Foundation

Overview

Guided by the Mozilla Manifesto, the Mozilla Foundation is building a better technology future - powered by people, open by design, fueled by imagination.

Mozilla Foundation Foundation is working to imagine, co-create and mobilize to build a better technology future that serves and is shaped by the people who use it. It is building the digital world people hope for and deserve by fueling technology that is open, trustworthy, and prioritizing the public good. Through advocacy, education, funding, and innovation, Mozilla Foundation supports people-first alternatives to today’s extractive systems.

The Foundation works alongside communities to shape digital ecosystems rooted in equity, agency, and collective power. It uses its our global reach to connect builders, thinkers, and users with the tools, resources, insights, and networks to make meaningful change. This work is grounded in integrity, imagination, and the belief that better is not only possible—it’s ours to create.

Additional updated information about the Foundation's forward-looking strategy will be shared here in early 2026.

This wiki overview was updated in 2025.

About Mozilla Foundation

Mozilla exists to guard the open nature of the Internet and to ensure it remains a global public resource, open and accessible to all. Founded as a community open source project in 1998, Mozilla consists of multiple organizations. The 501(c)3 Mozilla Foundation leads Mozilla's movement building work and its wholly owned subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, leads our market-based work. Additional entities including Mozilla Ventures, Mozilla AI, and MZLA Technologies Corp now make up the broader Mozilla portfolio. The organizations work in concert with each other and a global community of tens of thousands of volunteers under the single banner: Mozilla.

Mozilla Foundation is a global nonprofit dedicated to ensuring the internet remains open, inclusive, and equitable. Founded in 2003, it supports people-first technology through funding, advocacy, education, and research. Rooted in the open-source movement and guided by the Mozilla Manifesto, Mozilla Foundation focuses on critical issue areas like ethical data practices, healthy digital ecosystems and shifting digital power toward individuals and communities. Its work connects technologists, researchers, policymakers, and activists to reimagine and rebuild systems to serve the public good. With over two decades of global impact, Mozilla Foundation continues to lead the movement for a better technology future.

Team Structure

Teams (and subteams) within the Foundation comprise:

Office of the Executive Director (OED) led by Nabiha Syed – Executive Director

• Planning & Strategic Initiatives
• Global Grantmaking
• Mozilla Education

Strategic Operations led by Angela Plohman – Chief Operating Officer

• Finance & Administration
• Tech Platforms
• People & Culture
• Legal

Strategic Communications led by Dayo Lamolo – VP, Strategic Communications

• Communications
• Marketing/Editorial

Development led by Danielle Jensen – VP, Development

• Mobilization
• Development Operations
• Major Giving

Community led by Kyle Baptista – VP, Community

• Mozilla Festival

Imagination & Strategic Growth led by Ziyaad Bhorat – VP, Imagination & Strategic Growth

• Creative Futures
• Fellowships

See also: Mozilla Foundation Leadership Page

Board

The Foundation board includes:

• Nicole Wong, Chair
• Brian Behlendorf
• Helen Turvey
• Amy Keating
• Mark Surman
• Alondra Nelson
• Edwin Macharia
• Zain Habboo

The program committee of the Foundation board includes Nicole Wong, Helen Turvey, Amy Keating, Mark Surman, and Zain Habboo.

The board also has committees for audit, diversity, finance and investment, all of which are made up solely of board members.

Visit our board wiki for more details including previous years' board slides

Programs

Our programs sit within our strategy flywheel of Imagine - Co-create - Mobilize.

• Our imagine programs are a thesis development engine surfacing what should exist
• Our co-create programs are part of a proof-of-concept engine demonstrating it can exist, while cultivating a repeatable playbook of how (product-community fit).
• Our mobilization activities are adoption & feedback infrastructure illustrating and cultivating demand.

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Imagine Programs

Our Imagine aligned programs seek to surface unexpected insights. This part of the flywheel is a thesis development engine surfacing what should exist.

Creative Futures

Creative Futures is a Mozilla Foundation initiative that sparks community imagination and makes it real.

We convene the most imaginative communities – artists, cultural innovators, technologists, and open-source builders – to articulate bold new visions for the future of the internet. Guided by the belief that cultural imagination is essential to shaping technology for the public good, Creative Futures then partners with creative technologists and developers to prototype these visions into reusable assets: open-source tools, cultural frameworks, and infrastructures.

Through commissions, convenings, and funding collaborations, Creative Futures develops a new field of cultural R&D – amplifying pro-social design principles, serving as a community-led prototyping lab, and offering Mozilla and its partners durable assets that anticipate and shape the next wave of digital technologies.

Creative Futures collaborates closely with the grantmaking, community and strategic communications teams.

Fellowships

Mozilla Foundation is building a better technology future – powered by people, open by design, fueled by imagination. We make, inspire, and mobilize to build a better technology future that serves and is shaped by the people who use it. We are defiantly optimistic that the future of technology can be good, and our Fellowship program is one way this optimism becomes action. By investing in rising technologists and established innovators, we position ourselves at the center of every major technology debate while gaining frontline intelligence on the issues that matter most to our communities—from AI ethics to data governance to platform accountability.

Our 2026 Fellowship Program will support up to 10 visionary technologists, researchers, creators, and advocates who share our belief that a better tech future is not only possible – it's ours to create.

The Fellowship Program is led by Lindsey Dodson, Director, Global Grants in close collaboration with the grantmaking and strategic operations team.

Find out more about Fellowships at the Mozilla Foundation website

Nothing Personal Magazine

Nothing Personal is the editorial arm of Mozilla Foundation, to tell better stories and cultivate an engaged, younger audience funnel beyond email. Its goal is to:

• Highlight human-first stories about tech’s impact, the stakes
• Showcase how we can literally build the world we want by supporting user-first software, tools, and services
• Amplify Mozilla people, products, and ideas
• Build community and creativity through commissions.

Nothing Personal includes three formats:

• Feature Story: An ambitious monthly commission of longform journalism with media rich experiences.
• Product Reviews: Consumer reviews are at the core of the brand – a utility for our readers to understand the tech in their lives (previously known as PNI).
• Advice Column: A humor story where our Human columnist will make fun of a feature of the tech world. Edited by The Onion.

Nothing Personal is led by Bourree Lam, Executive Editor in close collaboration with the strategic communications and tech platforms teams.

Read Nothing Personal here.

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Co-create Programs

Our Co-create aligned programs transform the visions from our 'Imagine' work into working prototypes through our co-creation efforts, where our Incubator optimizes for "product-community fit." Our co-create programs are part of a proof-of-concept engine demonstrating it can exist, while cultivating a repeatable playbook of how (product-community fit).

Incubator

Mozilla Foundation's Community Tech Incubator helps mission-aligned technologies navigate the critical transition from prototype to sustainable product by connecting them with the community they need to thrive.

Rather than chasing market dynamics that compromise core values, we help project teams achieve product/community fit by connecting them with the users, contributors, and funders they need to create sustainable technologies built with care, powered by people, and open by design.

The Community Tech Incubator is led by Lindsey, Director, Global Grants in close collaboration with the grantmaking and strategic operations team. Learn more about the initiative here.

Common Voice

Common Voice is the world's most linguistically diverse open-source voice dataset. Built by Mozilla Foundation, it invites people everywhere to record and validate speech in their own language — creating freely available, ethically sourced training data for speech AI. All data is released under a CC0 license: open to any developer, researcher, or institution.

It is Mozilla Foundation's strategic bet on AI: that the path to equitable, accountable artificial intelligence runs through open data — and that communities, not corporations, should be the ones who build it.

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Mobilize Programs

Building a community of mission-aligned people. Our mobilization activities are adoption & feedback infrastructure illustrating and cultivating demand for pro-social technology and a better tech future.

Mozilla Festival

The Mozilla Festival is the Mozilla Foundation's annual global festival for a healthy, open, and trustworthy internet, serving as a unique convergence of art, tech, and society. It is a gathering of technologists, activists, researchers, artists, and policymakers who participate in hands-on, community-led sessions, installations, and workshops to collaboratively address critical issues like privacy, and AI ethics, ultimately working to shape a more inclusive digital future - our theme for 2025 was "Unlearning."

Led by Zeina Abi Assy, Director, Mozilla Festival, the team includes experts in curation, community management, federated design, and production. Learn more about the Festival at its wiki page here, at the dedicated Foundation page or on the ticket and event website.

Mozilla Education

From 2018 to 2025, the Responsible Computing Challenge (RCC) directly invested in future responsible tech builders – awarding over $6.9 million in grants to over 60 academic institutions worldwide to revise, expand, and share responsible computing curricula. To date RCC cohorts have been active in the USA, Kenya and India.

Since 2025, the Responsible Computing Challenge team has expanded to become Mozilla Education – exploring the ways in which responsible computing principles can be accessed by the general public through the Education Hub and creating a network of equitable compute infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Led by Steve Azeka, Program Lead. The team includes experts in education, policy, and computer science. Together, we cover everything from higher education training to implementing compute.

Read more about Mozilla Education at its wiki page.

Development

Our Development team focus on growing a community of people who believe tech should work for everyone — and back that belief with real resources, from grassroots donors to major funding partners. Every contribution fuels the work: the research, the advocacy, the builders, and the movements shaping a better tech future.

Archive - Strategy

This strategy is no longer in active use. It is recorded here for reference only.

What follows is documentation of Mozilla Foundation’s previous movement building strategy in three phases:

1. Phase I, 2016: Launch movement strategy for internet health
2. Phase II, 2019: Focus on trustworthy AI theory of change
3. Phase III, 2021+: Hone in on specific AI impact

Archival documents:

• Big picture: Trustworthy AI white paper (published December 2020)
• Mozilla Foundation Trustworthy AI Movement Building Strategy Executive Summary (September 2022)
• Trustworthy AI theory of change (PDF, October 2020)
• 2021-2023 narrative arcs for our work on transparency, bias and data stewardship (PDF, February 2021)
• Mozilla Foundation’s 2022 Objectives and Key Results (wiki, 2022)
• Mozilla Foundation Movement Building Programs - Operating Model ( November 2022)
• Mozilla Foundation's 2023 OKRs (March 2023)

Key blog posts:

• Mozilla’s vision for trustworthy AI (blog post, December 2020)
• Mozilla's 2021+ trustworthy AI priorities (blog post, February 2021)
• Trustworthy AI starts with transparency (blog post, March 2021)

Fueling a movement for internet health (Strategy Phase I, 2016)

Mozilla believes that we all have a stake in understanding and protecting the health of the internet. Since 2016, the Mozilla Foundation has focused its efforts on fueling an emerging movement of internet users, technologists, researchers and activists who are standing and fighting for a healthy internet for generations to come.

Relevant links:

• Original 2016 Movement Building Strategy slide deck (PDF, February 2016)
• Updated 2018 strategy brief and theory of change (PDF, November 2017)
• Program evaluation from the first phase of our movement strategy (PDF, September 2018)
• Wiki with extensive documentation of movement building phase one (wiki, 2015-2018)

Focusing on Trustworthy AI (Strategy Phase II, 2019)

A key learning from our 2018 program evaluation was that we needed a more specific impact goal to drive our work forward. Since 2019, and as part of the second phase of Mozilla’s movement building strategy, we focused our work on developing trustworthy AI.

Mozilla has ideas for how to work towards AI that enriches the lives of human beings, rather than harms them. We call it ‘trustworthy AI’ and this framing guides a large part of our work. If we want a healthy internet — and a healthy digital society — we need to make sure AI is trustworthy. AI, and the large pools of data that fuel it, are central to how computing works today. If we want apps, social networks, our devices and government to serve us as people — and as citizens — we need to make sure the way we build with AI has things like privacy and fairness built in from the get go.

Relevant links:

• Core document: trustworthy AI paper (published December 2020)
• Mozilla’s vision for trustworthy AI (blog post, December 2020)
• Trustworthy AI theory of change (PDF, October 2020)
• Mozilla’s focus on AI + consumer tech (blog post, April 2019)
• Honing our focus on AI in the second phase of our movement strategy (blog post, March 2019)
• Background: Mozilla’s process towards focus on AI (wiki, 2019-2020)

Zooming in: transparency, bias and data (Strategy Phase III, 2021+)

When we turned our attention to AI, we started to ask: how can we make the data driven technologies we all use everyday more trustworthy? How can we make things like social networks, home assistants and search engines both more helpful and less harmful in the era ahead? In 2021, entering the third phase of our movement building strategy, we want to make concrete progress in three specific areas: transparency, data stewardship and bias/fairness. We also want to deepen our efforts to build alliances with other movements.

Mozilla Foundation’s 2021 work is organized around these themes:

• Test AI transparency best practices to increase adoption by builders and policymakers.
• Accelerate the impact of people working to mitigate bias in AI.
• Accelerate equitable data governance alternatives as a way to advance trustworthy AI.

We have also mapped out draft three year arcs in these areas to guide our work in the coming years. All of this maps to short term outcomes in our AI theory of change.

2021 objectives and sample key results

Relevant links:

• Mozilla Foundation Trustworthy AI Movement Building Strategy Executive Summary (September 2022) Note: this is Mozilla Foundation's most recent strategy document
• Read about our next steps on trustworthy AI (blog post, February 2021)
• 3 year narrative arcs (PDF, February 2021)
• Mozilla Foundation’s 2022 Objectives and Key Results (wiki, 2022)

Other related links

Foundation website

• https://mozillafoundation.org/
• About the Foundation

Related Wiki pages

• https://wiki.mozilla.org/Foundation/Mozilla_Education
• https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Festival

Archival links

• Strategy Retreats (2017-2019)
• MoFo monthly calls (2018-2021)
• Mozilla Foundation annual OKRs (2017-2023)