Mozilla Foundation Data Futures Lab – Infrastructure Fund

Funding to support the development of open source software and technical tools to foster a more fair and just data ecosystem, focusing on enabling communities and individuals to effectively exercise their rights over their data in large datasets.

The Mozilla Foundation Data Futures Lab is an experimental initiative and virtual space designed to stimulate new approaches to data stewardship challenges. It provides funding, frameworks for collaboration, a forum for emerging ideas, and a place to workshop approaches to data stewardship which give greater control and agency to people.

The Foundation aims to support organisations that are developing and building technology platforms that mobilize communities to contribute their data for a shared benefit in any domain (health, transportation, labour rights, gig-work, research, consumer advocacy, and beyond) that supports the principles of ethical and fair data collection and storage that will work towards solving a public interest problem.

The Data Futures Lab Infrastructure Fund has been established to support the development of open source software and technical tools to foster a more fair and just data ecosystem.

The objective of the fund is to ensure that communities and individuals are able to effectively exercise their rights over their data in a way that enables them to gain meaningful value – with particular regard to the dominance of private interests operating in the data ecosystem and the large datasets that power AI applications.

The Infrastructure Fund will support the development of technical tools to address issues of privacy, security, bias, ethics, and agency in how these datasets are collected, processed, used, shared, and governed.

Examples of projects of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Tools to identify and address bias in datasets
• Tools for better informed consent management
• Tools to improve anonymisation of data
• Tools that allow individuals, communities, organisations to better exercise digital rights (such as those enumerated in GDPR, CCPA, etc)
• Tools to assess interpretability and auditability of datasets
• Tools to support data donation projects
• Tools to support accessing and aggregating datasets for social good
• New data licenses that protect the rights and interests of individuals and communities

Projects must demonstrate technical feasibility, public benefit and differ from, or improve upon, existing solutions.