After a conversion with @emma_irwin and other reps on telegram, I decided to write an article about my vision and what mozilla could do to improve our contribution.
I tried to summarize what problems we have with some examples and I suggested a few changes in some existing tools as a solution that can be used soon and also another idea that must be detailed if we will adopt it for the future :
This is just the begin and I’m really waiting for your feedback and ideas.
I’ve mentioned this elsewhere but I feel that Reps Mentor is still poorly defined.
Mentors : budget/swag voting, mentoring mentees and screening requests
We haven’t really defined what “mentoring” means. It has to be more than a budget approval person.
In an email thread from May, I suggested:
My core question is how do you measure success? How do you know you’re actually developing people? How do you measure that?
I think there’s an impact element to being a Reps Mentor. How do we grow a Reps’ impact within Mozilla? Within the Community?
Hi Sofien,
Thanks for the blog post. Lots to take in. I generally agree we have all the tools to centralize success, and that Mozillians is a great place for that.
Actually being able to use groups for communication and outreach withing Mozillians.org would be amazing, because you’re right ‘showcase’ is mostly what we have there right now. Coming from the Drupal community I can say (pretty confidently) the benefit of a centralized way to create organic groups, for both communication and ‘find-ability’ of opportunity has been a huge connector and empowerer of people. Also agree lots of potential for one and done.
I’m not a fan of rating someone’s contribution level though, because the emphasis might be on quantity and not quality. I think that’s also the issue with counting to a million Mozillians - instead wondering how vounching + badges can act as something like a profile Mozillians can use to proudly display their accomplishments in a way that helps resumes & CVs. Again, Drupal is already doing this well).
Disclaimer: I have yet to look under the hood of Mozillians, so I don’t know how easy or difficult it would be, but the ideas are great.
A few comments just on the comms piece:
Some of us are struggling with the increased traffic on discourse, and haven’t yet figured out how to use it, see https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/staying-focused-on-discourse/2477.
In the initial planning phase of mozillians, we tried to get it to work for contacting l10n teams, and to empower contributors to self-proclaim and maintain their involvement. Sadly, that failed. The taxonomy we need at least on the l10n side was just more complex than what folks wanted to implement. Or it became too cryptic for contributors to self-proclaim. Like, how do you know that you want to be in a group called l10n:fx:de or so.
There’s a bit of thing at mozilla, where we all want one tool, then we make that tool do all the things anybody needs, then it’s bugzilla complex, and we go on and search for the next tool. Rinse, repeat.
Don’t have good suggestions, just some background that some of this was tried in the past.
Deep thoughts right there Emma. I agree on emphasis being put on the quality of work.
Regards,
Michael Buluma.
I want to echo I agree with you @Pike on the tool conversation. I usually flag tools conversations as being an easier route than actually addressing problems. Having said that… I have believed for a very long time that the lack of a central place (that search engines can find!) to:
a) Talk
b) Create Groups (organically according to need: could be regional, could be functional, could be experimental)
c) Talk in, and invite others to those groups
d) Highlight our own work, be it through published posts, links to commits, badges etc.
Makes the community feel ‘hard to find, and even harder to join, and then super-hard to share what our accomplishments are to people outside the community’.
I feel a community ‘hub’ would be game changing, because it would be central, it’s about tools, yes and I know… that feels like a hard sell, but it’s not as hard as trying to put people in all the places where new contributors might turn up, combat the abandoned-dist list syndrome, isolation and firehose of questions. I mention Drupal because that’s been an experience of mine: the contrast in trying to find people, projects, like-initiatives and opportunities (even for brief collaboration) is way, way way easier there. Also, because it’s built on an open source project, it doesn’t feel so ‘custom’ to ask for changes - or tweak for improvements.
So that’s basically why, in this case I feel talking tools is unavoidable.
thanks lucy for this slides but I think you should make a separate discussion for your survey and not here 
Sure! Moving to separate discussion.