What we're looking for
Mozilla Builders is dedicated to delivering on the promise of the internet, where the people are in control of how the internet is used to shape society and where business models should be sustainable and valuable, but do not need to squeeze every last dollar (or ounce of attention) from the user. For instance, we love initiatives that shift the balance of power from centralized forces back towards individuals, citizens and communities.
Over the years and from our work building platforms like Firefox, Javascript, Rust, WebRTC, Web Assembly, and others, we have been developing a vision for a next internet that is imbued with these values and deployed across tomorrow's devices, networks, algorithms, and cloud platforms. We’re inviting you to join us with your ideas for how to bring this vision into the world.
Hit us up with your ideas for how we can use the power and reach of internet technologies to level the playing field and create new opportunities for everyone.
We hope to see a wide range of proposals around big categories including, but not limited to:
- Collaboration & Society, particularly in view of the current global crisis: (i) Foster better collaboration online, (ii) Grassroots collaboration around issues & emergencies, (iii) Local & neighborhood support networks, (iv) Supporting small businesses, (v) Social money-pooling for issues, people & businesses.
- Decentralized Web: build a new, decentralized architecture for the internet from infrastructure, communications, media & money, to using the blockchain and peer-to-peer technologies. This summer we are particularly interested in seeing proposals around how to make decentralized storage services a viable + reliable system for building applications upon.
- Messaging & Social Networking: can we build a new way to communicate online that favors privacy, people, and users' interests? What needs to evolve?
- Surveillance Capitalism: whether it’s big tech or governments, everyone’s collecting your data. How do we put the user back in control of their data? Can we build new business models for messaging, social networking, news & information that don’t rely on excessive data minute and hijacking our attention?
- Misinformation & Content: ideas for services that help us get beyond polarization, filter bubbles and fake news.
- Artificial Intelligence that works to benefit communities and citizens.
- Web Assembly: 25 years of evolution and improvement, and the web’s "execution environment" - the Javascript engine in every browser - has now broken free as a remarkably fast, safe way to run ANY code. We’re interested in tools and platforms that leverage and build on Wasm as THE way to run applications connected to the internet. What’s the ecosystem missing today? What new things can be built with it that couldn’t be built before? Where can Wasm have the biggest impact?
- Search: For most people in the world, search is the gateway to news, shopping, information, and answers that shape the way they live their lives. These searches happen for billions of people from the search boxes in their browsers but also in new and exciting ways like getting a quick answer with your voice from a little screen in your kitchen. For the last 10 years the thought of building a new search experience was left to only the largest companies in the world but with the rise of privacy focused search engines such as DuckDuckGo, the panoply of vertical search engines, cloud platforms, and developer tools, there’s clear evidence that better search is possible. What will be the next major step in making the world’s information open, accessible, and credible for the next generation of users and devices?
Please review the seven focus areas above. But don’t let your thinking be constrained. Imagine the internet as you wish it could be. Here are some interesting reads to get you thinking:
- A fun Techcrunch read on a new wave of social apps spreading during Covid-19
- Anil Dash's video and blog post about the web we lost
- A New York Times Magazine feature on China's internet, and what might be our future
- Mozilla's 2019 Internet Health Report
- Mozilla's State of the Internet / Surveillance Economy
- The World Wide Web Foundation's Contract for the Web
If you want to start your ideation with some terrific tech building blocks, here's some technology that has the potential to break the status quo:
- Secure Scuttlebutt - for a distributed social graph
- The GUN database - a distributed offline-capable database that runs everywhere JS runs
- IPFS - protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system
- Zero Knowledge Proofs - moon math becoming routine
- Twilio's open source video conferencing apps for iOS, Android and the web
Looking for more inspiration? Check out what some of the participants in our Spring MVP Lab are building.