalities.

Te Hiku Media , a 2023 Data Futures Lab Awardee, launched the Kaitiakitanga License, a new data license that prioritizes indigenous data sovereignty. Any profits generated from data use are reinvested directly into the communities from which the data is derived. The license benefits the community, and is being used to protect the most accurate automatic speech recognition model for the Maori language.

Importantly,

  • We reached approximately 5,000 students while partnering with over 33 faculty members globally through the Responsible Computing Challenge last year;

  • 80% of Mozilla Technology Fund-awarded projects reported that they were able to become more sustainable in the year following the receipt of the award;
  • 80% of awarded projects reported expanding infrastructure and maintenance efforts using their MTF award.
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