Since 2005 Seneca College in Toronto, Canada has worked closely with the Mozilla community in order to create a set of Mozilla-specific courses, engage hundreds of students directly in Mozilla development projects, host and record dozens of Mozilla events and talks. Seneca's faculty and students are key contributors to the Mozilla project, and have gained significant experience bootstrapping new contributors into the Mozilla technology and culture. The resources, knowledge, and experience that has come from this work can be used around the world by other institutions and individuals who wish to also become part of Mozilla or otherwise contribute.

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Mozilla's work with Seneca began with a research project that required knowledge of Firefox's source code. After the project was completed, it was clear that the knowledge gained about how to get started in the Mozilla community was something that should be taught on its own: Mozilla provides one of the best real world examples of a large open source code base that is actively maintained by a global community. At the same time it was clear that Mozilla itself, while good at the highly technical work of creating its software products, was not as good at helping new people to get started (i.e., many contributors find Mozilla on their own, and then teach themselves how to cope).

As time has passed, many generations of Seneca-Mozilla contributors have gone through the courses. The students have produced valuable contributions, for example: APNG, plugin-watcher, buildbot infrastructure, web tool improvements, core improvements, Firefox and Thunderbird front-end fixes, countless tests/docs and other QA related activities, etc. In addition, students have been hired as full-time Mozilla Corporation employees or interns, helping to validate the level and focus of the work they did while in the Mozilla courses.

Mozilla's Emeritus Director of Grants and Programs Frank Hecker wrote of the program, "Programs like Seneca’s demonstrate possible new ways to teach software development: in the context of large real-life projects, with an emphasis on the social and community aspects of projects, and through an inter-disciplinary approach that teaches not just programming but also other skills such as QA and testing, release engineering, user-centered design, evangelism and marketing, and even software as a business."