The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Funding OSS with Mozilla Open Source Support awards (Interview)

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

We're talking with Mehan Jayasuriya program officer at Mozilla about MOSS — the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program which recognizes, celebrates, and supports open source projects. Earlier this year we caught the “MOSS 2018 Year in Review” blog post — this post highlighted many of their efforts in 2018 so we reached out to talk through the history, goals, and impact of this very generous project.

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I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at Changelog. On today's show, we're talking with Mahan Jayashuriya, Program Officer at Mozilla about their program called MOS, the Mozilla Open Source Support Program, which recognizes, celebrates, and supports open source projects. And earlier this year, we caught the Moz 2018 year in review blog post. And this post highlighted many of their efforts in 2018. So we reached out. We got Mahan to talk through the history, the goals, and the impact of this very generous project. So about Moz, Mozilla open source support. In 2018 had a year review blog post and this is

what turned me on to reaching out to you all and I was just so excited to see the highlights from 2018 secure a job the tour project to many others being funded so man what work we begin to kind of dive into say 2018 but maybe moss at large yeah I'll kind of start with Moss at large and then maybe kind of transition a little bit into what happened in 2018 in particular. So Moss, for folks who are not familiar with the program, is the Mozilla open source support program. And the goal of Moss is to broaden access,

increase security, and empower users by providing catalytic funding to open source technologies. So in short, it's basically an awards program. It's run out of the Mozilla Foundation. It's unlike a lot of other kind of foundation awards programs in that it works directly with open source technologists and gives awards to organizations, to for-profit companies, but also just to small teams of folks who are working on maintaining projects. The MAS Awards program has existed for a few years now, about four years or so. But 2018 was kind of a year of kind of a lot of transition and change for the MAS program

and also the beginning of some growth of the program as well. And so I think a lot of those really big kind of marquee awards from 2018 that you mentioned were actually kind of the culmination of years of work from all the different staff that have worked on the program over the years. Like most overnight successes, it actually took a while. So curious, though, what your role is. So if Moz has been in place for several years now, stemming from the Mozilla Foundation, what has been your role in those four years? Is it one of the founders of this idea? Where are you sitting at? years now stemming from the Mozilla Foundation. What has been your role in those four years? Is it one of the founders of this idea? Where are you sitting at? Yeah, no. So I'm not one of the kind of founding members of the Moss program. The Moss program originally started on the Mozilla

Corporation side of the house. So Mozilla is kind of a weird entity in which there's two halves to Mozilla. There's the Mozilla Foundation, which is a nonprofit, and the Mozilla Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the nonprofit organization. So the Mozilla Corporation is the one that most people are familiar with. They make Firefox, that's the kind of digital product side of the house. The Foundation is kind of more like a regular charitable foundation. We offer awards and fellowships and do other kind of charitable programs, all in the world of technology and all kind of in keeping with Mozilla's values. So the MOTS program originally started on the Mozilla Corporation side of the house. And I can kind of go into more depth if you want to kind of talk about the history of the program. But basically, in 2018, the program

transitioned mostly over to the foundation side of the house. The foundation has gotten increasingly good at running awards programs and other charitable programs. We have the infrastructure and the processes to do that now. And so the decision was made basically to take most of the MAS program, which in a lot of ways looked like a foundation program from the beginning, and kind of move it over to the foundation side of the house and to bring all of those foundation processes and kind of mechanics to the MAS program. So I've been over to the foundation side of the house and to bring all of those foundation processes and kind of mechanics to the MOS program. So I've been working for the foundation for a little over two years now. And I first started working on MOS probably in like late 2017. And then when it transitioned over to the foundation in 2018, that's when I kind of

started running the day-to-day operations for moss track one which is our foundational technology track as well as moss track two which is our mission partners track a couple of things that stand out to me about this i do want to know where the initial idea sprang out of mozilla also i would like to know where the money is coming from because the two things that looking at this that surprise and delight me first of, this is not chump change that we're talking about. In your 2018 post, Moss provided over $970,000 in funding to over 40 open source projects during the course of 2018. So we're talking about a significant amount of funding. And then secondly, really the focus on, and I'm sure there's strings attached and we can get into the details of what it means to be funded and what it requires and all that.

But whereas many foundations offer, I don't know, supporting infrastructure, legal advice, stuff like that. It's like y'all are just giving cash to these projects. And that seems to be a little bit of a different tact from many other foundations. So why don't I start with the history of the program, because I think that's kind of a good way to understand how MAS has evolved over time and why we have kind of structured the program the way that we did. So the program first started in 2015. And 2015 was kind of a big transitional moment for Mozilla in general. And some of the questions Mozilla as an organization was asking itself was, you know, how do we kind of give back to our roots, which were in the open source community? And so it was kind of this program that came together with a very small team.

Mitchell Baker, who is Mozilla's executive chairwoman, was very interested in this question. And she worked very closely with Jarek Markin, who was an engineer, among other things, at Mozilla, as well as Jane Finette, who is Mitchell's chief of staff. And they just kind of put their heads together and came up with this idea for an awards program. So Mitchell has a certain amount of kind of discretionary funding that's available to her, as is the case for executives of a lot of organizations. And she decided to use a chunk of that funding to fund awards in the open source space. So, you know, something that you just kind

of hinted at is there's a lot of foundations out there. There's a good number of them that support open source technology. But the things that they support are not usually technical development, right? They might support, you know, going to a conference or dissemination of information or all these kind of tangential activities. But there's not a ton of core support out there for actually doing the actual development work. And so that was the kind of gap

that Mitchell and Jerv and Jane were kind of seeking to fill was to take a chunk of money, offer it up for folks who needed kind of core support to build and maintain their projects and to see what kind of impact that would have on the open source ecosystem. And so the first iteration of MOTS really began with us looking at and wanting to support the dependencies that we rely on. So for Mozilla technologies, especially a project as big as Firefox, you can imagine there are so many dependencies that we rely on, so many libraries and other pieces of code ranging from big to small.

And any one of those things could be a core dependency for us. And so the original vision of MOTS was to kind of take a chunk of money and try to support those kinds of projects and to be a steward of the ecosystem that we grew out of and that supported us in that way. And so that program existed in that kind of way for about a year. And in kind of late 2015, early 2016, you know, the kind of focus shifted a little bit as, you know, Jerv and Mitchell and the other folks who are working on the project realized that there are a lot of other people in the ecosystem who are supporting and advancing Mozilla's mission every single day, but who are maybe not building technologies that are dependencies for us in that same kind of way necessarily.

And so an additional kind of chunk of funding was put into MAS under the track two part of the program, which is called Mission Partners. And the original part of the program was turned into track one, which is what we call foundational technology. So track one is for dependencies, tools that we use at Mozilla to get the job done. The idea behind track two was let's offer similar funding to any open source project that kind of aligns broadly with Mozilla's mission and that we think is kind of advancing the causes that we care about in the world. And then the last kind of major track that came online was track three in 2016. And that's our secure open source security vulnerabilities that had been revealed that got a lot of folks at Mozilla talking about how we might address those kinds of things. like Facebook or Google, you know, things like mechanisms like bug bounties work pretty well, right? Because if you have the infrastructure to find bugs and to patch bugs, all you really need

is somebody to report them, and then you can kind of solve those problems yourselves. But of course, it's not really the case for a lot of open source projects, especially small ones, especially ones that are kind of maintained by a core group of volunteers. And so the idea behind Track 3 was similarly to how we had provided funding through Tracks 1 and Track 2, let's provide the money for audits and remediation for widely used open source technologies. And Track 3 is a bit more hands-on than the other tracks in the sense that Mozilla does kind of play a matchmaker role as well. So we have a bunch of folks that we like to work with as outside contractors for things like audits and remediation. And so if you know an open source project that is in need of an audit, we will kind of connect them with the right folks to undertake that work. And if they find anything in the course of that audit, we will

then also pay for the remediation to make sure that the bugs are fixed. And one of the kind of cool stories on the SOS track is shortly after that track was founded, I think it was in 2016, we gave an award to LibJPEG Turbo, and we had funded a security audit for that library. In the course of doing that audit, two bugs were discovered. And then under closer inspection, it turned out those bugs were not bugs in libjpg-turbo. They were bugs in the underlying JPEG standard.

And so if you think about critical infrastructure for basically the entire Internet, you know, that's about as serious as it gets. And those are bugs that maybe would never have been discovered. So those are the kinds of things that really get us excited. You know, I'm not sure that there's a lot of other programs out there in the world that would fund a security audit in that particular case. I guess when you look at these past fundings, so you mentioned LibJPG Turbo. I was also thinking of Curl. There's in the list from the audits you've done before. So let's say you catch something in 2016. What do you do, I guess, to say continue to support Curl

or LibJPEG Turbo and these audits in the future? So you helped in 2016. How do you deal with that in 2017 and 2018 and beyond? How do you provide that audibility or security on the long term? Yeah, that's a good question. And that actually kind of speaks to the idea of sustainability, which is something that we're always trying

to kind of get at through Moss Awards and kind of talking to awardees about. So, you know, we actually have a long history of giving repeat awards to different projects and different organizations. We, you know, you mentioned SecureDrop before. We gave them a $250,000 award last year. That's actually the second $250,000 award that we've given SecureDrop. So very often, if a project has

had a successful MOS project in the past, the committee will be excited to give them additional funding if they can answer a few questions for us. One of the questions the committee is always interested in is the question of sustainability, right? I think like any funder, like any foundation, Mozilla doesn't want to be the sole source of funding for any project. We want these projects to be on the path to sustainability. And so when we talk about catalytic funding, we really are looking at projects where they're on the path to sustainability.

They have a vision and they have a roadmap for getting there. There's maybe a gap in that path. And the committee loves to fill that gap to help those projects reach sustainability. And so when folks come back to us to ask for additional funding, those are the kinds of questions that we usually end up asking. But if folks can kind of tell a compelling story about the additional work that they want to do, and if folks are kind of on track to secure additional support, those are the kinds of things that the committee will be excited to support a second time around. So when I said this isn't chump change, I wasn't kidding. $500,000 over the course of two years is this is big time money in open source many of us are trying to scratch out you know donate via

paypal buttons and maybe a couple hundred bucks a month from patreon supporters but this is significant so what does the money go to uh many times i think it was uh i think the js foundation i was asking specifically why they don't directly fund the developers in terms of their labor. And there's good reasons why that can be problematic. But in the case of these, especially the big ones from 2018, SecureDrop, 250 grand, Tor Project, 150,000, Processing, almost 70,000, DATAT 34,000. So significant funding in open source terms. Surely they have to justify why they need a certain amount of money, what they're going to use it for. But can you go into that and tell about, is it for developer labor or for anything

you think you need or what does the money go to? Yeah, so it can kind of be all of the above. And it's really, it's very much on a case by case basis. So the kind of general universe of funding that we normally see for projects is somewhere between about $10,000 US and $150,000 US. And I would say about 90% of projects will fall in that range. We funded things as small as $5,000. We funded things as big as $250,000 or close to $300,000. But most things are kind of in that $10,000 to $150,000 range. The committee tends to look at these. And if you get up into that 100,000 plus range, that's really where we're going to be expecting you to come to us with not just a clear kind of outline of the work that you want to get done and milestones and a roadmap for achieving that work, but even just kind of a breakdown of how you're going to use all those funds. We want to know that you have a very clear plan for using all that money, that you have tied the need to the specific work that you want to do. And, you know, in terms of what we fund, I would say the vast majority of it is just developer

hours, right? A lot of what we're funding is core work on these projects. But depending on the project, you know, it can be all sorts of other activities as well. One of the things that we ask folks to articulate on their application is to tell us about their user base and to tell us about their community, tell us about the contributor community that they've built. And if they have goals for growing any of those, we want to hear about those goals. We want to hear about how the work they're proposing to do feeds into those goals. And so sometimes these projects will come to us and say, we've built a technology that a small group of people loves to use. We're solving a specific need for a specific group of people. We want to grow awareness of this

project in X, Y, and Z ways. And sometimes the committee will choose to fund those types of projects, as well as the projects that say, we have a strong community, we have a strong user base. The thing that we just need is to be able to pay our developers to continue working on this project. So it's kind of a range and it really depends on the size and the scale of the project, the size of the scale of the ask, all those kinds of things. There's also a grant process to this, right? So you had to do the purpose of the grant, the project details. So some of that's even being defined by the initial ask to be a part of these programs anyways, right?

Like, so they're kind of, the project is sort of determining what they need to do and you're granting them a certain amount of money to achieve that. And it's up to them to put that money to work. And I'm assuming there's gonna be some sort of report back to you to ensure that those grant details were followed. Is that correct? Yeah, absolutely. So why don't I kind of walk you through the process at a high level? So you mentioned the application form, right? That's the first kind of intake that we get from you. So you

will fill out the form. It's a pretty lightweight form, we think, by foundation standards and by award standards. You know, it's one page. There's character limits for each of the questions. We're not expecting you to write a 10-page application or anything like that. One of the things we know working on the MOS program is that the vast majority of folks who apply to the MOS program have never applied for awards funding before. This is not like the traditional foundation world where you have somebody who's working in development and their whole job is applying to grants from big foundations. A lot of the folks that we work with are developers.

They're technologists. They're not people who are familiar with this world. So we try to make the kind of initial application form as kind of lightweight and easy to use and clear and understandable as we can. And so you would fill out that form. You send that to us. I, as a program officer,

kind of take a look at your application and just vet it for things like completeness and stuff like that. If any of it is incomplete, I might shoot you an email and say, hey, can you kind of, you know, fill in this question or something like that if it looks like something's missing.

After that, it goes to the committee. So we don't have any kind of formal deadlines, unlike most awards programs. All of our applications come in on a rolling basis. And we have a committee of open source experts who meets once a month. And so every month, they consider the applications that have come during the previous month. They have a sense of what the budget is for the year and how much the committee has spent that year relative to each of the three or four tracks that we're funding projects in. And then they kind of look at the applications and sometimes they have additional questions they want to go back to the applicant for.

And sometimes they'll just make a decision and they'll say, you know, this looks like exactly the kind of thing that we're looking for. This doesn't look like a good fit. So if they do choose to fund a project, then I, as the program officer, will kind of go back to the project and kind of loop in my colleague, Jessica Gonzalez, who's the grants manager, and kind of work with them in the process for, you know, signing the paperwork for that award for them receiving that award. One of the things I do at that stage is I usually work with the, whoever the maintainer is who has submitted the application to kind of flesh out their roadmap

a little bit more and to get us a set of milestones. So one of the things that we always want to have kind of when they're signing on the dotted line and saying, I'm receiving X amount of money, we want to have kind of a set of deliverables that they are kind of committing to getting done within the 12-month award period in exchange for that award funding. And so I'll work with them to make sure they have kind of a clear, achievable set of milestones, that the milestones seem like they're of appropriate size and scale and all those kinds of things for the amount of funding that we've provided. And then we kind of sign a contract and they have 12 months to complete those milestones. And so as they complete each of those milestones, they will submit a pretty informal report to me.

Honestly, right now, it's just an email that they send me that kind of says, here's what we got done. You know, if they have links to pull requests and things like that to illustrate some of the work, they can send those along to show us how their code base has changed. But a lot of it is just kind of them saying, either we did or we didn't achieve what we set out to do. Here are the reasons why. While we were building this feature, maybe we discovered some additional technical data or the development went in a different direction for whatever reason. And then I just kind of make a judgment call about whether or not it seems like they've completed an appropriate kind of set of work relative to the milestones that we set. And then the last piece is at the very end of the process, once they've finished all

the milestones, they've received all the payments, we ask folks to write a blog post. That's kind of right now one of our best ways of spreading the word about the MOS program. We know that a lot of folks in the open source world will potentially see the blog posts and things that folks are writing. And so we ask folks to just kind of write a blog post to say, hey, I received this award for X amount from Mozilla. Here's what I was able to accomplish using the award. Here's the impact I was able to have. That kind of thing. This episode is brought to you by Get Prime.

They just released a 52-page beautiful field guide called 20 Patterns. This field guide is a collection of work patterns Get Prime has observed while working with hundreds of software teams. And their hope is that you'll use this field guide to get a better feel for how your team works, to recognize achievement, to spot bottlenecks, and also to debug your development processes with data. You'll learn about long-running PRs, flaky product ownership, scope creep, knowledge silos, and so much more. Check the show notes for a link to download this field guide or learn more at getprime.com slash changelog. That's G-I-T-P-R questions about money. Money is the is the hard topic here. And like any foundation, I'm assuming that it's always be fundraising. And I'm curious, like how you determine this million dollars to give away in 2018? Is it just you're doing specific fundraising for it?

Is it what how are you getting this money, basically? Yeah, that's a super interesting question, especially in the context of Moss. So I have other awards programs and fellowship programs and things like that, that I work on on the Mozilla Foundation side. And for the vast majority of those, it's exactly what you said. We go out and we do specific fundraising for specific projects. So for instance, I worked on an awards program a few years ago where we got a chunk of funding from the National Science Foundation. We basically partnered with them. They provided the funding. We provided the awards and the infrastructure.

And we went out and kind of ran this program around wireless networking. MOS is a huge outlier in that way. It's very much unlike our other awards programs in that the funding for MOS every year comes from Mitchell Baker's discretionary funding, basically. And it's a set amount each year. And so she basically says each year, you know, here is your budget. And it's usually somewhere around $2 million for the year. This is the money that I'm providing for you all to go out and give awards to folks

in the open source community. And so in that way, it's actually really just, you know, Mitchell kind of opening up her wallet, as it were, and kind of saying, you know, this is how we're going to put our money where our mouth is this year and kind of fund the ecosystem that we grew out of. And just in case no one knows Mitchell, can you give kind of a precursor to Mitchell? Yeah. So Mitchell is the executive chairwoman of Mozilla, Mozilla as a whole. She has been involved with Mozilla since the very start of the Mozilla project and even well before that. You know, to me, she's kind of a legend in the open source world, in the world of software, in the world of the web. You know, I think she's one of the kind of pivotal figures in the development of the web browser and a lot of technologies that we enjoy today. Pretty cool what she's doing with her money, in my opinion.

Of course, I'm biased towards open source, but I'm happy that she's doing it. It's awesome that so many projects can benefit from her opening up her wallet, as you said. Very cool. A couple of questions about the money. So that's where it's coming from, different than most of these things,

but straight from Mitchell's quote-unquote wallet the question is where does it go we talked about what it mean you know what kind of projects that you're interested in and the application process first of all i did want to say i didn't get a chance to say it earlier i think the revolving door is that what you called it or like the every month you can basically apply at any time i think that really, I think that's really cool versus like a once a year application process and selection because in light of sustainability, you know, a lot of these projects when they need money and they need help,

you know, they might not be here if they got to wait nine months before they can get an application put together. So I think it's pretty, pretty cool that you can just, you know, if you need the money, go ahead and apply once a month, you get a shot at it. I think that's a neat, neat formula,

but let's talk about where the money goes because, uh, um, a few of these, uh, organizations I'm thinking like open collective where they've formalized, you know, and a 501 C three, and they'll actually be able to receive the money on your behalf. There's a lot of legalese and problems with receiving money. And so when you go ahead and select a project and say, okay, we're going to give the Tor project $150,000 for the year 2018, how do they receive that? Is it sent to an individual? Do they got to claim taxes? Is there an entity? Is it different for each project? Help us understand who receives the money and how. Yeah. So it is kind of all of the above. And

it is very much a thing that varies from project to project. This is one of the ways in which we try to maintain as much flexibility as we can. And, you know, sometimes our lawyers and our grants people hate us for the amount of flexibility that we give folks. But we do want to understand that there's all sorts of different setups that people have for maintaining open source projects. And some of the projects we fund could be a lone developer who's kind of the steward of that project. Some of them could be a 501c3 nonprofit organization, like you said, like the Tor project or Freedom of the Press Foundation or something like that. And then there's everything in between, right? There's all other different types of projects. And so we try to provide funding in the way that makes the

most sense for the project receiving it, while also educating them on things like tax liability and some of these questions that they may have to answer further and on the line if we do provide them with a chunk of money. So when we do, on our application form, actually, we ask people, you know, are you an individual applicant? Are you a for profit? Are you a nonprofit? We also ask them, how much funding do you want to receive from us and in what currency? And then based on those questions, that kind of starts a conversation that we have with the awardee once the award has been granted about, all right, what's the best way for you to receive these funds? And so if you are a 501c3, we can give you a grant instead of an

award. That way, since you are a nonprofit organization receiving those funds, you don't have to pay taxes on it. There's certain other restrictions that we would maybe have to abide by in other cases where if you're a 501c3, there's kind of certain things that can change the way that the funding is received and handled and things like that. If you're an individual or you're a group of individuals or something like that, we normally ask one person to kind of step up and say, I'm going to be the person who receives this money and then kind of is responsible for any tax liability and things like that. You know, we've given money to folks in Albania, we've given money to folks in India, we've given money to folks kind of all over the globe. And, you know, in some cases, if we need to make a wire transfer

to a bank account, in a country on the other side of the world, like we'll make that happen, if that's what we need to do to get the funding to the person. But then in a lot of other cases, too, it's, you know, we're kind of having a relationship with a grants manager at another nonprofit and kind of, you know, granting them money and more of a traditional foundation way. So it really depends on the needs of the project. And we try to kind of be as flexible with the funding as we can. So the basic suggestion, though, is that when applying for the grant, when determining the amount to ask for, that you're considering the tax implication ahead of time for those who are asking for the award? Yeah, I mean, that's definitely what we would recommend for folks. And, you know,

sometimes with nonprofits, for instance, as well, they will ask for a certain amount of overhead, and that will be a part of their budget. And that's actually a fairly common thing in the nonprofit world to kind of say, you know, in addition to the, let's say we're asking for 50K for a grant, we might ask for a couple more thousand dollars on top of that account for the labor that will be involved in receiving and documenting the grant and all those kinds of things. And, you know, in those cases, we try to work with them to make that happen as well, as long as that's something that they're flagging for us in the initial application. You mentioned issuing a grant instead of an award to say a non-profit. What are some of the more, let's just use 2018 for example, when you issued funds for those projects,

the five or six that were mentioned in the blog post, what are the typical ways you gave it? Was it to an individual or was it to a non-profit or was it to some sort of foundational organization that represents that project? Yeah. So in the you know, the ones that we highlighted in 2018, those I think were SecureDrop, TorProject, Processing Foundation, and DatProject. It just so happens that all of those were projects that have a nonprofit board that maintains them. And so those are all kind of fairly straightforward. At least one of those, I think, used what's called a fiscal sponsorship, which means you can have another kind of bigger nonprofit act as the receiving body for the money. And then you don't need to have the full infrastructure of a nonprofit in order to receive that money.

So that's another kind of common thing, too, where we will give the grant to a bigger nonprofit like Software Freedom Conservancy or somebody like that. And then they, in turn, will regrant it to the awardee. So if that's what makes the most sense for the awardee, then we do those kinds of relationships as well. So one thing you're pushing towards, and it seems like you're having some success, is in diversifying the recipients of these awards, especially geographically.

It leads me to think of things about developer labor. So one problem with developer labor is, you labor is it's not all created equally. So even just looking at SecureDrop, $250,000, that is a lot of money for a year. That being said, that could be a single person's salary in the Valley. Sure. Maybe in the Midwest, you might get two people for a year for that. Maybe in Albania, as you said, maybe you can have an entire team for that kind of money. So are these concerns that you have as you divvy out how much to provide?

And then also, are you in these weeds? Or is it really we trust the project to handle that on their own? Curious your thoughts on that. Yeah, so we definitely get in the weeds with some projects. And the bigger the ask, the more in the weeds we're going to get. And in fact, the more in the weeds with some projects. And the bigger the ask, the more in the weeds we're going to get. And in fact, the more in the weeds the committee is going to get as well. So, you know, SecureDrop, you know, we had already given them a large award. They had done an incredible amount of work based off of that award. The committee and everyone was

very happy with the work that they had done with the previous award. But when they came back and asked for 250k, again, we said, you know, Freedom of the Press Foundation, we work with you on other things outside of this, you're a known, trusted entity to us, we know that this team did good work with the last award, but we're still going to ask to see a ton of documentation because we want to know exactly how you're calculating this amount. And so in that case, you know, we did want to see how many developer hours are working on each of these different things. What are the hourly rate that's being paid to the developers? We wanted to benchmark that against what we know about salaries in those places and stuff like that. And so for the big awards,

we do actually dig into that stuff quite a bit just to make sure that it all kind of makes sense. We do still allow for flexibility. And like you know, like you said, everything's relative, right? Like what makes sense in the Bay Area may be very different in Illinois and may be very different from Albania. And so we try to kind of be understanding of those regional differences and regional needs. You know, we had a project, I think, in 2018 that was a small group of developers working on it. And the core maintainer was a lone developer in India. And this person submitted an application and said, if you give me $5,000 US, I can basically like, stop working for six months and put all of my full time energy into this project and get this project to a much better place. And so that was another one that the committee funded. It was kind of the polar opposite of SecureDrop in terms of size and scale. And in that case, they didn't ask for a lot of documentation, right?

It was a pretty small ask, but based on the documentation that was provided, they had a good amount of faith that this is a group of folks who have produced good work like this in the past. And the committee just thought that they would be able to pull off what they promised, and they did. Let's talk about licensing, because that's the sticky part of open source these days is is the the question of if if something truly is open source based on its license yeah um are there any particulars around licensing in terms of the project or any concerns around that say if they have a current license that is accepted but say they change a year from

the date of funding like how do you deal with licensing when it comes to funding? That's a really good question. In terms of the general blanket statement that we give to people when they ask about licensing, we generally say, the MOS committee will consider any project that's licensed under any open license that has been approved by either OSI or FSF. So there's a broad range of licenses there. As long as one of those two organizations has kind of signed off on the

license as an open license, we will recognize it and we'll say, okay, as far as we're concerned, this is an open source project. Now, of course, there are a lot of edge cases. And one of the things that you kind of hinted at there is, you know, licensing can change over time. Sometimes we deal with like open core projects that want to monetize at some point, projects that want to transition from open to closed, or maybe they have some kind of a business deal that's influencing the licensing, that kind of thing. So one of the things that we do is when we give away an award, we have folks sign an award agreement with us. And it's basically like a pretty lightweight contract that says, you say you'll do these things.

We say we'll give you this amount of money. This all will happen within the course of 12 months, that kind of thing. And, you know, one of the kind of asks that we have in there is for the work that's completed under this award and during this time period, it must not just initially be under an open license. It must always be under an open license, it must always be under an open license. And so, you know, if a project decides that later on down the line, they want to close something, they can't close the work that they completed using the Mozilla money without violating that agreement, basically. Any stories gone wrong that you can share? Maybe not name names, but just scenarios of when the rules were bent or the contract was broken or just anything that helped you all learn along the way? Because I'm

sure that over these last four years, you've gotten better and better at this. Yeah, totally. So, you know, in terms of licensing, actually, we have not had a huge number of issues with that. I think that we try to be pretty clear up front with folks about what our expectations are regarding licensing. And generally the folks who come to us for funding are equally invested

in the open source ecosystem and keeping things open and they understand the benefit of keeping things open. So that has not really been a huge point of contention in the past. The main learning for us, I think, has been understanding that with

open source projects, and especially kind of like the smaller and scrappier they are, things change, people leave the project, people new come to the project. These things are living organisms, right? And unlike giving a grant to a big nonprofit organization, if you're giving an award to a small group of people, there's all sorts of things that can come up that will kind of change the trajectory of that project, even just within that small 12-month window in which we're working with them.

And so, you know, in the past, in the distant past, something we used to do for Moss is provide most of the funding upfront, if not all of the funding upfront. So if you had a $50,000 award, we would just send you $50,000 and then on good faith. And then we would just hope that you get the work done over the course of 12 months. That's not something we do very often anymore. So part of our work around milestoning is also figuring out a payment plan. And those payments are tied to those

milestones. So you have to basically complete each of those milestones in order to unlock the next payment. We'll usually provide you with a chunk of funding up front just to help you get started and understanding that there are costs associated with achieving the first milestone. But then after that, you'll kind of receive a third of the payment or a fifth of the payment or whatever, based on the kind of the size of the award and the size of the project. So things that have happened with some regularity in the past and continue to happen with some regularity, and this is just a part of the world that we're operating in, is we'll be working with a project, and they'll be six months into their project or something like that. And then somebody for the project will email us and say,

hey, the main maintainer of this project just kind of like disappeared and doesn't answer emails anymore. And we can't get a hold of them. And we like see them talking on this other Slack channel somewhere. So we know that they're still alive. But for whatever reason, they're just like not, you know, they're not involved in this project anymore. They don't want to be. And so in some of those cases, we do actually have to void the agreement and kind of say, all right, like, we're releasing you from this agreement, we understand you're not going to get this work done, you understand you're not going to get the agreement and kind of say, all right, like we're releasing you from this agreement. We understand you're not going to get this work done. You understand you're not going to get the rest of the money, that kind of thing. So, you know, that does happen from time to time.

And I think that the kind of milestoning and the increased attention to the work plan and kind of tying a payment plan to that was something we had to kind of learn over time by working with projects like that. What about the team size? I'm thinking like to kind of manage the day to day of that, you'd have to have some sort of oversight. How do you break down, you know, not only who's behind Moss, but the individual attention each project needs along its path? Yeah, that's a really good question. That's something that we're actually, we've gotten a lot better at, I think, in the last year or so. So Moss was originally run by Jerv Markham. And Jerv was his job title, at least, I think, was he was an engineer at Mozilla.

And Moss was kind of like a side of desk project for him. And so in addition to all the stuff he was doing, he would run these committee meetings and give out these awards. And because it was the side of this project, he had a system that worked really well for him. But it was very much kind of like held together by duct tape and bubble gum kind of thing. So he had a bunch of Google Docs where he would take notes. He would document decisions he or the committee made in the Google Docs or sometimes he wouldn't. He would give out the money and it was all done in kind of a very informal fashion, which I think, you know, coming from the open source

world made a lot of sense and, you know, was not necessarily unusual to the awardees that he was working with. So Jerv, unfortunately, passed away in 2018. And so part of the Moss program transitioning to a new staff was us kind of learning these processes that Jerv had built and kind of keeping the program running while also kind of learning these processes that Jerv had built and kind of keeping the program running while also kind of building some additional process around it. And so a lot of the work that we've done in the last year has been kind of professionalizing the program and kind of using some of the tools and the best practices that we have used on the foundation side for years to build and maintain programs to make sure that we are kind of having those

touch points with awardees throughout the award cycle that kind of give them opportunities to let us know if issues come up or things like that. So as a program officer, it's kind of my role to be kind of having that day-to-day conversation with awardees. And I work very closely with my colleague, Jessica, who is a grants manager and who is the day-to-day point of contact for anything having to do with payment. So if you have a question about, you know, when you're going to receive the next payment or the best way to receive it or things like that, things relating to the agreement, she kind of plays a similar role in terms of answering those questions and talking to folks. You know, a lot of this has been kind of informal

in the past and a lot of it has not necessarily had process built around it. But one thing that we're starting to do now is we have a grants management system that we use at the foundation. And when we enter a new award in there, we can enter in, okay, these are the milestones, these are the rough dates when we expect to get those milestones,

and these are the payments that are tied to those milestones. So in the future, awardees will start seeing things like you might get an email 30 days or 90 days before you told us your next milestone was going to come in saying, hey, like, you know, it's almost July 2019. You told us that you would have our Qtus project ready in July. Expect to hear from the program officer soon. So kind of giving folks a head up, a heads up and reminding them and kind of trying to keep them on that path. So, you know, kind of small bits of automation and process like that are things that we're

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If I heard you correctly, in 2018, you awarded almost a million dollars. But did I hear there was a $2 million budget? Maybe you just were rounding. Is that what the budget was? It sounds like there's some unutilized money and potentially y'all are looking for more applicants. Yep. So there's a little bit of both. So because we have this rolling application cycle, we have projects that last for 12 months, but sometimes stretch out over multiple years. So, you know, if we have a two million dollar pot, we may give away a million dollars in 2018, or close to a million dollars, but a lot

of that additional million is already committed to additional projects that we know will be coming through with additional milestones in 2019. So the accounting gets a little bit kind of complicated that way. But we are always looking for more projects. And, you know, one of the things that we are doing this year that's new is we're trying to grow the program in general. So we're trying to give out more money to more projects. But we're also trying to grow the program in some specific areas. And so the specific areas that we're looking at are projects that broaden access, projects that increase security, projects that empower users, or projects that increase or can demonstrate a commitment to diversity and inclusion in the open source ecosystem. So we're looking for those projects in particular,

and we're always considering any and all open source projects that align with the Mozilla mission. How about open source podcasts? No, I'm just kidding. Tell us, help us, help us help our listeners who are out there thinking I got a project.

My patron is not doing so hot. My open collective has, you know, a few bucks rolling in. help our listeners who are out there thinking, I got a project. My Patreon's not doing so hot. My Open Collective has a few bucks rolling in. I would love to have a significant amount of funding from this program. Help us check the boxes. What exactly are you looking for? What exactly do they have to do? What disqualifies them, etc.?

The first step, I would say, if you're interested in the Moths program, is go to the Moths website and read up on what we're looking for. So that is mozilla.org slash MOSS. If you go there, you will see a description of the different MOSS tracks. You will see a link to the application form. We also have an FAQ at the bottom of that page that I strongly recommend that folks read through

because it answers a ton of the questions that we get most commonly from folks who are interested in applying. In terms of the kind of profile of applicant that we're looking for, you know, the MOS funding decisions are made by a committee of experts. So I or really nobody else at Mozilla has a say in what gets funded. It's the committee that has the same what gets funded. And so I can't necessarily tell you what they like to fund with 100% accuracy, but I can tell you what the kind of general type of project they get excited generally looks like. So that project is usually a open source project

that has a specific focus on solving a specific problem for a specific group of users. It is a project that has seen some success in acquiring those users. It's also a project that's seen some success in building a community of contributors who are interested in kind of contributing to the health of that project in the long term. And most of these projects also have an idea about how they're going to reach sustainability if they're not actually already on the path to sustainability. There may be gaps in that path. And that's usually the reason why they're coming to us is they have an idea about

how they're going to make this thing sustainable in the long term, but they need some funding to help them survive the next six months, nine months, 12 months to be able to get there. Those are generally the kinds of projects that the committee is looking for. And one thing I should say here is I'm always happy to chat with folks. If folks have questions about the application, if folks have questions about, does this seem like a good fit for Moss or not? If folks just have questions about the granting and the money side of things, if you shoot an email to moss, M-O-S-S at mozzola.com, that goes directly to all the Moss program staff. So whichever one of us is kind of best situated to answer that question, we'll get back to you. I'm always happy to jump on calls with folks who are interested in

applying that sort of thing too. I can vouch for submitting questions to that email address because that's exactly how we got you on this call today was we emailed you and said hey you want to talk about moss 2019 on the change login here we are so it works it works there are real human beings behind that email really yeah it was an easy process too so we appreciate that i think it was jeanette that got back to us as part of that and then i think a couple other people that ended up being you so pretty smooth process. What about education when it comes to, I know FAQs are good, right?

That's just scratching the surface. Are there at length blog posts, documentation? What's being worked on? I'm thinking kind of like Stripe Atlas for founders. Do you have something Stripe Atlas like for would be or should be leaders and maintainers of open source that could use MOS grants or awards to make the next best thing. Yeah, that's a really interesting idea. We don't necessarily have anything like an Atlas yet for projects. But one of the things that we want to

do this year is start thinking about, in addition to award funding, what are some resources that we can give to our awardees that will help them grow their projects and maintain their projects long term? And there's a few kind of specific areas that we're focusing on. So governance is one, diversity inclusion is one. We're basically looking at some of these things that seem like they're pressing challenges for a lot of the projects that we work with, and then trying to come up with resources that we can connect them with that can help them along that path. So, you know, in the example of diversity and inclusion, some of the things we're working on right now are documentation that kind of helps you evaluate, self-evaluate your own code of conduct, or helps you figure out, okay, I have a code of conduct,

but what kind of reporting process do I need to have? Or what are the different options, right? And if I have a reporting process, what kind of remedies do I need to have or what are the different options right and if I have a reporting process what kind of remedies do I need to offer what kind of actions do I need to take how do I kind of tie those to the reporting process so you know we're kind of starting to think about building that library of resources but that's still very much kind of an early thing for us the reason I ask that is because I look at the two links since I'm using your FAQs as a lens here, I'm linking to what looks like one grant version, which is Kia DHCP, DHCP server. And then the other one was the Tor project. And they both kind of have, you know,

here's what we're going to do over this amount of time. And they may not be going this order. And then with each of those milestones as dollars, I'm just thinking like, how do they get educated enough to even fill this thing out to make your jobs easy enough to one, just get this suggestion of this, you know,

this, uh, this statement of work or this whatnot to, to figure out what to do. I'm thinking like if I had to do that personally, I would just like literally copy and paste and just replace and, and hope that these examples are good. I'm just thinking maybe there's a better way.

Yeah. So in terms of the milestone stuff, that's one of the things actually, and the scope of work and all that, that's one of the things where we don't expect every project to have that stuff 100% figured out when they come to us. We know that for a lot of folks, part of the process of working with us is actually figuring that stuff out. And, you know, I think that in some cases there, we have the opportunity to help kind of provide feedback on that as they're

working through it. That I think kind of really depends on the size and the scale of the project. Right. So for like the examples that you gave for those big awards that are looking for the $150,000, $200,000 award, you know, either we're expecting them to come to us with that scope of work and that kind of fleshed out work plan, or if they don't, we're going to be reaching back out to them and saying, hey, the committee is interested in this, but they really want a,

you know, a more granular level of detail about what work you're going to accomplish, how long it's going to take, how much it's going to cost, all that kind of stuff. For folks who are smaller projects, they're asking for a smaller amount of funding. Sometimes they'll give us just kind of a very broad sketch, right? They might say, you know, we kind of want to build out the documentation for this thing. And, you know, we want to kind of transition this thing to the next major version. And we want to kind of shore up the security of this thing. And that might be kind of all they have when they come to us.

And if it's a fairly small ask, the committee might say, that sounds good. Give them the award, work with them to kind of flesh that out. And so from that point on, I'm kind of in a relationship with those folks where they're sending me stuff. I'm providing them with feedback. We have templates and stuff like that that we send to folks. So we kind of say, here's what a good set of milestones looks like. Here's what a scope of work looks like. Here are the kind of elements you need to have, which could include a rough date of when the work

is going to get done, the number of hours, you know, depending on the size of your project, maybe break those hours down among the team members, maybe let us know how much each of those team members is probably going to be paid hourly, that kind of thing. And, you know, we very much will work with those projects to kind of get that scope of work to a place that both we're happy with and that the project is happy with. And that they think kind of gives them a good roadmap to get the work done within the 12 months. It's really about momentum then. I mean, if I'm understanding correctly, the key thing is just to apply and share your story, whether or not it's fully fleshed out or not. Just share the story of your project, what you're going to use the funding for,

what a rough version of your plan is, even if it's not perfect. And behind the scenes, since this is rolling once a month, you're going to reach back out and say, let's take it to the next step and hold their hand or be a partner with them to the next steps. That's exactly right. Yeah. And there's there's kind of a whole set of different possibilities that happen when your application gets to the committee. It's not very black and white. It's not necessarily like either you get all the money or you don't get any of the money. There's a lot of gray area and most projects actually fall into the gray areas, I would say. And so a lot of projects will go'll go back to them and say, hey, the committee is really interested in this project,

but they just need a little bit more information in this area or that area. Can you flush this out a little bit more? Just send me a paragraph about whatever it is, sustainability maybe. I'll take that back to the committee and then they'll kind of either green light it or they won't. Sometimes we'll go back to folks and say,

this project is really cool. The committee really likes it. They think it's really interesting, but they don't think you're quite at the point yet where you're a good fit for Mott. So that might mean that you have to grow your community of users. That might mean that you only have folks

inside your organization contributing. You haven't built any kind of community of outside contributors. And so we'll kind of say, here's what the committee would want to see in order for them to feel comfortable kind of funding this project. Go spend however much time you need to do to feel like you have gotten to that point, and then please come back and reapply once you reach that point. There's a small number of projects that the community will outright just kind of say, like, no, this is not a good fit.

And that's usually kind of one of two things, either the nature of the project is just not aligned with the Muslim mission. And, you know, that doesn't just mean like, you know, for profit things or things like that. Sometimes there are very cool projects that are doing really cool stuff, let's say around education, which is a thing that the committee believes in and thinks is great and, you know, can be a force of good in the world, but it's not necessarily aligned with the goals of the mosque program. Or the other category of things they won't fund is if the activities don't look like the kind of activities that we normally fund through MOS. So if somebody says, hey, give me 50 grand so I can take my whole team to a conference, the committee will usually say, yeah, I mean, this is a cool project maybe, but that's not the kind of thing we like to fund.

If you have an idea for technical development you want to do, come back and give us an application for that instead, that kind of thing. Is diversity and inclusion a new aspect to the application form this last year? It is. And actually, we're kind of continuing to iterate on the way that we ask those questions on the form. We actually just rolled out some changes in the last month that allow us to get a little bit more depth on some of those questions. So one of the initial questions we added to the form was, does your project have a code of conduct? After a few months, we realized that the answer to that question was only giving us part of the information that we wanted to get. And so now we ask additional follow-up questions.

So if you answer yes to the, you do have a code of conduct, we want to know what's something you think that you're doing really well in your code of conduct. What's an area that you feel like you could improve on your code of conduct? So kind of teasing out a little bit more, how far along are you and how much thought and care have you put into this process? And we get a whole range of answers to that question. I mean, there's not a one-size-fits-all there at all. Folks are at all kind of stages of that process. We are asking some optional questions now around things like gender and ethnicity and geographic location. Those are 100% optional. Folks don't have to answer those questions, but we have set goals for ourselves in terms of funding projects that either, you know, increase or encourage

diversity and inclusion in the ecosystem. And so, you know so if folks do feel comfortable providing that information, those are ways that we can internally then kind of track our own progress against those faults. You want to speak to maybe the linked portion of that section of the application. It's a document that says open source inclusion, basic checklist for projects. And it seems pretty clear in terms of your code of conduct and your governance, but then also give some checkboxes to some do's and don'ts, basically.

Seems more like do's rather than don'ts, but you get the point. Yeah, totally. I mean, the idea here in general is that we've now been funding, for almost five years, we've been funding stuff in the world of open source. We've funded a bunch of great projects that we're really excited about. We've funded a whole range of important work that probably wouldn't have gotten funded otherwise. And that in and of itself is a thing I think that everyone at Mozilla is very proud of. But as the MOS program kind of reaches the five-year mark and as it kind of has gotten a little bit more kind of structure and process behind it,

one of the questions that we have gone into 2019 asking ourselves is, can we get more opinionated, right? We have this pot of money that we are handing out to projects. We have the ability to kind of tell projects like this is what we and the committee wants to see in the world. Can we get a little bit louder with our voice in terms of articulating those things? And can we kind of use the Moss funding, the Moss application to kind of point people in those directions? And so, you know, increasing the diversity and inclusion of the open source ecosystem is one of those opinions. I think that's very aligned with broader opinions at Mozilla.

And I think that in terms of Moss, that's one of the areas that we think that we can have an impact in. And we think that we can improve the diversity and inclusion of the projects that we fund because we think it will make those projects healthier and better overall. Yeah. I mean, it seems like the linked up version, which was a good example was the Firefox debugger community teams page. I think that's pretty interesting how you kind of got a good example of something being done, not only out there, but, you know,

more particular being done by Mozilla folks. And I think, one, it leads to healthier asks from your front to sort of ensure that your focus is on inclusion and diversity and the different missions you mentioned there before, but more in particular, healthy open source at large. This isn't just simply MOS serving so that you can easily and or just get through an application and ensure a project makes sense. But you're sort of paying it forward to a future open source that this is good behavior. That's exactly the idea.

Yeah. And something I should stress is you don't need to have this stuff totally figured out in order to apply to Moss. We continue to fund projects that are still kind of working through this process and that are just in the beginning stages of this process. The important thing for us is that we get a commitment from you that if you don't feel comfortable with where your project is in terms of setting these policies around inclusiveness, that you're willing to identify the places where you can grow and that you commit to grow in those

areas in the next 12 months that you're working with us. And we're kind of rolling out new tools every day for awardees. One of the things that we're going to be experimenting with soon is having D&I consultants that will work one-on-one with projects that need it. So if you identify a need and you say, hey, I just really need to sit down with somebody and have them walk through my code of conduct and help me improve it line for line. We want to be able to provide those kinds of resources in addition to the funding that we're giving you so that you come out the other end of the 12 month cycle and you've built X, Y, and Z things that you committed to build. But also your project is now healthier and set up for better community engagement in the long run, far after the award cycle is complete. Jerry, you can back me up on this, but I think one thing we're kind of keen on here to some degree, it seems like, was that conversation we had with Gina around NumFocus was their focus was kind of at the non-incubator stage, right?

The graduated stage where they were venture capitalists, for lack of better terms, funding open source. And these are sort of proven teams, so to speak. And it seems similar here, but what you're talking about sounds a little like incubation. Yeah. I mean, we are kind of, you know, one way that Mozilla talks about itself internally sometimes with regard to the Mox program is an investor for good, right? We see all of these VCs in the world that are providing Catholic funding to projects that have the potential to create huge returns in the long run or to be very profitable or whatever the case may be. We want to act in a very similar capacity,

but to invest in things that we think are a force of good in the world. And that's really kind of the reason driving us. Of course, unlike our VC, we're also not taking an ownership stake in these things or anything like that. But we do, you know, we think that mechanism of investment and funding can actually be very powerful even outside of the kind of traditional venture capital context. Well, let's end on Seed Awards, which is something that's very cool. And I have to admit, I have a biased reason for bringing this up because when we were talking with Gina, Adam, I pitched you an idea. Do you remember what it was?

Yes, I do. It was a shark tank for open source. That's right. I pitched you an idea. Do you remember what it was? Yes, I do. It was Shark Tank for open source. That's right. Shark Tank for open source. And I'm reading about the SEED Awards, which is a new thing you did in an effort of broadening participation in the MOS program at MOSFest or Mozilla Festival in London,

which sounds a lot like, you guys called it MOS speed dating. It sounds a lot like Shark Tank for open source. You want to tell us about it? So, you know, I will tell you that at some point in Mozilla's distant history, there was something called Dino Tank, which was also supposed to be Shark Tank for open source.

Oh, okay. Yeah, so we've done a few things kind of like that before. The Moss Speed Dating event was also very much kind of Shark Tank for open source. Hopefully a little bit friendlier and less intimidating than Shark Tank, but similar kind of dynamic. Yeah, so the idea there was we give out these big awards every month, right? And most of the awards are $10,000 US or above. And they're

usually the projects that, like I said, have figured out the community piece, they've figured out the contributor piece, they figured out a little bit about the sustainability piece. There's tons of smaller projects that aren't quite there yet that we still want to bring into the MOSS ecosystem. We would love, for example, to have some of these projects be in touch with us throughout their lifecycle. And when they're ready for a MOSS award, they know how to reach us and they know who to ask questions

and things like that. And so we started asking ourselves some questions last year about how do we start to reach that kind of audience and what is something that we could provide to some of those folks that would be interesting for them and that would kind of familiarize them with MOTS and bring them to the table. So the Mozilla Foundation runs a big festival every year. Historically, it's been in London and tens of thousands of people from the general public attend this event. And the event kind of touches on all of the different parts of the Mozilla mission from security to open innovation to digital literacy, all that

kind of stuff. And so it's really kind of the biggest gathering that we do every year that brings together Mozilla contributors, Mozilla community members, and just folks, members of the general public. And so the idea that we kind of came up with was, you know, we have this Moss committee meeting every month. It happens behind closed doors. People don't get to actually take part in the conversation. And we have these folks who sometimes come to us, they're interested in Moss, but they're not quite ready for a big award yet. What if we do kind of a speed dating round where we say, hey, if you work on an open source project, your project could use a little bit of funding. Maybe you have not figured out all of the different aspects of your project yet in order to be ready or well positioned to

apply for a large Moth award. But maybe you could talk about your project and tell us what your vision is for the project and tell us why a small amount of award funding. So in this case, we did $5,000. Why $5,000 would make a big difference for your project. So we did, we put together a kind of interim MAS committee for the event, which drew from the existing MAS committee, as well as some Mozilla staff, some past staff members, some folks who are just kind of part of the larger Mozilla community, and just had them all sit in a room. And we did like five minute like speed dating rounds, basically, like just give your pitch

on your project in five minutes or less to this person. And then boom, go give it to another person and then go give it to a third person. And so at the end of that day, we had the committee kind of sit down and we said, you know, you can give up to $25,000 awards, make your selections and choose which projects are going to get those awards. And, you know, in fact, the majority of people who came and participated in the event that day walked away with a $5,000 seed award. And so our hope with those seed awards is, A, that it will provide, you know, catalytic funding to small projects to kind of continue to grow. But B, that it will kind of mark the beginning of their relationship with us. These

are projects that the committee members saw a lot of promise, a lot of potential in. And we hope that when they get to the stage that they're ready for a bigger award, they know where to come back to, and they know who to talk to. So we're kind of, you know, we're looking to do something similar to that event again this year. And we're kind of always looking for different ways like that to, you know, kind of get outside of the we have kind of a rigid set of processes now that we use for how the traditional loss awards are made. And we also want to use that two million dollar bucket to experiment a little bit with other ways of giving out funding and giving out different kind of more nimble, flexible types of funding as well. So 14 projects selected. Do you know the total number of projects that participated? Yeah, I think it was

20 or 21. We had a limited number of spots, so folks had to sign up for those seats before they filled out. Pretty good odds there. So it's kind of like a lightning talk, only at the end you get $5,000. Mm-hmm. Sounds like a pretty good time. Yeah, to fund your future a lightning talk only at the end you get five thousand dollars sounds like it sounds like it sounds like a pretty good time yeah to fund your future of open source projects that's pretty cool

yeah well i love that you guys are not just doing what you're doing with the moss awards but also this experimentation and really trying to bring more people more awareness more people to the party so to speak that's pretty cool So I definitely wish you luck with that. You said you're going to do it again. Is Mozilla Festival happening again in 2019? I believe it is going to happen again, yeah. And I think we'll probably look to do something similar again this year. You know, one of the things that we have learned over time

that we continue to learn by running Moss is that the open source community is incredibly diverse. There's a huge number of different projects of different size and scale and scope, different types of teams, teams spread out all over the world and all sorts of locations. And so I think it kind of behooves us as a program that's trying to give awards in that space to experiment with different ways of reaching different people in the ecosystem and trying to serve as many different types of projects in the ecosystem as we can and not just one kind of project.

So it might be cool. And I know it wouldn't be exactly like Shark Tank for open source, but it might be cool. And people might be nervous, but it might be cool to film that at the event and have some assets you can take away with and use those to spread the word about what you all are up to. It's also a nice little promotion for the projects involved. You know, they get to have people watch them tell other people about their project. Could be cool. That's definitely an idea that we talked about last year. Last year, we made the decision not to do that just because we wanted the barrier to entry to be really low and we didn't want anyone to be intimidated, right? We wanted folks to show up and feel comfortable and kind of

be like, okay, this isn't actually Shark Tank, but we're just giving you kind of the opportunity to give a pitch one-on-one to folks. But we definitely, you know, I think we're talking about what are some things that we could do using video to do more storytelling around the projects that we funded through Moss and the impact those projects have had in the world. So definitely stay tuned for some things like that in the next year. On that note, let's talk about the future then, because what Jared just mentioned would totally feed into this. But looking forward to 2019,

your hope is to double down on your efforts to kind of widen this application pool, this applicant pool to Moss. And I'm assuming that also means those who are submitting to these seed awards as well. So this would lead into that. But what other things are you doing to do as you say, which is widening your efforts? What are you doing there? Yeah.

So we, for the first time ever in the history of the MOTS program, we actually have a like an outreach strategy this year. So we have a share of the MOTS budget that we are dedicating to outreach. And so, you know, some of the activities that we're going to do using that budget are things like, you know, send our committee members to conferences to talk about the MOTS program and kind of evangelize the program. You might see us giving out additional kind of small awards to past awardees who want to go and talk about their work at different conferences. I know that a project called Nunspell actually just gave a talk at Fostem

all about the work that they were able to do using their Mossa word, which is great. We love to see that sort of thing. So we may be encouraging those kinds of activities. You know, I talked a little bit about this idea of us getting opinionated and us kind of using our voice a little bit more loudly to articulate the kind of change and growth a little bit more loudly to articulate the kind of change and growth that we want to see in the open source ecosystem. And I think you'll see

us doing that a little bit more throughout 2018. You know, me talking on this podcast is kind of one great example of that. But it could also look like, you know, us doing things more like opinion pieces or interviews, things like that, that can kind of raise the profile of the program and hopefully get the word out to the right folks and the folks who are interested in applying. And one of the things that we really want to do is encourage and empower our awardees whenever possible to tell their own stories and particularly to tell stories about the impact that they're having in the world.

And so we're kind of constantly refining the kind of prompts that we give folks for that end of project blog posts. I think that in this year, you'll definitely see those blog posts will kind of focus a little bit more on impact and focus a little bit more on those kind of specific themes that we are encouraging people to kind of think about their projects in sort of as lenses to kind of view their projects and their work through. And, you know, hopefully we'll get to do a little bit more storytelling also around some of these MOSS projects to kind of say to folks like, you know, here's a project that exemplifies these values that kind of, you know, is the type of project that we like to see in the world and that we're proud to fund that kind of thing. One interesting thing I see is that we definitely have some crossover in particular. This last year, one of the recipients, $69,000, $69,700 was the number for P5GS, the Processing Foundation.

We actually talked to Lauren on Request for Recommend. So there's already been some crossover in terms of storytelling that we're sort of tangentially helping you do. So maybe we can be a bit more deliberate in the future. Yeah, absolutely. That'd be great. What's next then? What can we cover on the outtake here? Anything left unturned, anything you have brought to the table that we have not asked you yet that we can cover before we tail off? That is a good question. So we kind of touched on the range of projects,

the range of funding. We talked a little bit about the kind of operational details. We talked about the history, you know, some examples of projects we kind of went through. I think that's kind of it. I mean, in terms of what's next, you know, we kind of, we have our budget and we have our plan for 2019. And that plan is

very much around growing the project, spreading the word. We want more folks to apply. We want to give out more awards. We want to give out more money in general. And then those kind of four areas of focus I talked about, broadening access, increasing security, empowering users, and increasing the diversity and inclusion of the open source community. Those are the things that we really care about. And those are the places where we want to, in particular, want to provide targeted funding in 2019. You know, at the end of this year, we would love to look back on the year and be able to kind of tell a story about the impact that we had in each of those different areas.

What about the would-be listeners out there that are thinking, I've got a project, I'd love to get this 5K to start my project. Is this simply a Mozilla Festival thing or is this sort of an applicable thing as well where you can kind of tee up a smaller grant? Yeah, so it can be either or. So the Mozilla Festival thing, the way that it worked last year at least, was you had to be physically present at the Mozilla Festival in London. So that, of course, kind of limits the amount of people who can apply. But the MAS committee is accepting applications at all times from a wide variety of applicants. And if you want to apply for a small award, like a $5,000 award or a $10,000 award,

you can do that at any time. It's just a matter of kind of being able to hit the right notes at that award level in terms of telling the story about your project. So for folks who are interested in doing that, check out the Moss website, read through the FAQ, look at the application form and, you know, think about how you would do some storytelling around your project in that way. And if you have questions, if you want feedback on your ideas, if you just want kind of a thumbs up, thumbs down sense of like, is this thing a good fit for the Moss program? Shoot us an email. We're always happy to chat.

We're always happy to provide feedback to the interested applicant. Cool. And just to recap that for the listeners, it will be in the show notes, but just for your ears sake, mozilla.org slash Moss and or emailing moss at mozilla.com. Well, we'll get you to the next step. Miha, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate all the work you and team are doing. You know, Jared and I are behind the scenes clapping really loudly about all of your efforts

because this is amazing and we need more of this. So we really appreciate all the work you're putting into not just funding open source, but being a guiding light towards sustainable open source and more in particular in open source that builds the future we need. So we really appreciate that. Thank you for your time. Well, thank you both so much for having me. We're working hard to spread the word around about the MOS program and really appreciate

you all giving us the platform to talk about it a little bit today. Cool. All right. Thank you for tuning into this episode of the changelog. Hey, guess what? We have discussions on every single episode now. So head to changelog.com to discuss this episode. And if you want to help us grow this show, reach more listeners and influence more developers do us a favor and give us a rating or review in itunes or apple podcasts if you use overcast give

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