Welcome back to the third episode of Daniele that “rant” about Mozilla not healthy management of volunteers.
If you want to check the previous episodes (and join the discussions of course) check:
- About gratification for volunteers in Mozilla
- About the Volunteer role in the Mozilla workflow decision chain
This time I want to talk about something that involve all the Mozilla communities around the world: regional local community management.
Legend:
- With local community I mean a community that is a part of a country or language and involve different sub communities of Mozilla of the same area
Probably you are part of a Mozilla community or Open Source community, or maybe both (happen quite a lot).
About this topic there was also other people that written a lot (as example):
- Don't like the direction that community management at mozilla is heading
- What is a healthy regional Mozilla community?
- [Call for input] Open Letter to Mozilla Leadership
- Open Conversation to Mozilla Leadership
- Volunteers and time commitments
Anyway let’s wrap up with my opinion about regional community management.
As the graphs the community are not only local/region based but also by topics. If you think from the topic side is working, the Mozilla community of specific technologies grows because there is a plan about community management and involvement in the projects in all the various phases (also the decisions/contributing) also because there is no interaction with others to create confusion or complicate things.
Instead, when we are talking about grow the community by a region or locally this is mainly by the Mozilla Reps in that area, if they are interested with time to work on that (and knows people).
Basically the Reps program is not scaling but decreasing with fewer Reps and a lot of countries (but this is another discussion) where we are missing (as communities) for a lot of reasons.
Also, when there is something to do across the local community, like is happened in my experience with Maker Party or ChangeCopyright, this is only for a short time and is not helping the community or the Mozilla’s values on spreading because of the short time.
This kind of things show how Mozilla manage their volunteers as promoter with no way to join decisions and let the local community to grow.
Communities organize events/activities online/offline to get fun, recruit more people and grow etc.
A community that doesn’t grow (or at least evolve) is a community that is locked by some specific people that when they will be missing will die very easily, and this is happened a lot of time (against the Leadership agreements).
In other words (seems) that there is no interest on helping the local Mozilla community to grow but only about specific projects because they have more metrics in short time compared to local community (in my opinion).
Local community needs to grow because contamination (between itself) improve the community health and the future chances on what is possible to do it to spread the Manifesto.
Also, on recruit new people and motivate the new generation of volunteers that discover Mozilla in a different way (as example by tools like mailing list → discourse → telegram → social networks and so on).
The only community management across local community happen when there is the Reps program involved right now, but it is enough?
Mission Driven Mozillians are the future and not distinguish a lot between local community or projects community but it is clear that there is no attention from a local community management.
Again only when there is a project to move on, Mozilla jumps in and reach the project community or the local (and there are cases when this is not happened at all).
An example of local community management in Mozilla that was sometimes missing: when there is a Mozilla employee going to an event to speak, reach the local community.
Or when is organizing a campaign without reach the community but involve that language/country and it is happened.
Organize a new campaign (that will have events) and reach the various local community to help them on planning and improve the event (often Mozilla shares the plan about how to do the event itself).
Understand the problems of a community or a region about do specific kind of Mozilla activities.
Do you have any other examples?
This are little facts that shows how much Mozilla give back to the community and is not happening (often)…
This can be easily improved with regional local community (or as you prefer to name it) that right now is missing.
Do you have any experience to share about this topic? The floor is yours!