Hey Friends,
As we all know from the past days we are in some turmoil phase among contributors. This is not the first time this happen (even though I think it is the strongest reaction) and I am sure this will happen again in the future.
Large entities like Mozilla will shift focus. Like an eagle soaring high, objects that once drawn its attention might be left behind as it flies on its desired path. Unfortunately, unlike our hypothetical eagle, Mozilla has not done the best job it could do when cancelling a project. Persona, Web Runtimes, Thunderbird and now Firefox OS are all examples of Mozilla shifting its focus. We may not agree and complain a lot but that also doesnât help. We all goes through phases and learn about our mistakes and how we can improve in the long run so instead of complaining more, I am coming with you all with a potential idea for the future.
I believe we should implement a shadowing system for projects that are being cancelled so that volunteers would have the know-how to move those projects along without staff intervention.
Shadowing: someone observing for a time, how some knowledgeable person does his job.
âStaff shadowcastersâ would work with âvolunteer shadowsâ to transfer knowledge and workflows related to some project. For this to work, Mozilla would need to maintain a little skeleton crew for a project it wants to sunset while the shadowing is ongoing. For example, in the case of Persona, shadows would learn about how the IdP works, and federation, where are the sources, how to transfer them to community ownership, etc.
Shadowing is in a simple definition the same as onboarding but at a very different moment. Its like offboarding, where you train people so that you can leave. This way the whole transfer of some projects to community ownership would become much more successful.
This is also an opportunity for leadership development and unlocking new skills on contributors. May they be organizational skills or technical skills. If we can get some success stories around community ownership then not only we improve the abilities and trust we have in our community but they also trust us more.
Attrition: the loss of volunteers/contributors
Currently we have a problem with attrition where contributors are leaving our community because of burnout, disagreements or just being angry at decisions done without transparency/consultation. This is a fact of every FOSS project and is expected. There are volunteers whose sole purpose is related to some project we are doing that we might decide not to do anymore. Unlike in employee/company relationships where the company might just try to accommodate that employee at a new position, in volunteer/community relationships the volunteer might just leave. This same person might be completely happy to keep working on that cancelled project if we unlock enough agency in them. I believe that shadowing can improve community participation while reducing attrition at the same time.
This of course requires a lot of effort and is not easy. We all know that the knowledge transfer is not like a download that completes at 100% but it is still a valuable process that has more chance to work and is more beneficial to everyone than switching things off.
I would like to know your thoughts on this. We should all ideate on more and better processes.