How to build advocacy and policy for net neutrality

Mozilla Advocacy- Workshop:

New Mozilla Foundation Fellowship with the Ford Foundation

The free and open web is in danger especially what’s happening in US and globally

The fellowship is 10 months long and paid

A fellow is connected with one of 5 host organizations building tools and providing advice on technical strategies. It is a great opportunity to have a large impact on the non-profits.

Application closes December 31ST

Fellowship begins February 2015

Here is the link for more information :

https://advocacy.mozilla.org/open-web-fellows/

Example of some of the Host Organizations:

ACLU (Legal team currently working with Snowden)

Amnesty (assisting with their technology plan)

OTI (assisting with Mlabs)

Public Knowledge (assisting the senior staff in regards to the technology)

^The fellow will have a huge impact on the host organization

How do you keep people engaged after applying to the fellowship, especially qualified technical applicants? This question went even broader during conversation regarding how to keep technical workers involved with non-profits.

Here are some of the ideas for the question above:

-Connecting high level technical individuals through NPmatch,volunteer match.

-Sales force does a great job with engagement

-It is really hard to be the matchmaker and connecting with non-profits a lot of time is spent and there is a high turnover especially for the non-profit

-There is a lot of effort in capacity to connect people with non-profits and it takes a lot of capital.

-Connecting tech volunteers that are working at the tech company and connecting them with non-profits (example consultation for 2-3 hours on a certain product)

^Community Technology Network Bay Area (ctnbayarea.org) - Tech Teach In Program

- Tech Soup has a great project called Caravan they connecting with a special group of non-profits and identifying the problem and connecting with the coders.

Incentives for Volunteers:

-Opportunities for learning (workshops, speakers)

-Opportunities for networking with different people

-Becoming the lead on a project (providing leadership)

-Creating Ambassador programs

An interesting point was made during the conversation regarding the fact in most situations a tech company is coming to an NGO and saying, “here use my product” and in many ways the NGO has no use for it. Possibly having it the other way around a sort of value exchange – the non-profit or the specific community is looking for something that can be possibly solved or alleviated through technology – tech companies provide proposals to work on projects. This will ensure sustainability and also most of all meaningful projects.