Mark Surman
| Mark Surman | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
February 20, 1969 Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto |
| Occupation | Executive director of the Mozilla Foundation |
| Spouse(s) | Tonya Surman |
| Children | Tristan Surman (16) Ethan Surman (14) |
| Website | marksurman |
Mark Surman is the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. He supports the notions of web literacy (the skills and competencies needed for reading, writing, and participating on the web) and Open Philanthropy (which advocates the transparency of the operations of nonprofit organizations toward the public).
Surman is a board member of the Toronto Arts Foundation and an advisor to Peer to Peer University.
Surman received his bachelor's degree in the history of community media from the University of Toronto in 1994.
In 1998, Surman co-founded and became president of the Commons Group, providing advice on networks, technology, and social change.
From 2005 to 2008, Surman was the managing director of telecentre.org. Created by Canada's International Development Research Centre, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, and Microsoft, telecentre.org worked to network the global telecentre community, and improve their sustainability.
The Shuttleworth Foundation, which provides funding for people engaged in social change, awarded Surman one of its inaugural fellowship in 2007. There he helped advance thinking about how to apply open source approaches to philanthropy.
In August 2008, Surman became the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, an independent non-profit that was launched on July 15, 2003 as America Online shut down the Netscape browser division and drastically scaled back its involvement with the Mozilla project.
As executive director, Surman oversaw the launch of Drumbeat, a "global community of people who steward the open web, explaining and protecting the internet as a critical public resource," by supporting projects and local events that gathers creative people "around big ideas, solving problems and building the open web."
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