Mozilla Foundation

Nabiha Syed is Executive Director of Mozilla Foundation, the global nonprofit that does everything from championing trustworthy AI to advocating for a more open, equitable internet.

Formerly, Nabiha was the CEO of The Markup, an award-winning journalism non-profit that challenges technology to serve the public good. Under her leadership, The Markup’s unique approach was referenced by Congress 21 times, inspired dozens of class action lawsuits, won a national Murrow Award and a Loeb Award, and was recognized as “Most Innovative” by FastCompany in 2022.

Prior to The Markup, Nabiha was a highly acclaimed media lawyer with a legal career spanning private practice and the New York Times First Amendment Fellowship. She led BuzzFeed’s libel and newsgathering matters, including the successful defense of several high-profile libel lawsuits.

Nabiha sits on the boards of the Scott Trust, the $1B+ British company that owns The Guardian newspaper, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the New Press. She also serves as an advisor to ex/ante, the first venture fund dedicated to agentic tech, and she is a current member of The World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance. In 2023, Nabiha was awarded the NAACP/Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award for her work.

Angela Plohman is Chief Operating Officer of the Mozilla Foundation, one of the world’s most recognizable tech-for-good organizations. She is an experienced nonprofit executive and strategic operations professional with a long track record of building and growing nonprofit organizations and programs.

Based in Montreal, she has spent over twenty years playing key leadership roles in the fields of arts and culture, community building, and technology in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Angela joined Mozilla in 2012. She has played many critical roles since, eventually building up a team that serves as the bedrock of all of Mozilla Foundation’s work. Over the last few years, she has: developed a strategy and a team aimed at helping Mozilla Foundation become an effective, healthy and sustainable movement building organization; and, at the same time, she has played a role in supporting the Board and executive leadership in growing the scope of Mozilla’s efforts. Angela also plays a critical role as the Secretary and Treasurer of multiple Mozilla Boards.

Since 2019, she has also served on the Board of OpenMedia, a community-driven organization that works to keep the Internet open, affordable, and surveillance-free. She serves on the Board of the Toronto Biennial of Art, and is also the President of the Board of Le Livart, a non-profit organization whose mission is to democratize access to art and culture, located in a former presbytery in Montreal.

Danielle Jensen leads the Development team at Mozilla Foundation, bringing over 15 years of strategic philanthropy experience spanning major and institutional fundraising, donor engagement and stewardship, organizational planning, and board development.

Prior to Mozilla Foundation, Danielle worked as an independent consultant, partnering with mission-driven organizations to design and scale fundraising programs, align donor and programmatic strategies, and strengthen teams and boards.

She previously served as the Deputy Managing Director of Philanthropy at Climate Lead, a philanthropic advisory designed to enable new philanthropists to give to global climate causes with speed and at scale. Before that, she spent nearly a decade on the principal gifts team at Environmental Defense Fund, cultivating relationships with major donors and foundations across the U.S. and Asia while contributing to significant organizational revenue growth.

Danielle began her career in public policy consulting in Southeast Asia and holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Michigan. She proudly serves on the board of The Growing Place, an early education program in Santa Monica, California.

Kristen is a systems and finance specialist whose passion is solving the complex problems that hold organizations back. She has worked as a finance and operations leader in permanent, interim, and advisory capacities in a variety of social impact organizations. Kristen has designed and refined the core systems that enable success in grantmaking, global compliance, financial reporting, and risk management.

Outside of work, Kristen can be found with her family exploring trails and waters around Seattle and beyond. She serves on the board of directors of Global Leadership Forum, a professional for Seattle based leaders in internationally-focused organizations.

Kyle is a community organizer with two decades of experience in the areas of distributed networks, grassroots organizing, civic engagement, movement-building and creative exploration.

His work in these fields has been amplified by a national student network of 10,000 international development advocates at Engineers Without Borders Canada while serving as their first Creative Director, a city-wide volunteer community of 150+ grassroots park community groups in Toronto as Park People’s Communications, Events, Fundraising & Community Manager, and over 200 chapters of the global creative speaker series CreativeMornings, where he served first as Chief Operating Officer and then Chief Community Officer.

As a host and facilitator of 1500+ events that have welcomed over 500,000 people, Kyle is fascinated by the connections people make with each other and the opportunity that forms around each of those connections.

Kyle is based in Toronto, Canada where you can find him traversing Ontario's natural spaces with his dog Ginger.

Ziyaad Bhorat is Vice President of Imagination and Strategic Growth at Mozilla Foundation, where he works at the level of institutional direction, capital strategy, and high-value global partnership and investment architectures. He operates across culture, policy, and markets, concentrating on the point where imagination becomes power and where alternative technology futures become credible, impactful, and investable. His work is grounded in a commitment to internet health and to technology systems where long-term public risk is not left unaccounted for by markets.

At Mozilla Foundation he advances long-term strategy, integrates imaginative and design-led approaches across the institution, and builds complex partnership structures and capital vehicles with global partners. He leads Mozilla Foundation's Fellowships program, and Creative Futures, Mozilla’s cultural R&D portfolio, as platforms for new category formation at the intersection of art, technology innovation, and institutional vision.

Ziyaad works with leaders across governments, major foundations, family offices, cultural institutions, and capital allocators shaping the future of technology. A Rhodes Scholar from South Africa, he holds a PhD from UCLA and graduate degrees from Oxford. He sits on and advises philanthropic and corporate boards, serving in both trustee and director capacities.

Nicole Wong specializes in assisting high-growth technology companies to develop international privacy, content, and regulatory strategies.

Formerly, Nicole served as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Obama Administration, focused on internet, privacy, and innovation policy. Prior to her time in government, Nicole was Google’s Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, and X's (formerly Twitter) Legal Director for Products. She frequently speaks on issues related to law and technology, including five appearances before the U.S. Congress.

She currently chairs the board of Friends of Global Voices, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting citizen and online media projects globally. She also sits on the boards of WITNESS, an organization supporting the use of video to advance human rights; and The Markup, a non-profit investigative news organization covering technology. Nicole currently serves as co-chair of the Digital Freedom Forum, and as an advisor to the AI Now Institute, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Luminate, Refactor Capital, and the Albright Stonebridge Group.

Mark Surman has spent three decades building a better internet, from the advent of the web to the rise of artificial intelligence.

Mark is President of Mozilla, a non profit that works with companies and communities around the world to ensure the internet is built for people, not for profit. Mozilla's double bottom line portfolio includes the public benefit companies that make Firefox, Thunderbird and open source AI developer tools; a venture fund that invests in double bottom line tech companies; and a global foundation which backs the work of artists, educators and builders. Mark works across this whole portfolio to ensure Mozilla's people and resources are aimed at bending tech — and the tech industry — in a direction that serves all of humanity.

Mark was Executive Director of Mozilla Foundation for 15 years. He grew the organization into an international movement-building force, renowned for its fellowships, philanthropy, advocacy, and insights work, launching projects including Common Voice, the world's largest open source voice data set, and the Mozilla Festival, a yearly conference that brings together technologists, activists, artists, and others to collaboratively shape a healthier and more just digital future.

Prior, Mark was the founding Director of telecentre.org, a $26M initiative connecting community technology centers in more than 30 countries. He ran the Commons Group, a boutique consulting firm specializing in open source and social enterprise. And he was awarded the prestigious Shuttleworth Fellowship to explore open source approaches to philanthropy.

Mark serves on the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation Boards, and on the Boards of Ushahidi, a global not-for-profit technology company that develops integrated tools and services to enable people to generate solutions and mobilize communities for good, and ROOST, a non-profit building open source tools that aim to radically improve the state of trust and safety across the tech industry. He is a professor of practice in the MacMaster University Masters in Public Policy program, and is engaged as a writer, speaker and thinker in global conversations about open source, trustworthy AI and the future of the internet.

Mark lives in Toronto. He holds a BA in the History of Community Media from the University of Toronto. You can keep up with Mark on Linkedin, and see his recent talks here.

Zain Habboo is the Chief Marketing & Mobilization Officer at the International Rescue Committee where she manages an award winning large global communications and marketing team. Previously, Zain served as the social change agency Fenton’s Chief Digital & Creative Officer. Before joining Fenton, Zain was Senior Director of Digital and Multimedia Strategy at the UN Foundation, where she coordinated digital, video, photo, and mobile strategies across the organization. During her time at the UN Foundation, there were many groundbreaking accomplishments, including helping launching the now global phenomenon #GivingTuesday, creating viral memes (the #unselfie) and social media innovations (#Instacorps), as well as global convergences such as the Social Good Summit and digital surge days. Zain was born in Iraq, raised in Jordan, and educated in the U.K., and brings a much-valued global approach and cultural understanding to her work. Zain is conversational in Arabic and French and has worked with organizations around the world on issues ranging from girls’ and women’s empowerment to climate change. Zain serves as a member of the board at the Mozilla Foundation and is a board member at PBS’s AmDoc POV series, she formerly served on the UN Foundation’s “Girl Up” board as well as the non-profit Too Young To Wed. Zain is a Global Human Development Fellow at Georgetown University and was a top finalist for the Washington Women in PR “Woman of the Year” award for 2020.

Edwin Macharia is a co-Founder of Axum, an Afrocentric impact firm dedicated to developing platforms and investments that deliver climate-positive growth, inclusive socio-economic development and technological advancement in Africa and the Middle East. In addition to leading the firm, he advises governments, bi-lateral and multilateral donors, investors, foundations, NGOs and corporations on a range of issues including strategy, operational efficiency and programmatic implementation. Edwin has held several roles spanning many sectors. Most recently, he served as the Global Managing Partner at Dalberg Advisors where he spent 16 years building the firm’s footprint, talent and capabilities across the globe. Before Dalberg, he was at the Clinton Foundation and McKinsey & Company. Edwin holds a BA from Amherst College and currently serves on the Boards of The Nature Conservancy, Nabo Capital and Prudential Kenya. He is an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellow, was recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and named as one of the Top 10 African Leaders by Forbes in 2015.

Alondra Nelson is the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Nelson served as deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. As a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and a science and technology policy advisor, she has provided guidance to local, state, and federal governments, legislators, civil society, multilateral and international organizations, and others. She is the author of several books, most recently The Social Life of DNA, an award-winning exploration of the social implications of direct-to-consumer genetic technologies. Dr. Nelson is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Medicine, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2022, she was selected by Nature to its international list of ten people who shaped science. She was included in the inaugural TIME100 list of the most influential people in AI and appointed as the US-nominated representative to the United Nations High-Level Advisory Body on AI in 2023. Dr. Nelson brings deep technical and policy experience to the Mozilla Board, at a time when we’re investing in both.

Helen Turvey (King) has been at the Shuttleworth Foundation for over a decade, driving its evolution, from the traditional funder to the current co-investment Fellowship model. She is responsible for the Shuttleworth Foundation’s strategic direction and daily executive leadership.

Helen was educated in Europe, South America and the Middle East. With 15 years of experience working with international NGOs and agencies, she is driven by the belief that openness has benefits beyond the obvious. It also offers huge value to education, economies and communities, in both the developed and developing worlds.

As well as holding various board positions, Helen is a lover of musicals and has smallholding ambitions (currently 3 hens and a seasonal veggie patch).