Mark Surman | |
---|---|
Born | |
Alma mater | University of Toronto |
Occupation | Executive director of the Mozilla Foundation |
Spouse | Tonya Surman (divorced) |
Children | Tristan Surman (1999) Ethan Surman (2002) |
Website | marksurman |
Mark Surman is a Canadian open internet activist and the president and executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. [1] He is a leading advocate for trustworthy AI, [2] digital privacy, [3] and the open internet. [4] Before joining the Mozilla Foundation, Mark spent more than 15 years leading organizations and projects promoting the use of the internet and open source for social empowerment in many countries around the world.
Surman is also an active board member, currently serving as an advisory board member of the McMaster University Masters in Public Policy, Digital Society program, [5] the co-chair of the steering committee for the European AI Fund, [6] and a board member for the Mozilla Foundation. [7]
Surman's writing has appeared in The Washington Post , [8] CNN.com , [9] The Globe and Mail , [10] Chronicle of Philanthropy , [11] MIT's Innovations, [12] and Fast Company. [13] In 2005, Mark published the book Commonspace: Beyond Virtual Community. [14] with Prentice Hall.
Surman received his bachelor's degree in the history of community media from the University of Toronto in 1996. His undergraduate thesis was entitled Wired Words: Utopia, Revolution, and the History of Electronic Highways. The paper was presented at the Internet Society's INET'96 conference. [15]
In 1998, Surman co-founded and became president of the Commons Group, providing advice on networks, technology, and social change. [16] During this time, Mark also led the development of the APC Action Apps, an open source project aimed at providing content publishing and sharing for activist organizations. [17]
From 2005 to 2008, Surman was the managing director of telecentre.org. [18] Created by Canada's International Development Research Centre, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and Microsoft, telecentre.org worked to network the global telecentre community and improve their sustainability. [19] Mark co-edited the book From the Ground Up: the Evolution of the Telecentre Movement. [20]
Surman was awarded one of the inaugural Shuttleworth Foundation fellowships in 2007. Shuttleworth Foundation provides funding for people using open source methods to create social change. [21] [22] There he helped advance thinking about how to apply open source approaches to philanthropy [23] and contributed to the development of the Cape Town Declaration for Open Education. [24]
In August 2008, Surman became the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, [25] the non-profit organization that supports the open source Mozilla project. The Foundation also runs advocacy programs [26] and offers fellowships [27] to protect the open internet. It is the sole owner of the Mozilla Corporation, which makes the Firefox web browser.
During his early years at the Foundation, Surman oversaw the development of the Mozilla Festival (2010), an annual gathering of people working on open internet and open source projects. [28] He also led the development of the initial Mozilla Fellowship program with the Knight Foundation (2011), with a focus on putting open source developers in newsrooms. [29] These efforts expanded Mozilla’s work beyond its traditional focus on browser and email software.
Starting in 2012, Surman helped develop a collection of efforts focused on promoting digital literacy, [30] including Mozilla's Maker Party [31] event series and the Webmaker software project. [32] These efforts also included a number of joint initiatives with MacArthur Foundation that focused on digital learning, including Open Badges and Hive. [33] Mozilla’s work on digital literacy was wound down in late 2017. [34]
In 2016, Surman and others shifted the Foundation’s focus toward supporting the growth of what they have called ‘the internet health movement’. [35] Work in this area has included the launch of the yearly Mozilla Internet Health Report, [36] the Privacy Not Included guide, [37] and campaigns advocating that companies like Amazon, [38] Facebook [39] and YouTube [40] improve their products in the public interest. Programs such as MozFest and the Mozilla Fellowships have continued as a part of the Foundation’s movement building activities. [41]
In 2018, the Foundation further focused its movement building efforts around the theme of promoting responsible data and AI practices. [42] The rationale for this focus was detailed in a paper entitled Creating Trustworthy AI, jointly written by Surman and Rebecca Ricks. [43]
In 2022, Surman took on the additional role of Mozilla Foundation president, working with Mitchell Baker on Mozilla-wide strategy and expansion efforts. [44] This included the launch of Mozilla Ventures, [45] a fund to invest in responsible tech startups and Mozilla.ai, [46] an R+D arm focused on translating computer science research into open source trustworthy AI products.
Surman was born and resides in Toronto, Ontario. He has two sons, Ethan and Tristan Surman. Both are members of the band The Neighbourhood Watch. [47] He was married to long time collaborator and Centre for Social Innovation founder Tonya Surman.
A web browser is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on a range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. In 2020, an estimated 4.9 billion people have used a browser. The most used browser is Google Chrome, with a 65% global market share on all devices, followed by Safari with 18%.
Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla. It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects.
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards. In November 2017, Firefox began incorporating new technology under the code name "Quantum" to promote parallelism and a more intuitive user interface. Firefox is available for Windows 7 and later versions, macOS, and Linux. Its unofficial ports are available for various Unix and Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, illumos, and Solaris Unix. It is also available for Android and iOS. However, as with all other iOS web browsers, the iOS version uses the WebKit layout engine instead of Gecko due to platform requirements. An optimized version is also available on the Amazon Fire TV as one of the two main browsers available with Amazon's Silk Browser.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source cross-platform email client, personal information manager, news client, RSS and chat client that is operated by the Mozilla Foundation's subsidiary MZLA Technologies Corporation. Thunderbird is an independent, community-driven project that is managed and overseen by the Thunderbird Council, which is elected by the Thunderbird Community. The project strategy was originally modeled after that of Mozilla's Firefox web browser and is an interface built on top of that web browser.
The Mozilla Foundation is an American non-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls Mozilla trademarks and copyrights. It owns two taxable subsidiaries: the Mozilla Corporation, which employs many Mozilla developers and coordinates releases of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and MZLA Technologies Corporation, which employs developers to work on the Mozilla Thunderbird email client and coordinate its releases. The Mozilla Foundation was founded by the Netscape-affiliated Mozilla Organization. The organization is currently based in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, California, United States.
Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. It aims to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open-source software.
Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) is a Washington, D.C.–based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation that advocates for digital rights and freedom of expression. CDT seeks to promote legislation that enables individuals to use the internet for purposes of well-intent, while at the same time reducing its potential for harm. It advocates for transparency, accountability, and limiting the collection of personal information.
The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, some of whom are employed by the corporation itself. The corporation also distributes and promotes these products. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla open source project, founded by the now defunct Netscape Communications Corporation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. The Mozilla Corporation reinvests all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects. The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."
The Shuttleworth Foundation was established in January 2001 by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth as an experiment with the purpose of providing funding for people engaged in social change. While there have been various iterations of the foundation, its structure and how it invests in social innovation, the current model employs a fellowship model where fellows are given funding commensurate with their experience to match a year's salary, allowing them to spend that year developing a particular idea. The Foundation announced that it is shutting itself down "by the beginning of 2024."
Digital literacy is an individual's ability to find, evaluate, and communicate information by utilizing typing or digital media platforms. It is a combination of both technical and cognitive abilities in using information and communication technologies to create, evaluate, and share information.
Michelle Thorne is an American-born, Berlin, Germany-based internet culture and climate justice activist who is known for leading community initiatives at Mozilla and before then with Creative Commons. Her work focusses on knowledge sharing and on the social and planetary implications of new technologies.
CSS animations is a proposed module for Cascading Style Sheets that allows the animation of HTML document elements using CSS.
Image files that contain verifiable information about learning achievements, Open Badges are based on a group of specifications and open technical standards originally developed by the Mozilla Foundation with funding from the MacArthur Foundation. The Open Badges standard describes a method for packaging information about accomplishments, embedding it into portable image files as a digital badge, and establishing an infrastructure for badge validation. The standard was originally maintained by the Badge Alliance Standard Working Group, but transitioned officially to the IMS Global Learning Consortium as of January 1, 2017.
Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.
Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) is a W3C specification for providing a communication channel between web browsers and the Content Decryption Module (CDM) software which implements digital rights management (DRM). This allows the use of HTML5 video to play back DRM-wrapped content such as streaming video services without the use of heavy third-party media plugins like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. The use of a third-party key management system may be required, depending on whether the publisher chooses to scramble the keys.
Web literacy comprises the skills and competencies needed for reading, writing and participating on the web. It has been described as "both content and activity" – i.e., web users should not just learn about the web but also about how to make their own website.
The Mozilla Manifesto lays out the guiding principles of the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that leads the open-source Mozilla project best-known for its Firefox web browser. Penned in 2007 by Mitchell Baker, with adjustments in 2018, it promotes free software, universal access to the internet, and interoperable technologies, and emphasizes values of privacy, openness, and a belief in the ability of the internet to enrich the lives of people.
Digital self-determination is a multidisciplinary concept derived from the legal concept of self-determination and applied to the digital sphere, to address the unique challenges to individual and collective agency and autonomy arising with increasing digitalization of many aspects of society and daily life.
Peter Daniel Eckersley was an Australian computer scientist, computer security researcher and activist. From 2006 to 2018, he worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including as chief computer scientist and head of AI policy. In 2018, he left the EFF to become director of research at the Partnership on AI, a position he held until 2020. In 2021, he co-founded the AI Objectives Institute.
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