Announcing the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund

Today, Mozilla is launching a fund to support innovators in Kansas City and Chattanooga. Join the community and help us build the future.

Creating a bigger surface area for the mind

Next gen communication and information technologies create new opportunities for everyone in our communities. They enhance what we can create and share. They help create a bigger surface area for the mind.

Mozilla’s Gigabit Community Fund is an effort to support the creation of innovative learning experiences and workforce development opportunities on the networks of the future.

People will be able to engage each other in new ways through immersive environments, new collaboration and sharing tools, and other possibilities enabled by the next-gen networks in Chattanooga and Kansas City.

Support for the Future

$300,000 will be available to support development and experimentation with education and workforce development-focused uses of emerging technologies.

Resources will be directed to projects with real, tangible potential to impact the community. Brick-and-mortar, mission-driven organizations must be part of each team. We want to move from gigabit prototypes to Minimum Viable Pilots and get these tools in the hands of users.

Help us learn what uses of next-gen networks will make a difference in people’s lives.

Additional funding will support community building activities led by a local Mozilla team to foster a collaborative community of practice in both Kansas City and Chattanooga.  As the country’s leading gigabit economies, these communities are becoming “living labs” for experimentation and development of public benefit uses of these technologies.

User-Driven Experimentation & Development

The project follows the Mozilla Ignite Apps Challenge program, which supported 22 teams working on gigabit app prototypes.

The fund will bring discoveries out of the lab and into the field, creating a community of practice in education and workforce development in the physical communities of Kansas City and Chattanooga. This community of practice will generate new collaborations, new knowledge and will drive collaboration and the sharing of best practices, tools and shipped code within these and other gigabit communities throughout the country and around the world.

The program is a partnership with the National Science Foundation and is deeply integrated with the national efforts of our partners at US Ignite and the GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) networking research community.

Mozilla’s mission is to empower all people through a web that is open, accessible, and is a platform for innovation for everyone. This bottom-up, grassroots innovation efforts draws on that mission and on Mozilla’s expertise in community-led innovation.

Join the Community


We are focusing our efforts in Kansas City and Chattanooga because we believe that a deeply driven community of practice is essential to making a difference in people’s lives using these tools.

Mozilla is looking for partners in these two communities that are mission driven to serve user needs in education and workforce development.

We are seeking dedicated individuals, community catalysts, educators, students, facilitators and more to help us amplify our own efforts to improve the lives of our communities. We are looking for curious and industrious folks who want to help us build this future.

We see common purpose among many diverse individuals and organizations in these two communities and we created the Gigabit Community Fund to serve and enhance everyone’s capacity to achieve those purposes.

Please get in touch if this strikes a chord, sign up for our announcement email list so we can reach out to you again as the program commences its request for proposals and starts helping organize community events, and finally, join us at our Community Kickoff event in January.

Please join us in helping improve the opportunities of everyday folks in Kansas City, Chattanooga and beyond.

Looking forward to working with you all!

Will

Will Barkis, PhD
Director Gigabit Community Fund
@willbarkis

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