Net Gain — Protecting the Open Web
{These are my remarks during Net Gain. This was part of an introduction of Tim Berners Lee}
Hi everyone. I’m Dave Steer. I work on policy and advocacy for the Mozilla Foundation. Thank you to the NetGain organizers for inviting me.
I want to start with a short video that we made last year — it’s an open letter to the Web that served as launch point for the most recent version of Firefox.
An Open Letter to the Web
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm5i5kbIXzc
We created that video as part of a massive campaign to relaunch the Firefox browser. More than 10MM people saw this video. Nearly 15MM people visited the campaign page, and 1.5MM people told us what they want in the Web.
That level of engagement is astounding, and what we learned is that the message of the video — the importance of protecting the Web — resonates broadly. “I am not a data point to be bought and sold”; “I am a citizen who lives in the world and on the web”; “I’m grateful for what you’ve given the world; I’m fearful of how big you’ve become”; “I need technology I can trust from people who understand me” — we put these principles in front of a lot of people, and we learned that they resonate on an emotional level.
This type of breakthrough is vital, especially since the open web movement needs *everyone* to understand what they can do with the web and that they are citizens of the web.
Achieving the vision of Net Gain will also require leaders.
This means that we need to find and invest in people across all sectors — business, government, civil society — to fulfill the promise of the Internet. In public policy, we need laws to be shaped by people who get both how the web works and its potential for public good.
Last year, we joined with our friends at Ford Foundation to create a Fellowship program. The Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows program pairs people with tech skills with nonprofit orgs. It is an on-the-ground leadership learning lab where the community is the classroom and the goal is to protect the Web. During the application period alone, we learned about the demand for this type of leadership development: more than 550 people from over 90 countries applied to be a Fellow. They bring diverse skill sets and experiences — from full stack engineering to community organization on the ground.
All of this — leadership development and emotional engagement — is aimed at protecting and advancing the free and open web. It’s about creating a global movement of citizens of the Web. It’s about teaching you and me how the Web works and what is possible.
I’d like to introduce Renata from the Web Foundation to talk about the Web We Want campaign.
