(Credit: Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Competing with Google Chrome should be more than enough work for the people behind Firefox, which currently has a small slice of the browser market. But the foundation backing it recently launched a new venture that aims to solve some of the world’s problems instead of the web’s.
In November, the Mozilla Foundation announced its Experimental Incubator for civic technology projects, naming its first four recipients and inviting proposals for the next 10 awards.
“We want you to be pro-social, pro-human, and that's the table stakes,” said Nabiha Syed, the San Francisco-based nonprofit’s executive director, in an interview at the Mozilla Festival in Barcelona. “Come here and figure out your product-community fit.”
The first four projects to receive $50,000 grants through this program apply technology to surface previously buried data, most of it involving pollution:
- Code Carbon provides tools for developers to generate estimates of the carbon footprint of their software as they write it.
- EyeClimate is writing apps to help people analyze satellite imagery of their surroundings to spot methane-gas leaks.
- Fundacion Via Libre helps non-technical users audit recommendation algorithms.
- Proyecto Respira develops air-quality monitoring software for neighborhood-level use.
Syed’s summary of the common ambition behind these projects: “How can we make the invisible visible so we can all make better decisions?”
Her previous job was as editor of The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that has done some groundbreaking work in online privacy and security–some in collaboration in Mozilla–and Syed said that experience informed her approach to the foundation’s new venture.
“One thing we learned at The Markup was the importance of asking the right set of questions, which was never the obvious questions,” she said.
In addition to the money, recipients get access to coaching about things like business structures and open-source-software management, plus the collective insights of the wider Mozilla community (some members of which had gathered in Barcelona for the festival’s three days).
“We've got an inbuilt community of thousands of people who participate from 122 countries in the world, who are excited, early adopters of good tech,” Syed said. “You say you want good tech, let's matchmake a little bit.”
For its second cohort of grant recipients, the Foundation is looking for proposals to leverage AI to support democracy. That may seem a quixotic quest when AI’s primary political utility can seem to be creating deepfakes to push public opinions, but Syed suggested that AI’s potential for what she called “relational technologies” deserves more attention.
“Things that are helping people connect, understand, create, plug into their communities, plug into their societies,” she said, citing such use cases as leveraging AI to help coordinate mutual-aid efforts. “I really think there is a universe of technologies that can be used in those specific ways.”
Two weeks later, the foundation reports that it’s begun receiving pitches from individual developers as well as established organizations for ideas like using AI to explain complicated government documents such as bills and budgets and leveraging it to document the workings of content-moderation systems.
The 10 selected recipients will get $50,000 each, with two finalists to be chosen later for an additional $250,000 apiece. Syed cited such metrics for success as a project’s ability to secure follow-on funding from other sources, as well as more traditional metrics like adoption, growth, and reaching a sustainable basis of operation.
In fewer words: This program isn’t looking to finance the next billion-dollar unicorn.
“We want things to be sustainable for their community, providing real value,” Syed commented. “Things don't need to scale to be great.”
The total outlay will add up to a small fraction of the Foundation’s overall spending. The organization’s latest annual report cited $26 million total in 2023, of which $17.2 million went toward grants to external recipients, $6.2 million toward its own campaigns and activities (the Mozilla Festival included), and $2.6 million for research programs.
It got $7.8 million in donations and $18.6 million in royalties, mainly Google’s payments to Mozilla to remain the default search engine in that browser. The US search-antitrust case against Google had Mozilla execs voicing concern over the future of that critical source of funding, but the remedies laid out in September left Google free to continue those payments to Mozilla as well as Apple.
Syed predicted that this new incubator program will be a template for future donations at Mozilla, saying “This will be the lion's share of our grantsmaking.”
But while the total money going out may increase, she added, the scope of individual projects and grants need not. “Small and scrappy can get you to critical mass,” she said. “Because it can meet needs that the big folks can afford to overlook.”
Disclosure: The Mozilla Foundation provided a travel stipend to cover this conference.