The Tor Project is an open source software community. Openness and transparency are core values in the Tor Project's [Social Contract](https://community.torproject.org/policies/social_contract/). We are committed to transparency; therefore, everything we release is open and our development happens in the open. We expect the code and research we publish will be reviewed and improved by many different people. 

We contribute to the growth of the OSS ecosystem by promoting these values with all of our partners and working to make Tor welcoming to new contributors. We do so by mentoring researchers, offering paid internship that help traditionally marginalized folks gain experience in the tech industry, and making many different avenues of volunteering and participation available.

We also collaborate with other projects that share our goal of advancing human rights by building open source software that protects people's privacy, provides anonymity and helps them bypass censorship. Instead of using the model of competition and surveillance capitalism, we aim to work *together.* [One example with this is our partnership with Mullvad VPN to create Mullvad Browser.](https://blog.torproject.org/releasing-mullvad-browser/)

We hope to inspire other tech builders and organizations to take a page out of our playbook—and think of privacy as a 'feature' that can enhance user experience—and not as an afterthought. This collaboration with Mullvad illustrates that it is possible to build opens source privacy-preserving technology that protects users like ours does together, rather than in competition with each other.