User:Hecker/GrantStrategy/Education

The following describes an existing Mozilla program in terms consistent with my personal framework for strategic grantmaking:

• Problem: The Mozilla project needed to attract and grow new Mozilla contributors, and students in university computer science programs and programming courses were not being taught the skills and technologies relevant to Mozilla and other open source projects.
• Entrepreneurial partner: Dave Humphrey of Seneca College.
• Internal champions: Mike Shaver and others in the Mozilla Toronto office.
• Short-term goal: Get more university professors teaching Mozilla technologies, and more students doing Mozilla projects.
• Long-term vision: Use open source methods to help to drive a new wave of participatory, student-led learning in fields like computer science, design and business.
• Strategy and analysis: We did an initial analysis on the significance of Mozilla classes at Seneca College followed by an analysis that tried to consider Mozilla's education-related activities in the context of education in general. These documents informed a strategy for the Mozilla Education program.
• Activities: Activities under the Mozilla Education program have included:
  • funding of Mozilla-related courses at Seneca College
  • funding of outreach to faculty and students at other institutions wishing to teach or participate in Mozilla-related courses
  • sponsorship of specialty courses and other projects related to education
• Funding: Mozilla Education funding from the Mozilla Foundation amounted to almost $240K over the last four years (2006-2009), or about $60K/year on average. Almost all of this was to fund Dave Humphrey's activities in promoting Mozilla Education efforts at Seneca College and elsewhere.
• Other partners: Other organizations funding work related to or directly in support of Mozilla Education activities include
  • Red Hat (funding Fedora at Seneca, sponsoring POSSE workshop, participating in Teaching Open Source community)
  • National Science Foundation (funding the Humanitarian FOSS project, symposium, and related activities)