littlebird says:
Looks like the previous CEO (who had been a big privacy advocate) stepped down in 2019.
https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-ceo-resigns-opening-the-door-for-more-changes-for-firefox/
Interim CEO Mitchell Baker (she/her) was confirmed as CEO in April 2020.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-named-ceo-of-mozilla/
interesting interview with her:
https://increment.com/open-source/interview-mitchell-baker-mozilla-foundation/
a quote:
Q: You’ve worked on expanding what tech education looks like, primarily with the Mozilla Foundation’s Responsible Computer Science Challenge. What do you envision a more robust STEM education might look like?
MB: What I envision is that those who are educated in STEM have included within their STEM education the tools that allow them to understand something of humanity. It’s not a panacea, but right now we don’t have a systematized vocabulary or tools or frameworks or discussion forums to raise the question: What does this mean for humanity?
One thing that really struck me in conversations with user experience designers was that [their design criteria was essentially] “Keep people happy so they stay on our website or stay in our service.” And that sounds great, [but] what really seems to keep people engaged is not happiness. It’s conspiracy and outrage and fear.
Right now we don’t have the tools to address [this issue]. If you don’t have a basic set of tools to even think about something, then everybody has to figure it out on their own, which is long and slow and not as effective.
People have said, “Oh, Mitchell, you’re really naive because, sure, maybe I’ll have the tools to talk about [an issue], but if I’m an employee at a company and this is what I’m supposed to do, how’s that going to change? Even if I’m the owner or the creator or the founder or the CEO, if it’s more money this way and less money that way, it doesn’t matter if I have the tools to talk about it.”
I think that’s true in some regard. Yet we do have, for example, medical ethics. If you want a society that cares about what happens to itself, you have to educate people, give them tools, and give [those tools] some legitimacy to include in decision-making. In many places, the discussion is still “Tech is just tech. We shouldn’t think about any of these things.”
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