A question to Participation team regarding the global gathering selection

Mozillians
#22

I understand that this is important and it’s exactly what we’ve been aiming for. In this post, the presentation linked, Reps calls, the Mozilla weekly call I’ve attempted to explain in fair detail how the process unfolded, what considerations were taken into account, and what decisions were made. Obviously it’s neither appropriate nor possible to detail every individual decision and trade-off.

What would be great at this point is to help me understand what information about the selection process you’d like that hasn’t been made clear.

I do get a lot of emails and some were handled by Francisco. I will admit that I more or less ignored any email with the tone “this is an injustice that I didn’t get selected, here’s what I’ve done, especially because people who I’m better than did get selected” as I have limited time and in my experience someone who sends that kind of email is likely not open to constructive dialogue. They probably got a fairly short form reply saying that more information about the selection process would be available soon.

One reality is that, especially for India, it’s hard to get a complete picture of all of the various sub-country level communities. This is certainly something I would want to improve in a future process. As a result, most of the work getting a range of communities represented was done at the functional and country level.

I think we do. I’ll let you know after all of the gatherings what our lesson is on this.

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#23

Thanks for the clarification @george, it indeed clears a few points. Also it would be great if you can give more clarity for the below ones too.

I do get the intention from Participation & Mozilla getting selection for these events isn’t a recognition, it’s an extra responsibility to the individual( Mozillian ), but this isn’t the meaning conveyed so far to many, so giving an explanation will be helpful

This regarding the goals in general ( not the goals mentioned in https://wiki.mozilla.org/Participation/Global_Gatherings_2015 ). The wiki page for 2015 (https://wiki.mozilla.org/2015) is an empty document, don’t you think it needs content, we are in Q4 now :blush: already.

#24

I think it would be helpful for us community leaders to frame this as
"Mozilla resources" vs “recognition”

We need to stop conflating the two. It hurts both ways. First of all,
considering an investment of resources as recognition lets Mozilla off the
hook a little towards having a real functioning recognition system. Second,
it hurts community members because there are just not enough resources to
go around to everyone and there never will be.

Mozilla invests resources in alignment with its goals. This makes sense,
and it wouldn’t make sense to do it any other way.

Recognition though should be goal agnostic, and should be tied to effort
and results.

2 Likes
#25

@majken nailed it. This is the explanation you’re looking for @anushbmx

Alignment with Mozilla overall goals was not part of the evaluation process of applications. Instead, it was the specificity, ambition and perceived impact of individuals’ goals for 2016 that was considered.

For example we received a lot of applications that were very general in the articulation of goals. One real example:
“I want to establish the FSA program as one of the best student programs”

This is too general and wouldn’t have been rated as strong. Versus:
“I will work with FSA program members as they are most active contributors but they need to be organize to work on something. I’m already connected with 7 FSAs from 6 Universities and will increase that to 50 active members at these 6 Universities. I will organize these active members on teaching web literacy workshops, hopefully 25 in the first part of the year reaching to 500 high school students. The impact will be that 500 high school students know about the first topics on the web literacy map.”

This is much more specific, shows ambition, and articulates goals and impact.

Also, the 2016 goals for Mozilla are yet to be decided, and yes, we need to do a much better job of ensuring these are public and available than was done in 2015. You can hold the Participtation Team accountable for getting that right.

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#26

So you’re saying that if I applied being specific about something (not necessarily aligning with mozilla or it’s goal), I’d be considered for a Leadership event that involves mozilla and it’s goals? Or doesn’t the event align with mozilla’s goals either?

That doesn’t make any sense at all. Why would you want people who’re just ambitious and specific about something to join for an event about mozilla? Also, we’re talking about leadership in mozilla, not anything else right?

I am of the opinion that such teams should be made of people who’re more aligned to the goals of mozilla and who understand mozilla and it’s mission well enough. There is no point in inviting people who’re good at being specific with a language. So, again the problem of language barrier pops up. People who struggle to convey what they want to do find it even harder to be specific. What about them?

#27

What I meant was that we weren’t judging alignment with Mozilla’s specific and current priorities and goals – these were not published properly for contributors in 2015 and expectations were not set throughout the year about what activities contributors and Mozilla Reps should and should not prioritize.

Of course, we wanted people who want to build Mozilla and were working toward the organization’s broad goals and areas of contribution. That is obvious.

There is an issue of English and there is an issue of clarity of ideas. We took the former into account and when reading applications even if English was a second language it was easy to know who had clarity about what they wanted to do to build Mozilla and advance its Mission. In my experience, having clear ideas and being able to communicate them (in any language) is a strong indicator for being effective at mobilizing others, which is why we emphasized it in the application.

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#28

I agree but should we repeat the same mistake again in 2016 as well? There’s no point in crying over that anymore. What you (when I say ‘you’, I mean mozilla) should have done is to have set the goals for the year (the wiki page at the link is empty just like 2015) and then called for the leadership cohort to ‘crowd-source’ ideas on how to implement those goals.

It now seems to me that you [mozilla] don’t have any direction behind bringing this cohort together. You don’t know what to do with this team. Or at least you don’t have any idea on what to do for 2016 (or you do know but you never documented it). This is important and needs to be done urgently before anything else.

And the applicants (at least for Round 2, for the remaining 40 seats for Leadership Summit) should be evaluated based on those goals and aligning strictly to those goals.

#29

Planning for 2016 is in progress, to be done by early December and published more publicly in early January (though thinking about how to get some drafts of that out earlier).

We will have that done before the Leadership Summit and aligning people around those goals will be the main work of the Summit.

#30

I guess you should have done all that and then found people who aligned with those goals rather than aligning people with goals. It’s difficult to make a non-coder to contribute code or a coder to evangelize. Instead, you should have figured out what kind of people you needed and then brought together those kind of people.

#31

@shine , do you have any more questions? There has been a honest, and respectful effort to respond to every level of question proposed. This last comment feels less like a question, so I’ll assume not and move on to recommend you and others (if you’re not already) follow the Participation Leaders topic, where we’ll be doing a lot of sharing - especially after Orlando. If you have specific questions about goals for the part of the project you’re most interested in, then the All Hands topic is the place to reach out to those attending - part of their responsibility is to include the voices of those who cannot be there.

Thanks !

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#32

Thank you team for the clarifications.

Happy thanks giving #mozthx2015

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