Larissa Brown Shapiro & Mozilla concerned other organizations taking advantage of kids in open source
Reprinted with permission from Free Software Fellowship.
In April 2024, internal emails from Mozilla were published about the harassment scandals in Debian and the Balkan countries.
The emails make everything clear:
- Albanian women Kristi Progri, Anisa Kuci and Jona Azizaj are the "whistleblowers" who asked for help with harassment problems
- Daniel Pocock, the last person to be elected as Fellowship representative in 2017, was a witness to the harassment and gave support to victims
- Two local men, Elio Qoshi and Redon Skikuli were the source of the problems. Both men were in the Mozilla Tech Speaker program. Elio was also a Fedora ambassador.
- Mozilla's funds were enabling the harassment and control of women and children by the local men
- Pocock sent Larissa Brown Shapiro a written report about the risks, including the risk to underage participants. Pocock did this discretely and privately.
- Emma Irwin at Mozilla was also joined into the discussion.
- In March 2018, Anisa Kuci wrote an email thanking Pocock for his support
- Later in 2018, Chris Lamb & Debian misfits began spreading rumors, violating the privacy of everybody else concerned
- The Fellowship alerted the community to the risk of Albanians Grooming Women for Outreachy in a news report in 2021. Shortly after this report, people began making desperate attempts to shut down this web site but we are still here.
- The emails disclosed in April 2024 leave us feeling totally vindicated for our efforts to expose corruption.
Here are the words written by Larissa Brown Shapiro, Mozilla's Global Head of Diversity, when the scandal was first detected in October 2017:
I'm not sure, but I can seek legal advice on this matter. In my view, there is the potential there for other organizations to take advantage of these kids.
Which "other organizations" are source of Shapiro's concerns? Could it be the misfits at FSFE & Debian?
FSFE & Debian people continued working with Elio Qoshi & Redon Skikuli. FSFE & Debian refuse to publish detailed reports about money sent to organizations and events in developing countries.
The money paid for travel allowances and event sponsorship is a catalyst for exploitation in the region.
FSFE & Debian both claim to be concerned with openness and transparency.
Larissa Brown Shapiro's emails were disclosed as part of legal procedings in April 2024. Barely six weeks later, in June 2024, the Open Labs Hackerspace in Albania was closed down. Women who worked there are deleting references to Open Labs from their web sites.
These few words from Larissa Brown Shapiro, leaked as part of a legal process, were the last nail in the coffin for the Open Labs hackerspace scandals.
Larissa Brown Shapiro background details
Bio, copied from LISA 15:
Larissa works at the Mozilla project, program managing Firefox feature development, and was formerly Head of Contributor Development, where she led contributor development. Prior to joining Mozilla, Larissa was the first (and only) Product Manager at Internet Systems Consortium, an open source public benefit organization which is the creator and maintainer of BIND, as well as hosting one of the 13 root name servers of the internet. Larissa has worked in tech since the early 1990s. She has been a mentor for four years for women through the TechWomen project, is the leader of the Open Source Opportunities for Women mentoring program at Mozilla, developed an implementing partnership with the WeTech program for web literacy for girls and women in India, and travels worldwide supporting mentorship and women and girls in open source/open culture.
2014-10-13: Air Mozilla: Larissa Brown Shapiro introduces Rachel Leventhal from Women's P2P Network: Global Women's Meetups to End Violence Against Women
2013-10-17: TechWomen: Why I Keep Coming Back to Mentor with TechWomen
2015-11-03: OpenSource.com: Mentoring: a reward for both parties
2017-03-29: Mountain View Commons (Youtube): Mozilla's Larissa Shapiro interviews Laszlo Bock, digging deeper into the approaches and learnings Google has taken with people and data, and help us uncover how these types of approaches apply to the science and art of people management at Mozilla.
2017-11-01: Womanthology: Technology is far too useful, powerful, dangerous and interesting to be left in the hands of an elite few to design – Larissa Brown Shapiro, Head of Global Diversity and Inclusion at Mozilla █
Larissa Shapiro, Emma Irwin and other Mozilla women at Grace Hopper 2016 in Houston, Texas:
