The Mozilla Foundation has named Mark Surman as its new Executive Director effective September 22. Surman is currently serving as an Open Philanthropy Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation.
Yup that’s the same Shuttleworth that runs Canonical/Ubuntu and the same dude that paid $20 million to hitch a ride on a Soyuz up to the International Space Station. The Shuttleworth Foundation is a social development initiative that has been active since 2001.
Surman will replace Frank Hecker at Mozilla who had been the Executive Director since 2006.
“I am totally psyched about this.
Mozilla is a new kind of foundation, one with with participation,
transparency and innovation at its very roots,” Surman wrote in a blog posting. “It’s not just about
giving out grants or making bold statements (although these are
useful things to do), but also about getting large numbers of people
involved in making things. In particular, things that make the
Internet more open. For someone obsessed with reinventing how
foundations work, there could be no more exciting job than this.”
