Brainstorming - How should visibility of Reps activities look like?

Reps
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From our last meeting, we have the following notes to answer the following question: How should reporting look like?

Updated, May 12 18:20 UTC: Let’s make this broader than “reporting”, let’s think of it as “How can we increase the visibility of what Reps are doing on a daily basis?”

As it is now, we are using reports, which is not the perfect way to do it. Let’s brainstorm here without thinking too much of the current solution. I’m pretty sure there is a way better way if we don’t focus on the current mechanism! We need your help to answer this question. We would really appreciate your feedback and ideas!

  • Needs to be very easy to do
  • Simplified form (not necessarily categories if those are not necessary)
  • This should be visible to the whole community
  • Nice dashboard
  • Having a mobile app just dedicated to that might help
  • Opening it, easily fill it out, done
  • Open question: how can we have automated reports from other systems?
  • Could this be done in Mozillians so not only Reps could do it?
  • This could then be included in the Mozillians profile
  • This might be a really good exercise to do a design thinking session on it

Feel free to reach out here if anything from these notes is not clear enough to give feedback or ideas on!

Thanks,
Michael

2 Likes
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I would make a step back and start thinking more about “Accountability and visibility” because reporting is just a (possible) solution. If we brainstorm about a solution we won’t be able to discover other alternatives :wink:

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I think that easy and fast will be the first points.
But accountability and reporting for me needs to go together because the second is the only way actually to check the first.

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Is it? I think we are making that assumption and that’s blocking us to think on different alternatives.

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I agree on the “visibility” part, though for me the “solution” above still stands in that case, since the external communication part is handled in the Identity/Comms Working Group and I don’t have any other idea for “Showing what Reps are doing on a daily basis” right now.

For the “Accountability” part, we’ve splitted that out to a separate topic. So let’s focus on the visbility of what Reps are doing here.

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6

Those are great ideas. I think one thing we should have in there is that if we consider Reps to be representatives of some form, the action of going to a non-Mozilla event/Meetup and representing Mozilla and the community’s interests there should be something we should be able to report on, in some simplified form - possibly with a line or two on “what’s the take-away for Mozilla from attending that event/meetup?”

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Agree with you. I have been involved in non-mozilla event/meetup in the past with regular report. These are value added activities which can be taken on board.

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Thinking more about this, I realized it would be great for such events that I go to, if I could report what topics of interest to Mozilla I discussed with who, so that the Reps program and even Mozilla can find out from the reports who knows which kinds of people (e.g. “who has connections to the game development scene?”) and which topics of interest seem to resonate with people “out there” that we talk to.

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or maybe allowing reps to input manual reporting along with default templates so that they can report freely about what they actually did on event :slightly_smiling:

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Hi Everybody,

Wish to share my recent experience regarding posting an event and reporting on the following non-mozilla event I attended last week on the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day 2016. It was an opportunity to spread Mozilla Campus Campaign and Connected Devices, I have been able to meet students on the campus and other friends from other institutions. I met so many people and talk about Mozilla presence in Mauritius.

However while reporting this event, I had not enough choice from the 2nd metrics list. I think these should be expanded and give Reps enough space for posting event and to provide feedback.

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11

Maybe we can divide reporting as Events and Activities.
So events have different fields but for event we have also the events system in Reps but is focused only in Mozilla related event so I don’t think that is better to divide.
When a Reps attendee an event that have Mozilla stuff this need to be added in the portal so there are all the metrics focused for the event but for the activity we need to improve it.
The problem it is to aggregate all this information in a way that it is easy to have statistics and data, with free template this will be very difficult.

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Reporting should be data driven. To figure out how to improve reports we should first decide what data we want to collect. The purpose of the data should always be to help us do better, that means being able to see how we’re doing, and see if we’re improving. We should be able to set goals by it and track progress on those goals.

One thing the reporting system currently fails on is tracking outreach and follow-up of potential Mozillians. I feel like that should be the #1 purpose of a reporting system. Event tracking and reporting fits in that scope as well, it’s just a different type of contact.

I think it might actually be useful to track what Mozilla meetings Reps are attending, but the current reporting system doesn’t let us aggregate that data (I’ve shared my idea for a meeting tool with several people, email me if you’d like to hear it).

Increasing the visibility of Reps is about marketing, not data collection. Yes, data can help, but not if we’re sharing it. Also not well tied to the current report system either. We can log that we did make a blog post, but what about reach? If we want to increase visibility we should give Reps “points” for sharing each other’s blog/social media posts. See also my suggestion to allow testimonials on the Reps portal.

I would love a mobile app that would let me do my tracking/receipt submission on the spot.

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Look on Okra - Managing Objectives and Key Results - Mozillians - Mozilla Discourse

Don’t confuse reporting activity and event metrics because they are different for areas and also for forms in the portal.

I think that the reps portal is to track the activity done by the Reps, the follow-up of potential mozillians I think that is not for that portal.
The mentorship can done also by non-rep so for me we have to improve the speed of compiling fields with custom fields based on the type of activity.

So I think that we have to focus on the area that require reporting and as explained on Meta Working Group: Improve the Reps Portal for recognition - Reps - Mozilla Discourse there are many functional areas and other stuff that need to be added on the portal and few to remove.

Once we defined the area we can discuss the metrics that we want for this area to get a data driven workflow and improve of the visibility of the activity of a rep.

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So I will try to link Okra with the reps reporting issue and the MWG as Daniel pointed the Okra topic.

Mozilla metrics can be linked to Okra so an objective set in Okra has a type that correspond to an activity, area or initiative in Reps portal. Any people working on the same field could be linked and the Galaxy Map (feature) can be designed to show different interactions and linked between people according to the option set: per regions, per team, per alike activities… quite the same as how Reps Metrics works.
But with Okra we should also be able to see Mozillians connected to these reps activities, since the web app not only focus on Reps but all Mozillians. The web app can link a Mozillian to a Rep, not just because they belong to the same team in mozillians.org and reps.mozilla.org but because they have currently the same objectives.

Going further in the concept, achieving a key or a task and finishing a quarter should create an automatic report for Reps. A notification will be send to you, so you can accept to create this report/event on the reps portal (or not). Mozillians would have the same kind of reports but internally with Okra, and we can imagine at the certain amount of succeeded keys in a specific areas, we earn a badge: still alike Mozilla Open Badges.

A special API could communicate with the Reps Portal (and Mozillians one ?) to check if there are new area, activities and field of interest. I think the Reps Council should easily be able to add specific Mozilla events or special programs each new quarter or month to correspond to limited-in-time community needs (feature for Reps Next and MWG).

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Erm, sorry to ask, but what’s Okra (other than a vegetable)?

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But please don’t link it too deeply, these are ideas for now. Tomorrow it might turn out that OKRs is not the best way to do it and then you’re stuck. If we decide that OKRs is the best way to keep Reps accountable, then this might come in handy. The same goes for the current reporting process, this might look completely different in the future.

Don’t get me wrong, I still like the idea, but I don’t think it’s useful to spend too much time on the Reps-specific part until we have a decided way to keep Reps accountable and the question around reporting is answered (both of them are here on Discourse).

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A non-official app that Quentin is building, see Okra - Managing Objectives and Key Results - #8 by Popzelife - Mozillians - Mozilla Discourse

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Well what is the activity done by Reps? It has always been to impact contribution to Mozilla. No the portal shouldn’t be for tracking new Mozillians into the project, but it should be for Reps to track the progress and outcomes of their contacts. Of course that’s my opinion because I think that’s what the main goal of the Reps program is.

If the main goal is to hold successful regional events, then we may not want to track attendees into the project, but we want to track whether or not people are coming out more often, or if they’re coming out once and not coming back, because repeat attendance is one important way to measure the quality of an event, especially community building events.

Also there is no reason that we couldn’t use the Reps portal to incubate a tool that could be used for all volunteers. If we agree Reps main role is to increase volunteer participation in Mozilla, then the portal should help them track their contacts absolutely, but you’re also right that you don’t have to be a Rep to promote contributing to Mozilla and you may benefit from the same tool. We would just need it to be able to distinguish and report on Reps vs non-Reps.

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Great discussion here! While I think these are all really good ideas on how reporting could be improved and actually be useful in terms of data. I really appreciate all the energy you all are putting into this! This is exactly the energy we need to bring the Reps program to the next level!

In hindsight it might not have been the best idea to already mention reports in the initial post since those are just one possible solution to achieve our goal. Let me rephrase the goal here:

“How can we learn from each other and keep up with what other Reps are doing to empower local community or bringing forward mozilla’s mission in general?”

Once again, I just came up with that phrasing just now. It’s not perfectly phrased, but hopefully provides a little bit of background for the initially asked question.

Having such a diverse community in the Reps program could be used way more efficiently to learn from each other in my opinion. While something that is working perfectly well in Asia might not work in Europe and vice versa, I still strongly think that learning from eachother’s actions and activities would be of great value to all of us. But how can we enable and empower other Reps to share what they’ve learned recently or what activities they’ve done to nurture local communities and Participation in projects? For example, sharing my recent experience regarding bringing somebody back to the project after some time of inactivity might be useful to a lot of other Reps.

What are possible solutions to achieve this learning experience sharing? What are possible solutions to maybe also go further than Reps and enable Mozillians from other communities to learn from our experience that we have on a regular basis? I think answering those questions might bring us forward quite a bit here.

I really liked the year book we did at the end of last year. While this had a lot of general information on it, it also enabled everyone to see what different communities did in 2015 and are planning for 2016. Maybe we could adapt this idea and build a “share your helpful experience, achievements and learnings” framework for anyone to learn from and increase their skills doing that on a regular basis? At least for me it made me reflect about the year and even think about what I could do better in 2016. I’d like to believe that I was not the only one who had this experience. And I also learned a lot reading the other pages of the book.

Another point here is that I sometimes want to know what other communities are doing. Currently as it is I can look at events that are going on in other countries, but I can’t really get a lot of out that since that only covers events and not activities. So many Reps do more than events, for example helping out the local communities with challenges they face or contributing to exciting Mozilla projects in functional areas. There is currently as far as I know no way to dive into that and get inspired to try some of those activities for my local community as well. Keeping in mind that we’re distributed all around the world which means we have a lot of different approaches to challenges, I think this would be a great way to broaden the horizon of every Rep and enable experimentation as well.

I’d love to hear your thoughts around that!

Update 21:46 UTC: fixed the link to the year book

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I’d love to see all our relevant (!!) social media activity aggregated in a reporting system.

Note: I am not sure how to implement such a “relevance” filter.

Example 1:
I attend an event I consider relevant to my Reps identity. All (or only a subset of?) the event tweets therefore go to my Reps reporting.

Example 2:
Somebody else tags me in Facebook at an event. The occasion is considered “Reps relevant” by me. So I’d like to be able to get this added to my Reps reporting.

Hope these examples make sense?