The Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows Program — a collaboration between the Ford Foundation and Mozilla — is an international leadership initiative that brings together the best emerging technology talent and civil society organizations to protect the open Web. The program fills a critical niche: it provides an ecosystem for the next generation of open Web advocates to make an early impact. As threats to digital freedom proliferate, it’s critical to have capable leaders.
Each year, Fellows spend 10 months embedded at leading advocacy organizations to safeguard the Internet as a global public resource. The 2015 host organizations are:
- American Civil Liberties Union, Massachusetts
- Amnesty International
- Association for Progressive Communications
- Free Press
- Open Technology Institute
- Public Knowledge
2015 Fellows
Paola Villarreal, American Civil Liberties Union, Massachusetts
Tim Sammut, Amnesty International
Website, @t1msammut, Contact Info
Fellowship projects
- Secure Communications Framework: An approachable framework for human rights researchers that helps them understand how to communicate with contacts around the world safely in the context of varying threats and information sensitivity.
- Community Incident Response: Help human rights organizations in Amnesty's worldwide network access technical assistance during active digital attacks.
Personal projects
- ThunderSec: DKIM, SPF, DNSBL plug-in for Mozilla Thunderbird, addons.mozilla.org, GitHub
- Operate Tor Nodes
- Making Linux on the Macbook Pro Retina Less Terrible
Things created
- 1 October 2015, Blog post, Three Steps Against Mass Surveillance, For Other People
- 20 September 2015, Blog post, Human Rights Education Threat Modeling
- 12 September 2015, Conference proposal, Promoting Freedom of Expression with Tor
- 14 August 2015, Blog post, Tor Hidden Service for teamsammut.com
- 11 August 2015, Slides, Tor vs. VPNs and Proxies, PDF, ODF
- 23 July 2015, Blog post, The Internet that enables human rights won't continue by accident
- 23 July 2015, Blog post, What is the Open Web?
Andrea Del Rio, Association for Progressive Communications
Many of the bad things that happen offline are also true online: for example violence against women, discrimination against LGBT people, hate crimes, inequality of access to basic services or censorship. The project I am working on right now called The Feminist Principles of the Internet aims to inspire people not only to imagine a Feminist Internet but actually build one that is fair, inclusive, empowering and safe for everyone.
Month two blog post: https://medium.com/@andreadelrio/ford-mozilla-open-web-fellowship-apc-month-2-65aab25f9402