Connecting the Community

Reps
#1

As discussed in this week’s Reps Weekly Call (which you can watch on AirMo for all the details), the Mozilla Community can often feel fragmented and people active in one area don’t hear about the good work happening elsewhere and feel isolated from the rest.
Therefore, it would be great to find a communication channel that can make everyone feel more connected and get everyone more informed about what’s happening in the larger community - including even projects and initiatives not driven by the official Mozilla organization but other groups in the community, like e.g. Coqui, WebThings, and others.

One proposal for that which came up in the call would be a regular summary of highlights from the community, similar to the internal “tl;dr” posts here on Discourse, another would be to make some of the Reps Calls into some kind of “Community News” calls where those updates could happen in an audio-visual form.
There may also be other ideas, but we should start somewhere and be willing to experiment to find the right format, esp. fitting also the people who’d be willing to volunteer their time to help out there. If you have additional ideas, please tell us about them!

Konstantina brought up that we should make clear what we really want to achieve and who our target audience is for this, and Francesca offered to set up a meeting where we can brainstorm and discuss the next steps to get something moving there, with interested people from the community, including e.g. also Reps Council members. That said, first it would also be great to get some input here in Discourse.

So, what’s your opinions, who do we want to reach and in which way can we reach them? Do you have a proposal on what we can do there? Would you be willing to help?

7 Likes
#2

Once this was part in the Reps weekly call where people will add links to external projects or what other Reps are doing in other communities similar to mozilla.
My guess is that there is less people following those calls or maybe we have less reps involved in those things.

#3

Thanks @KaiRo for bringing this up, I think this is a great initiative coming from the community. I would also love to hear what other people think the audience should be, the initial idea is to keep the community informed and involved. I would love to know what the rest of the Reps think.
Just to be clear though, if we decide to make a Rep call into a community news call then it will be open to everyone in the community and not just Reps. So everyone will be able to bring up subjects (replying mostly to the comment from @Mte90 about how Reps calls used to be that)

#4

I like the idea of having a regular summary from the community. We need to think how the community can submit their activities to be featured, though. And getting them to share is not always easy. We may even have to actively reach out and encourage them to share.

In SUMO community call, we have a section called Mozilla’s world update where I sometime feature what’s happening around Mozilla that may not directly relate to product or support (for example https://wiki.mozilla.org/Support/Weekly_Meetings/Agenda_2021-01-28). I think it’s should be possible also to collaborate with the cross-functional community (reps, add-ons, sumo, common voice), so that we all have visibility into what’s happening for each area.

1 Like
#5

Muy buenas, celebro este tipo de iniciativas, me encanta, mi sugerencia es que se tenga tipo una síntesis de los proyectos que cada comunidad viene realizando y la manera de colaborar, a mí me interesa lo relacionado a cyber acoso, bullyng. Gracias por la oportunidad

#6

I believe an interesting way of having the community involved would be a “News addon” that everyone could optionally install on Firefox that would allow managers to send notifications to everyone about their projects with the frequency they would deem necessary.

#7

Why use an extension instead of following a category on discourse that can give to you push notifications or an email (as example)?
There are mozillians that don’t use Firefox or they use it only on mobile.

It makes more sense a newsletter or a something social to follow so you don’t discriminate people by a specific technology.

#8

Thanks for starting this discussion!

I think there are two distinct questions around audience here:

  • Who do we want to encourage to share updates?
  • Who is the audience to consume these updates?

For me the first one is easy to answer, but still might need some more deeper thinking here: everyone! This would not even need to be limited to the Mozilla-related community, there might be other communities who are working on something interesting that might be worth sharing with the broader Mozilla community (GNOME, Wordpress, privacy organizations, …). In terms of content, this could range from one sentence or image to a larger deep dive, depending on the topic. I don’t think updates would need to be high quality, even a short update has the power to inspire others. What I’m currently missing is inspiration. Sure, there are the campaigns, but apart from those I’m currently quite out of ideas.

The latter question is probably a bit harder to answer. “The broader community” is probably the answer to this, but I feel this needs to be defined a bit further. I would love to have a format for anyone in the Mozilla community to digest updates from different products, projects and community support in a short manner. IMHO it would be beneficial if this would not only be limited to community updates, but also product and projects. And as said above, this could potentially even be from outside of Mozilla. I really like the audience of the “These weeks in Firefox” newsletter. It’s targeted towards other engineers on Firefox (staff), code contributors, Nightly users and potentially also Firefox product staff (?). I would like to see something similar, not only focusing on the several communities within Mozilla, but especially also surfacing what volunteers are working on towards Mozilla staff. This basically would be the two-way street, bringing information from Mozilla to the community, and achievements and efforts from the community to Mozilla. Whether that should be one or two different formats would need to be decided depending on the exact problem statement of course.

I think the format heavily depends on the targeted audience, so I really appreciate that this discussion is starting with the audience question.

4 Likes
#9

I agree without define the audience and how to provide this information it is a problem. Before we had the reps portal, so it was more easy to track what “we” were doing, but a lot of people stopped reporting what they are doing with the google form (like me).

I think that is also part of “how many reps are active” question today, so let’s start discussing how will share those updates and what is the target.

To me as we are a program I guess that both should be Reps as there are a lot of way to get updated about people is doing following them on social networks.

#10

Hi all, this is a really great discussion, thank you Kairo for starting this!

If the problem statement we are trying to solve here is “Fragmentation of information amongst Mozilla communities”, “lack of inspiration”, “lack of awareness” I think it makes sense to open it to as many people as possible.

So, in principle, I agree that this should be a wide thing as possible, to say we should encourage anyone to participate (not just reps).

We still need to define to the audience first, because then we can give some guidelines on “what kind” of things we would like to talk about (and we could have different formats, e.g. short updates, and deep dives, as Michael suggested).

2 Likes
#11

It wasn’t necessarily an only Firefox add-on, it could be for every browser. I agree that we need to find the audience first in order to act on the problem. But for me, I believe streamlining information and delivering it to everyone signed up for any Mozilla related newsletter would be a starting point, as I guess people usually like to know what’s happening in the ecosystem.

#12

Hi

Great to see this topic being discussed, I have a few thoughts:

I think it would be good to broaden the calls beyond ReMo to other parts of the community, regardless of whether that is “core” or the broader community. SUMO, l10n, AMO - there is amazing work that just does not get mentioned.

I am not sure how this could happen, but we also need to raise the profile of the community internally.

  1. What would make Mozilla staff want to attend to learn about the community and what we do?

  2. What would we want to learn from them? (example - could the call be part of the new product launch process to help involve community?)

2 Likes
#13

For me the prime target is to get the exchange and information flowing between the contributors (and starting with volunteers) - if that works well, and staff isn’t excluded but included as part of the community and as also being contributors, then IMHO the “profile of the community” with staff would rise as well without much additional effort, as for one thing there are people from staff who are just interested by themselves in those things, and for the other, it will make the job of Konstantina etc. much easier to show internally that the community is alive and kicking and awesome.
Also - and that’s why I’m always offering to actively be part of whatever we’re doing - I think it’s best to start with what we can control and where those of us who are interested in the topic can directly contribute with as few barriers as possible while still achieving the reach we want. Finding that combination is IMHO the key. :slight_smile:

Also, if there is buzzing activity, I have high hopes that interested bystanders will be pulled in and get convinced of ways how to contribute themselves as well. :wink:

#14

I think it’s great if the Reps play a role in organizing this but I think it’s a good idea to organize this in a way that it isn’t labeled as a “Mozilla Reps” activity primarily, as I think that would make people who are not Reps feel like it’s not for them, and also would make it feel like a MoCo-driven thing (as Reps is an official MoCo program) which may make projects in the wider community (like I mentioned, e.g. Coqui, WebThings, and others) feel excluded, and I personally would like to see all of those included in this communication channel, esp. as the Open Web/Internet is much bigger than the smaller amount of products that MoCo focuses itself on nowadays.
That said, it’s great if the Reps program and the Reps themselves play a role in getting this communication channel going and supporting it!

1 Like
#15

Maybe it’s better to start with Reps or it will be chaos with too many people reporting and also if we are no getting updates by reps itself we have a red flag to study for the program future.