Do we have the resources? Yes
Are we exploiting those resources thoroughly? A big NO!
We are trying to change strategies, products, managers and partners but we never ask what is really going wrong in our organism!
Yes, we didn’t have a clear vision of the future and we didn’t have a long-term strategy for our products! but we start working on that.
But what about the community? did you take the time to ask them what they want, what they need, what was wrong during your experiences (events, workshops… ), what can be the solutions, do you have proposals?
Unfortunately, I think No! No one asked for that or let me correct, no one from the leadership board of the community have the time to ask or work fully on this BECAUSE we are doing it wrong inside the reps program (As we consider that the Reps Program is the main community bridge between Mozilla Community and the “decision takers” in Mozilla).
Here is more details about my definition of the Reps Program (Reps, mentors and councils) and why I think things are going wrong within it:
- Council: This group of people need to have most of his time (80%) to think about strategy, structure, critical SOPs, report problems, solutions and ideas to/from the leadership board.
- Current: Council is here to do bureaucracy and decision are mostly a last-minute or urgent reaction decisions.
- Mentors : budget/swag voting, mentoring mentees and screening requests
- Reps: mentoring non-reps contributors and coordinate/prepare local events, report problems, solutions, ideas from local community.
In Mozilla we have a lot of great projects and initiatives but we are not using it in the right way. I will talk about 5 major projects that can be the main Mozilla contribution ecosystem:
But first, let me define what problems we still have until now and after I will show my vision (of course it’s one of many other solutions that you can have) but let start with this one :
Problems
We have 3 main barriers that reduce the effectiveness of your contribution or motivation.
I- Communication
1- Inter-teams :
After the Firefox OS launch in Africa, I saw many difficulties in term of communication and coordination inside Mozilla. As members of launch country, we were receiving the same information from 3 different teams and no one knew what the other team was working on!
We were doing calls and meeting to talk about the same thing and no one was coordinating.
The considered solution that time was to create a Mailing list for this ‘project’ (Launch in Africa) BUT as always after 2 or 3 weeks you find yourself with more than 50 emails and you don’t know from where your are pinged and what is urgent!
Also sometimes, we forget to inform others about some details that can be important.
2- Staff – Volunteers :
The more we have new projects, the more we have difficulties to maintain the bridge between the two groups.
Today, the new comers managers and developers don’t know exactly what means a community/volunteer/contribution so we lose the motivation of some contributors after two or three contact. We feel that we are repeating the speech and doing things again and again with the new persons.
With the new challenges with partners a lot of things changed and pressures increase. A huge number of bugs and tasks need to be done BUT no one in the community knows the priorities or even that we have priorities.
I remember two years ago when I had a conversation with David Scravaglieri (Director of Engineering for Firefox OS) and I asked him ‘why the employees didn’t answers on bugs?’ and he just said ‘because we have priorities set by partners and we really don’t have time to spend time on other bugs’. This information is not passed to the community unfortunately and people are disappointed from this lack of information!
So do we have coordinators to push/tell that to the community ? Do we have a common platform for employees and community ? I think the answer is NO!
For those who think that the councils did this, they are wrong :
I think 9 persons can’t coordinate all information from +40 teams to all reps. Also if this information is in the hands of reps, we don’t know what is under NDA and what can be shared with mozillians! And this point was the main source of problems that makes the Firefox OS launch a fail and we lost contributors (the restriction of NDAs and the frustration behind it)
3- Mozilla – Partners – Community :
With the reps program we have the chance to own an NDA so partners can share information and critical news but did Mozilla tell them about that? Did Mozilla explain clearly what means a community of volunteers to those closed system who are partners? Did Mozilla explain that contributors are persons that aren’t paid and don’t have always time to contribute? I think NO!
Orange organized its 3-months forum in Tunisia just one month before the Firefox OS launch in Tunisia, and by chance we were invited 12 hours before by Dees when we are bringing him to his hotel and when we met Wilfried and Tony! We met some orange staff and at the forum NO ONE from orange knew that we really exist 😀 and one of them told us ‘ask for money, ask for money’ and we were just like ‘WTF, they don’t know what means volunteering and contribution”. Even if Dees explained that during his speech, we had a terrible experience with communication with Orange and also Mozilla.
II- Contribution steps
What Volunteering is based on => motivation + after daily work and personal life => short time per day/week.
When I joined Mozilla in 2010 we had just a few projects so we could choice quickly an area to contribute in and also we had the necessary documentation. With the appearance of products like webmaker and Firefox Os or programs like reps, FSA,… we didn’t find the best approach to cover all the new areas of contribution (lack of documentation – lack of clear areas of contributions within those projects..) So what happened ?
The newcomers don’t understand projects and programs (and the perfect example of this lack of documentation and communication : When you ask this question: “Why you want to join the reps program?” the answer I had from my experience as mentor is “because I can contribute to Mozilla!“ Which is totally WRONG!)
So that’s why new teams (CBT and participation team) were in Mozilla to put/improve our contribution platforms and clear this problem.
The contributor today want to have a clear vision and overview of all Mozilla projects, programs and areas of contribution and I think we won this challenge with our contribution page but we are just in front of another big problem which is the ‘contribution steps’ or ‘List of tasks’ by priority, difficulty, time and project/area. Some teams in Mozilla have already this list BUT in different locations/tools so that we can’t (some times) have the time to check all these platforms. This was one of the main reasons that the Baloo project failed.
III- Recognition
A big topic that no one have the right standard strategy for all cultures but let check what we have in place :
- ROM (reps of the month) : but if you are not a rep and do a huge effort like 4 hours per day so you can’t have the chance to highlight you contribution!
- BonjourMozilla.fr : a great initiative created by clarista from french community and it was really a fantastic way to reward contributors. (not live anymore)
- Give the chance to everyone had contributed for the last 6 months to attend one of Mozilla community events like mozcamps, meetups and local events but also we have problems like if no one knows about what you are doing we never can select you. Also with the strategy of Mozilla we no longer have major community events like mozcamps and we are focusing on the new workweek process that is not really a community event and we reduce the chance to encourage contributors with this kind of small simulating trips.
A last point :
Before going to solutions I want to express my disappointment about the dissolution of CBT : with this team we worked on these main points but we was in front of the big challenge ‘one million mozillians’ which is for me impossible without tools and a solid platform!
We don’t know how many contributors we have, what they do, how many time they spend and what teams need more contributors!
Hope that this new Participation Team can have the chance to accomplish what the CBT did without pressure.
Solution
With the 5 projects listed above I can imagine an ecosystem to improve contribution and participation in Mozilla :
In Mozilla Tunisia we create a group called ‘Kernel Team‘ like the council in Reps program to ensure the health of the community by working on tools and strategies that allow newcomers to contribute immediately. This structure allowed also that everyone focus in just one area and manage his group of contributors.
Let us imagine if each community have the same structure :
This looks good but not all communities can adopt this structure because of the lack of members. The new communities will have problems to integrate this system.
Also, some contributors don’t want to be a community member and they only want to contribute as person.
What about concentrate all things on Mozillians.org ? Every mozillian (staff, reps, contributor) need to be on mozillians.org so we can improve the interaction and the role of reps :
- Councils = Councils : working on strategy, structure, critical SOPs, report problems, solutions and ideas to/from the leadership board.
- Mentors = Super-Mentors : budget/swag voting, mentoring mentees and screening requests.
- Reps = Mentors : contribution mentoring and not working only on events and calls.
- Mozillians = Mozillians : learning, contributing and being a mentor.
Today Mozillians.org is just a showcase of profiles but we have groups inside it and this can be a good start point. Having Mozillians profile to get updates, check contribution for any mozillians (reps or not) will value a lot their contribution. I hacked the visual of mozillians profile to integrate badges, contribution dashboard, mentoring system and blog posts and it’s like that :
The last tool to use is discourse to maintain the interaction between everyone, to ask questions, to share experiences or to propose ideas.
The overview of the final ecosystem looks like :
We can start using this ecosystem tomorrow 🙂 but we can do more and more ! before ending this article I want to add a last idea that can simplify our life in Mozilla :
It’s a mix of Discourse and OneAndDone.
The first part is the news that Mozilla Staff can add and share with other teams, reps and contributors so they can see it but of course with some configuration level of visibility. For example the launch of Firefox OS in Tunisia is the X date that was added by the Firefox OS marketing team and only Managers, Teams that are involved on this launch and reps from Tunisia.
This concept is simple and it’s all about TAGS 😉 You can add to your dashboard what interests by selecting the appropriate tags. You can also get a place where your name was mentioned (it just ‘140 characters’ not more!)
The second part is about tasks with priorities, teams and time of contribution. Also with the same mechanism : level of visibility, what you want and where you are mentioned! TAGS 😀
Those are a long time thoughts that I’ve tried to adapt and especially propose solutions for what I saw and lived within Mozilla. this is just the begin and waiting for your feedback and ideas.
