Mr. Mark Surman

A community activist and technology executive of 20+ years, Mark currently serves as Executive Director of Mozilla, makers of Firefox and one of the largest social enterprises in the world. At Mozilla, he is focused on using the open technology and ethos of the web  to transform fields such as education, journalism and filmmaking. Prior  to Mozilla, Mark served as the Director of Telecentre.org, a $26M  initiative to connect community technology centres around the world supported by Microsoft, Canada's International Development Research Centre, and the Swiss Development Cooperation. Earlier in his career, Mark worked as a consultant and social entreprenuer working on technology projects for organizations as diverse as Government of Canada, 211 Toronto, the Association for Progressive Communications and the Canadian Labour Congress. In the early 1990s, he started the web development arm of Canada's first nationwide non-profit internet provider. Mark  has raised more than $30M for projects he has led, authored two books,  presented at 100+ conferences, written dozens of papers, and traveled to  more than 40 countries. Mark holds a BA in the History of Community  Media from the University of Toronto. He was also awarded a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship in 2008 to to  explore the application of open source thinking to the field of  philanthropy.