Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows during the meeting in New YorkThe inaugural cohort of the Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows met in New York last week for only the second time face to face. Working remotely from Lima, Washington DC, Boston and London, the 6 fellows meet weekly with Melissa Romaine from Mozilla’s San Francisco office, and with me from my home office in Victoria, British Columbia. This was an In Real Life™ meeting we were all looking forward to, if for nothing else than the important reminder that we aren’t squares on a video conference call – we are talented and complicated humans.
The six fellows are placed within Internet Freedom organizations, working on a mixture of team and individual projects.
Paola Villarreal, American Civil Liberties Union, Massachusetts. Paola is working on Data for Justice, a data-driven advocacy tool that visualizes information critical for eliminating injustice in communities.
Tim Sammut, Amnesty International. Tim’s projects are:
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.
Andrea Del Rio, Association for Progressive Communications. Andrea is creating the web version of the Feminist Principles of The Internet, which aims to inspire people not only to imagine a Feminist Internet but actually build one that is fair, inclusive, empowering and safe for everyone.
Drew Wilson, Free Press. Drew is embedded in Free Press’ Internet2016 campaign and is building tools that internet rights advocates can use to bootstrap their own activism projects.
Gem Barrett, Open Technology Institute. Gem is a member of the MLab team at OTI, helping to build the largest collection of open Internet performance data on the planet.
Tennyson Holloway, Public Knowledge. Tennyson is working on projects that inspire and educate future web advocates. “What can i do for the internet.org” is a website that represents a vision of a story based platform that educates, inspires, and assists users to join the open web movement. His other projects involve creating web games that explain tech policy Washington issues, such as copyright and patent trolls.
Read the full blog post here .
Brett Gaylor is the Director of Mozilla’s Open Web Fellows. Brett also makes documentaries about the Internet: Do Not Track and Rip! A Remix Manifesto.