Seneca College awards Mozilla co-founder Mike Shaver honorary degree

Toronto, June 25, 2008 --- Michael Shaver, Chief Evangelist for Mozilla Corporation, will be presented with an honorary Bachelor of Applied Studies degree at Seneca College’s convocation.

Convocation will take place Thursday, June 26, 2008, at 10 a.m. at The Toronto Centre for the Arts, 5040 Yonge Street.

Throughout his career, Mr. Shaver has demonstrated a tremendous commitment to helping people understand, build, and benefit from an open source community.

He worked at Netscape Communications and later zerøknowledge, Cluster File Systems, and the Oracle Corporation. Beginning his career as a developer, he quickly rose through the ranks and eventually gained Internet fame as a founding member of the Mozilla Organization in 1998.

Mr. Shaver is a great supporter of Seneca through his active involvement with applied research projects, participation on the School of Computer Studies advisory committee and as a guest lecturer.

Seneca is a world leader in teaching open source software and development, and has four courses focused on the Mozilla project, students in these courses work directly with Mozilla on Firefox and its associated technologies, such as the Firefox web browser.

“Seneca’s relationship with Mozilla is a great example not only of career – focused polytechnic education, but also of a successful collaboration between college and industry,” said Seneca College President Rick Miner. “Mike Shaver has demonstrated a commitment to providing students with the opportunity to work on world class, commercially utilized software – before graduation.”

More students choose Seneca than any other college in Canada. With eight campuses across the Greater Toronto Area, Seneca provides internationally and nationally recognized polytechnic education, training, and academic pathways key to graduate career success in the global economy. Every Seneca diploma, certificate and degree program is developed to a high academic standard, in consultation with industry, integrated with information technology, combined with technical and transferable skills, and reinforced by opportunities for ongoing education and re-training.

For more information, please contact:
Seneca College Media Relations
416-491-5050 ext. 7018