Call for applications, for the 2024 Mozilla Technology Fund of up to $50,000 USD, has been announced. The Mozilla Technology Fund (MTF) is designed to provide support to open-source technologists whose work fosters potential approaches to solving pressing issues.
Mozilla Technology Fund
In 2022, Mozilla welcomed its first cohort of the Mozilla Technology Fund, which was focused on lowering the bias in artificial intelligence (AI) systems and raising their transparency. For the inaugural cohort of the fund, the Mozilla Foundation purposefully cast a wide net, financing artistic endeavors, literary resources, and crowdsourcing tools that accomplished everything from assessing the discriminatory effects of voice assistant technology to disseminating the inner workings of social media recommendation engines.
This year 2023, they made the decision to concentrate their efforts on a new tooling area where they saw a genuine chance for impact: open-source auditing tools. This decision was based on the lessons they learned from that cohort.
Mozilla Technology Fund 2024 – Details
This year, the foundation wants to ask about the role of, or if AI systems can help in addressing issues like energy justice, food justice, indigenous justice, and environmental degradation. Could AI technology contribute to the solutions to these problems rather than merely making them worse?
The foundation is particularly interested in projects for this year’s call that address the health, economic, and social effects of climate change on the Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA), including people of color, indigenous and traditional peoples, local communities, and specific ethnic-racial groups throughout the global south.
About Mozilla
The Mozilla Foundation seeks to maintain the Internet as a freely accessible public resource. Firefox was created by the Mozilla community in the early 2000s. The foundation broke the browser monopoly, provided online consumers options and control, and contributed to the development of a more wholesome internet. Twenty years later, Mozilla is still fighting for a strong internet where users have true online agency and Big Tech is held accountable.
The Mozilla Manifesto serves as a direction for Mozilla’s work. The Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, which leads its market-based activities, and the 501(c)3 Mozilla Foundation, which was founded as a community open-source initiative in 1998, are the two organizations that make up Mozilla today. Under the single name Mozilla, the two organizations collaborate closely with one another and a large global community of tens of thousands of volunteers.
Financial Benefits of Mozilla Technology Fund
Out of a total pool of $300,000 USD, all successful submissions will receive rewards of up to $50,000 USD each.
Eligibility Criteria for Mozilla Technology Fund
Applicants must:
- Be in possession of a product or a functional prototype; unfinished projects will not be taken into consideration.
- Have a core team already in place to support the project’s development (this team may consist of software engineers working closely with AI researchers, designers, product/project managers, and subject matter experts).
- Accept community stewardship, openness, and transparency as an approach.
- Provide their work with an open-source license
- Be able to legitimately accept funding in the form of a grant from the Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in the United States.
- Be attempting to resolve a problem or issue of public importance pertaining to the theme of this call for proposals.
- Applicants must be working towards solving a public interest problem or issue related to the focus of this Call for Proposals
How to Apply for Mozilla Technology Fund 2024?
All Interested and Qualified Candidates should Go to Mozilla’s Portal at: https://mozilla.fluxx.io/apply/mtf2023 to apply
For more details about this fund, kindly visit the Mozilla website at https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/awards/mozilla-technology-fund-mtf/
Application Deadline
October 5, 2023.
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