MIECO

Advancing the future of the internet

The Mozilla Internet Ecosystem (MIECO) Program funds innovators building a healthier internet experience. We are creating a community of mission-driven individuals advancing projects that not only unlock a fairer value exchange between creators, platforms, and people, but also drive long-term value and economic growth for the wider internet ecosystem.

Why Join Us?

For Builders

No-strings attached grant – we don’t take equity!

Stipends for learning and networking (e.g. conferences)

Access to Mozilla’s ecosystem of people, partners, and organizations

For Collaborators

Collaborate with existing MIECO builders while receiving a 10-100k grant

Learn from open source partners and organizations in the Mozilla ecosystem

Get access to Mozilla marketing channels for further promotion

For Sponsors

Learn about the frontier of what’s possible on the internet

Invest in a more open and vibrant internet ecosystem

Accelerate projects by contributing resources, materials, or expertise

Why are we doing this?

The internet has the potential to uplift society — it can promote democracy, open markets, and free expression. But it can also promote polarization, mass surveillance, and misinformation.

More than ever, we need a movement to ensure the internet remains a force for good. That’s where you come in. The MIECO Program fuels this movement by supporting people like you who are looking to advance a more human-centered internet. We take care of the hard stuff – providing funding, mentorship, and amplification – so you can focus all-in on building the future we all envision.

What does the program entail?

The MIECO program is a 12-month experience where you will propose, design, and drive a new product or domain in a small cohort of like-minded builders.

Preference will be given to projects that address underserved communities on the internet, provide or support fairer value exchange, and are built in an open manner – aka projects that can be built upon by others (e.g., coding done with open source, providing open access to use part or all of the solution etc as compared to projects done in a solely proprietary manner).

*Timeline can be adjusted once accepted into the program.

Who should apply?

If you have a passion to create a healthier and more accessible internet, then you!

You will need to identify a specific challenge that you want to explore and show a body of work or consistent activity over 12-24 months to demonstrate a passion for the topic. It’s alright if your project already exists.

How do I apply?

We will be opening up the application window for our 2nd cohort in 2023. Please contact us

Current Cohort

Beyond oEmbed

Francisco Tolmasky

Francisco was a member of the original iPhone team at Apple, working on Mobile Safari. He later founded 280 North where he worked on the Cappuccino web framework, which was later acquired by Motorola. He is currently working on RunKit, a revolutionary new way to interact with code.

Mission: Define a standardized method for discovering and integrating 3rd party services into web pages in a secure, performant, and easy-to-use way.

Learn more

Actually Portable Executable

Justine Tunney

Justine is an activist who started as a cyber security hacker and used that experience to improve the security of open source software. She is the creator of Redbean, an open source web server that allows you to build local web apps in a single zip executable.

Mission: Extend the reach of universal binary files from x86 chips to work on ARM chips.

Learn more

Croquet Microverse

Yoshiki Ohshima

Yoshiki is both a computer scientist and software engineer who has published dozens of academic papers. He has worked on creating new programming languages and environments, designing and implementing dynamic interactive systems and applications.

Mission: Democratize the metaverse by enabling users and developers to create and modify a world from within itself, all while interacting with other users.

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ML Collective

Rosanne Liu

Rosanne is one of the 15 founding members of Uber AI Labs and has been building communities for underrepresented and underprivileged researchers since 2018. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science at Northwestern University and serves as the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion chair of ICLR 2022 and 2023.

Mission: Create and nurture a diverse and inclusive scientific community, by empowering non-standard and non-traditional scientists to grow on their own timelines and thrive in their self-defined career paths.

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Noosphere

Gordon Brander

Gordon worked on 5 browsers and an operating system while previously at Google and Mozilla. Drawing from those experiences, his goal is to understand and create open-ended ecosystems through software.

Mission: User-owned tools for thinking together. Building an open and decentralized protocol for multiplayer note-taking that prioritizes user-owned data.

Learn more

Datasette

Simon Willison

Simon, a serial entrepreneur and journalist, co-founded Lanyrd, a social conference directory that was eventually acquired by Eventbrite. He is the co-creator of the Django Web framework and was also a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.

Mission: Help people publish their data online in the most flexible format for others to explore, analyze, and use.

Learn more

Wardley Maps for Good

Simon Wardley

Simon, a senior researcher at DXC Technology, specializes in the intersection of strategy and new technologies. He is best known for the creation of Wardley mapping.

Mission: Can Wardley mapping help us find ways that interactive games can be used to encourage beneficial behaviours within society?

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Democratizing AlgebraicJulia

Brendan Fong

Brendan is the CEO of Topos Institute, an independent research non-profit. He holds a PhD in computer science from Oxford, and undertook postdoctoral studies in systems engineering and mathematics at UPenn and MIT. He’s also the founder of the open-access journal Compositionality and co-author of the textbook An Invitation to Applied Category Theory.

Mission: Open the use and future development of AlgebraicJulia to a wider and more diverse community.

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Storyboarder

Charles Forman

Charles is a movie maker, dreamer, product designer, and entrepreneur. He founded OMGPOP, the video game company behind Draw Something, which sold to Zynga. He also developed Picturelife, a smart photo storage and management company, which sold to SmugMug.

Mission: Build a community for visual storytellers to create, iterate, and experience other’s stories, starting with an easy-to-use storyboarding tool built for people who don’t draw.

Learn more

Tractor System

Jeff Lindsay

Jeff is a rogue software engineer and veteran open source hacker. He is a founder of SuperHappyDevHouse and Hacker Dojo, and helped create Docker, Twilio, and TIGSource. He also pioneered webhooks and early ideas around serverless.

Mission: Enable people to build and integrate arbitrary software systems from high leverage primitives through the "Photoshop of software."

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Metered & Research Portfolio

Adam Bouhenguel

Adam designs programming systems and tools for thinking. He started Tesserai to build intelligent systems from simple, composable parts. He studied computer science at MIT.

Mission: Help people turn machine learning models and other APIs into profitable, scalable businesses. Enable new funding models that reward engineers, researchers, and scientists for their most impactful contributions.

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Mnemonic medium

Andy Matuschak

Andy invents tools that expand what people can think and do. Previously, he helped design and build iOS at Apple, led R&D at Khan Academy, and created popular open source projects Sparkle and Pixen.

Mission: Help people internalize what they read through an open source platform which augments books and articles with memory and learning support tools.

Learn more

Want to collaborate with us?

We are constantly looking for new ways to collaborate with individuals and organizations who share our passion for building a healthier internet. Whether you want to be a guest speaker to our cohorts, a potential partner who can provide additional resources, or someone that just wants to support the MIECO program in some shape or form, we’re all ears!

Contact us

Frequently Asked
Questions

Is the Mozilla Internet Ecosystem (MIECO) Program a full-time program?

No. This is meant to supplement or extend existing work or can be used to enable someone to test a new concept that they haven’t yet been able to invest time in.

Will Mozilla own or be able to control any part of my intellectual property in exchange for the grant funding?

This funding is going directly to the individuals and is not an exchange of equity for funding. Mozilla will not take ownership of anything that the participants build during the program. However, we do have a preference for working in an open manner, and would appreciate any assets developed that can be donated to the open source community.

What is the duration of the MIECO Program?

Most projects will run for 12 months, though some projects may be better executed on a shorter or longer time line which can be agreed upon once the Builder is offered a spot in the program.