Open Policy & Advocacy

Mozilla's official blog on open Internet policy initiatives and developments
Categories: Advocacy

Mozilla Advocacy – 2015 Plan

Dave Steer

1 response

Mozilla Advocacy — Our 2015 Plan for Protecting and Advancing the Open Web

Advocacy is a relatively new area of focus for Mozilla. Our increased emphasis on advocacy is born out of the recognition that, like code, public policy has an impact on the shape and health of the open web — and that a vital force protecting the web will be the millions of people who consider themselves to be citizens of the web.

Over the next few weeks, the Mozilla Advocacy team — including Andrea Wood, Director of Digital Advocacy and Fundraising; Melissa Romaine, Advocacy Manager; Chris Riley, Head of Public Policy; Stacy Martin, Senior Manager of Privacy and Engagement; Jochai Ben-Avie, Internet Policy Manager; and, Alina Hua, Senior Data Privacy Manager —  will lay out our latest thinking about how we’re developing public policy and creating advocacy initiatives.

Our goal with Mozilla Advocacy is to advance the Mozilla mission by empowering people to create measurable changes in public policy to protect the Internet as a global public resource, open and accessible to all. Our three strategies to achieve this goal are:

  1. Leadership Development — Grow a global cadre of leaders — activists, technologists, policy experts — who advance the free and open web.

  2. Community — Assist, grow, and enable the wider policy & advocacy community.

  3. Grassroots Advocacy — Run issue-based campaigns to grow mainstream engagement with Mozilla and open web issues.

Each of these strategies ties directly to the goal of empowering people. Yet, as we execute there are still open questions that need input and more thought from the community. For instance, how can we create better scale and participation, recognizing that real impact happens when the community is empowered to take action on policy and advocacy initiatives. A key to this is making our own policy positions and advocacy efforts easier for people to understand and engage with.

We need you to play an active role. Because the web is growing in markets where we are not experts, the Mozilla community will play a central role in scaling efforts to protect the open web throughout the world. We invite you to help shape our thinking by reading the 2015 Policy & Advocacy Plan and offering input through this thread in the Mozilla Advocacy Community.

–Dave Steer, Director of Advocacy, Mozilla

One comment on “Mozilla Advocacy – 2015 Plan”

  1. Scott DuBois wrote on

    For starters, what I would do is assemble a team to go out into the community and gather intel of what the community feels needs work and what they feel is most important as well as what they’re obstacles are.

    1) Reach out to local Linux User Groups and ask to have a discussion forum with the attendees
    2) Look for groups on Meetup.com that might be willing to host a Mozilla discussion one meeting

    – The impact of a Mozilla representative coming out and speaking with a group is far greater than impersonal social media collaboratives

    3) Throw out some surveys to gather feedback through mailing lists or a link to them
    3a) Sometimes surveys broken in multiple parts based on topic can help promote feedback. Some topics are more important to people than others so breaking surveys into general areas of just a few questions allows people to decide which survey addresses their unique concerns more than others. People are more likely to do 10 question surveys than 100.
    3b) Consider incorporating an explanatory video at the top of each survey explaining the scope and goal of the project and how feedback will determine key objectives.

    Good luck with your project, sounds like a big one!

    3)