Agreement on Participation team communications

Mozillians
#1

Hello,

As part of the Comms for Participation team heartbeat I would like to share with you a statement we hope all the team members agree on:

By default we communicate in the open, private channels should be avoided unless personal info is handled.

  • Regular team communications will be done using this open Discourse category, the team email alias will be only used if personal information affecting privacy is involved, conflict resolution or NDA covered info.
  • Private channels can be used for some sync comms, such as 1:1s.
  • Team meetings and notes will be open by default (currently using vidyo and public pads).
  • Team work and its tracking will be posted in the open (currently Participation github repo and Google Drive folder)

If no one from on the team disagrees this will be our guide for communications inside the Participation team :wink:

Cheers.

2 Likes
#2

The principle here is great!

Two thoughts on the practice:

1) Can I suggest a quick audit of:

a) The Participation team alias/Google group to understand other situations where we have and would continue to use that means of communicating.
b) Personal 1:1 emails that are more helpful in that format.

Both of these will help create more precise guidelines.

2) Being transparent vs. being open

One of my biggest lessons from being at Mozilla is that having everything available, transparently is not the same as working in the open. In many cases the deluge of information, while in theory available to everyone, means that our thinking and ideas are totally inaccessible to others (because of time, organization, etc). This defeats the purpose of working in the open, which is about both accountability and leveraging the intelligence and participation of many.

So, assuming that effort/time is limited, I would prioritize us figuring out how to curate conversations and ideas and work in a way that makes them highly accessible for others to participate.

#3

A private Discourse category could be created to handle some of the communications that would go to the team alias. A big problem with using aliases is that people will just default to them if they aren’t sure if something should be public or private. If you use Discourse then a topic can be moved between. Also it provides an archive for people who weren’t on the alias before, but are affected by discussions/decisions that happened there.

@george - I agree about transparent vs open. github issues work, but are so prohibitive for people who aren’t used to working in github. I highly recommend JIRA over issues if you want to use a project tracker that ties in to github. Though I’m also learning that you aren’t going to find one communication tool to rule them all. At some point it will turn into a firehose. Teams should be able to work in github and in google docs, but updates should be given on Discourse as well, pointing people to the issues/docs for more info.

#4

From my initial analysis we have been talking about a lot of stuff there is no problem to be public. There are just a few situation where we have discussed personal situations that should remain private.

Yes, that’s part of the day to day work where 1:1 communications are involved, covered in the second bullet of my message.

#5

I am one of those people used to working in github, but from my experience github issues are a lot simpler than JIRA (which I would put on par with bugzilla levels of complexity).