Council Elections September 2016 - Nominee Q&A

Reps
#1

Hey all,
This is the second step into the Election Process. In this thread the 10 nominees should post their answers to the following questions:

  1. What are the top three issues that you would want the Council to address were you to join the Council?
  2. What is in your view the Mozilla Reps program’s biggest strength and weakness?
  3. Identify something that is currently not working well in the Mozilla Reps program and which you think could be easy to fix?
  4. What past achievement as a Rep or Mentor are you most proud of?
  5. What are the specific qualities and skills that you have that you think will help you be an effective Council member?
  6. As a Rep, what do you do to try to encourage inactive mozillians to be active again?

Let me know if you have any concerns.

9 Likes
#2

In the bottom there are all the references about the things mentioned.

What are the top three issues that you would want the Council to address were you to join the Council?

  • RepsNext: continue the discussions and improve the proposal of the other minor WGs like Meta and involve new reps to join the discussions
  • Regional Coaches: improve the actual initiative and evaluate the next steps with the help of the eyes as member of the council
  • Portal: our reference to track our activities needs an improvement and as a proposal lead for the portal I want to speed up that process

What is in your view the Mozilla Reps program’s biggest strength and weakness?

  • The mainly problem is the accountability: we have hundreds of reps that are not active for various reasons and the RepsNext worked in that direction to propose new rules and strategies for all of us, so it’s a working in progress.
  • At the same time the most powerful part is the network of all the reps, as I saw in the Reps Regional Coaches that the community leadership or coaching shared with local communities was the natural next evolution step of the program itself. Also the friendship between us it’s an important fact that show how we can work together with our vision for the same purpose and also joke between us because we are a community not a corporation.

Identify something that is currently not working well in the Mozilla Reps program and which you think could be easy to fix?

I think that the portal is the next easy step for the program because there is already a proposal and will improve the accountability and the data itself on the portal. This step before the apply of the RepsNext proposals because we need to see how that improvements for the events and reporting can help us to improve the already available proposals with new data. But with an eye for the actual proposals to be ready to implement new features. Also as developer that contributed on reps portal I think that we need to simplify the contribution on the portal itself.

What past achievement as a Rep or Mentor are you most proud of?

The born of the Mozilla Italia Participation Team called MozItalians where me and @edovio (RAL and also a regional coach) work on help new volunteers to join the monthly activities and educate the most promising volunteers to evolve as level and participate in internal discussions of our projects.
The mainly problem for us is organize a national meetup but we need to study the reimburse for all of us, so we chosen that for the first meetup will be online with a full agenda about coaching, how to do a talk, how to introduce mozilla, how to organize an event and recruit tips that I’ve already shared on discourse.

What are the specific qualities and skills that you have that you think will help you be an effective Council member?

I think the approach of a problem that as developer I have. Find the problem and evaluate many way to resolve it but also the open mind to new ideas, like the reps regional coaches that was not a my idea but proposed to me from the council itself and now I feel that is like a my project.
Also the planning in long term I think that is very important because the idea is not enough but also the planning is very important to get the best effect on the project itself.

As a Rep, what do you do to try to encourage your inactive mozillians to be active again?

For the inactive, in Italy we use an approach of a first contact with few questions why he cannot be active, what he don’t like and if we as community did something wrong with him. In that way we search a contact, not like a boss that want their workers to get back to work, but listen what are his issues.
I think that we have to ask and gather what are the problems of the inactive mozillians to understand where we can act and change their status to a profit mozillian.
I written a protocol for recruit that can be used also for the inactive mozillians and that works in Italy so I think that with few changes can be used also worldwide.

Regional Coaches:

RepsNext:

Extra:

7 Likes
#3

What are the top three issues that you would want the Council to address were you to join the Council?

I would like to address on the below three issues if I get elected.

1)Aligning Reps and communities with the campaigns and the 2016 goals:-

We have launched an activity campaign recently. For the success of such campaigns we need feedback and proper communication flow between the council and the reps. I’d like to put more focus on how we can align our reps with upcoming strategies and goals of Mozilla so that our Reps feel more empowered and connected. At the same time we have Regional coaches as well who can be empowered and trained to contribute more in the success of the campaigns and achieving Mozilla goals successfully.

2)Reps Leadership Trainings:-

Mozilla Reps are already leaders/mentors in their communities. But we need to provide them proper tools and resources so that they can be even empowered more. I would like to work on its efficacy. In the mean time , we need to be more aligned with the functional teams so that we can have some skill based trainings in order to make the Reps program more effective.

3)More Transparency: -

Council is already doing a great job in maintaining transparency in the Reps Program. But we need to work towards that even more as maintaining transparency is ongoing continuous process. We need to bridge the gap between council and reps so that reps can stay connected and updated. I would like to work on the same path to achieve it . A good transparency will make sure we have effective participation and scalability happening in the communities.

What is in your view the Mozilla Reps program’s biggest strength and weakness?

Biggest Strength :

Unity in Diversity. Reps Program have completed 5 years and I have seen a lot of changes in this Program since I joined program in September 2011. Mozilla Reps have been progressive to spread the word about the Mozilla Community in their regions in a very effective way and that’s why we have a earned a lots of trust and accountability in the period of time. We have Reps from so many countries who work together in spite of so many cultural and geographical differences and I am respectively proud to be part of such a program.

Biggest Weakness:

Biggest weakness according to my perspective is -“defining deadline for some important activities”. Today, so many contributors in way to contribute towards open source apply to be reps in their respective regions but they have long way to go as the waiting period to be reviewed is more hence while consequently the contributors lose interest in it. We need to focus and work in this area along with motivating inactive reps.

Identify something that is currently not working well in the Mozilla Reps program and which you think could be easy to fix?

Reps Inactivity and not filing contribution reports on the Reps Portal are the two things that are easy to fix. Having a survey with the Reps on what is blocking them to contribute can give us an idea about their inactivity and we can work on
immediate resolution of the same. At the same time, we should encourage Reps to file their contribution reports on the Reps Portal as well which shouldn’t be that tough.

What past achievement as a Rep or Mentor are you most proud of?

I started contributing to Mozilla since 2008. In India there were not enough of people contributing to Mozilla. Forming a community here was really tough at that time as we had not the proper resources or a program like Mozilla Reps
to help us with the resources or tools required. But with the help of other enthuastic people I was able to form Mozilla Bhopal , Mozilla Punjab ,Mozilla HP and later on Mozpacers sub communities in India which I am very proud of part of it.
Lots of the people whom I worked with are now Reps and Mentors which also makes me proud. I am also connected with multiple functional teams in Mozilla which helps me do some effective contribution and is another reason to be proud of.

What are the specific qualities and skills that you have that you think will help you be an effective Council member?

My passion for Mozilla and my 8 years of experience in this community will help me to be an effective council member. I have gained a lots of experience in community building, leadership skills , solving problems, organizing things and
conflict resolution will help me during my tenure as a council member.

As a Rep, what do you do to try to encourage your inactive mozillians to be active again?

Communication is the best way to resolve issues so, I will talk with them first to get an idea about their interest in contribution. After getting an idea, I try to analyse on how can I link his/her interest with the goals and activities of Mozilla and accordingly I provide him/her the updates as per their interest. I suggest them and give them their inputs and provide them the resources so that they can start their contributions effectively again.

7 Likes
#4

"What are the top three issues that you would want the Council to address were you to join the Council?"

1. Communication :

_ Communities and Reps:_* There is a big gap between regional communities and Reps program, EX: a lot of Reps program candidates don’t know they do have a regional.

Communities needs to be heard and get more attention, so much issues raising and little bit of actions happening.

*Communications between Reps program and other programs: There is lack of communications between Reps and other programs as an EX: Reps could be great aid to other programs like at there region we are making separation and big gap between FSA and Reps program.

Having communications between programs will make us great.

2. Resources (Materials, training ) and Tools: when a person being called (Representative for an organization) means he will be fully Representing a company or an organization, Reps have to be provided with the basic materials,tools and training before he/she starts acting as one, we need to work on these basic rules to help Reps start acting like one.

3. General Reps Program improvements: Delays and complicity of budgets, Reps numbers are increasing and being accepted randomly with out any transparent and clear plans EX: at Jordan we have 9 Reps accepted at the same state! and rest of states they don’t have reps at all, programs being opened and closed without any notice EX: Firefox OS.

*Direction The reps program keeps changing direction this is unstable and doesn’t give reps a consistent expectations for their time.

*Transparency Council elections are never following schedule and decisions are often made in private. We need to be more transparent and open.

*Recognition We often recognize already well known reps for their work but do not thank and recognize lessor known reps. We need to try and recognize everyone equally.

"What is in your view the Mozilla Reps program’s biggest strength and weakness?"

Strength: empower and support volunteer, help Mozillians to organize and/or attend events, support their local communities, missing materials and training.

Weakness Missing Recognition for unknown Reps, unstable, lack of communications across programs.

"Identify something that is currently not working well in the Mozilla Reps program and which you think could be easy to fix?"

Communication, Recognition for unknown Reps.

"What past achievement as a Rep or Mentor are you most proud of?"

*Being chosen as a Rep of the month still means a lot to me until this moment. (March 2014).
*One of the founders for our Mozilla Jordan community and leading the community in the past.
*2 of my mentees chosen as a Reps of the Month (Sayed and Stefan).
*One of the Organizers for 2014 Arabic meetup, which helped us to relunch the Arabic community and bring it together again.

"What are the specific qualities and skills that you have that you think will help you be an effective Council member?"

*Acting as a Mozilla Jordan community leader helped me building and improving my leadership skills.
*Analysis, Planning skills gained by working as a product manager will help me to analyze, plan, track and solve problems using management tools.
*Worked as a frontend engineer and Ethical hacker which means i have a solid technical back ground could be used to provide Reps program with new tools like (Websites).
*communication skills gained by acting as a scrum Master, managing teams from different cultures.
*Started as an FSA -> Reps -> Mentor and still involved with FSA program as an RAL for Middle east and North Africa which gave me a vision related to the programs weaknesses and strengths and what we are missing.

"As a Rep, what do you do to try to encourage your inactive mozillians to be active again?"

listen to them to know what makes them inactive from the first place.

Take Actions Fix, guide, advice them through the reason behind making them take the decision to be in active.

_Recognize _ and Give them more attention.

5 Likes
#5

good luck bro

#6

Hi Reps, Council and Mozillians!
Thanks for the opportunity to represent Brazil for the first time at the council and Latin America again!

Gap between Mozillians and Functional Teams

We need to be aware of mozilla’s campaigns and goals so we can align the actions within the community working together with the functional teams. We need to have some tool that the employee within a functional team understands that he has an amazing asset to work with. The volunteers can be a “game changing” to be more effective regionally and globally. Programs like RepsNext and Regional Coaches will be vital to the success of these actions.

Improved Onboarding Process for New Volunteers

When a potential candidate for volunteer approaches mozilla to start contributing, comes up against barriers and processes that he’s not used to. This ends up making the heat of the moment lost and he doesn’t keep contributing. We need to review the onboarding process to make it easier to the volunteer to turn an active mozillian and understand the processes more clearly. Mentoring and coaching are two things that will help a lot to implement processes and easier tools.

Keep Mozillians active and Encouragement for inactive Mozillians return to participate

We have a great challenge that will be to make the volunteers feel motivated to continue participating. We have this problem constantly and we need to make the Reps and Regional coaches being the fuel that is missing so that the community can achieve their goals. Simplifying processes also will help to be more effective. Another group to work with, would be inactive mozillians that for some reason , are no longer collaborating.

The biggest strength of the program is Valuable human talent. I think we have a great network of amazing people that can do impossible things!

Our weakness at the program are the ways to interact with the reps at the portal and the amount of time we used to spend to approve bugs and other things. I believe with RepsNext, the evolution of Reps program, which I’m part of it, that will change very soon. So I just want help to design and plan this new era of the program. Also I believe the language barrier is a big turning down point for many people that don’t speak English

With a program that is already in course, Regional Coaches, which I am part of it as well, review team will be able to understand local needs and provide a more regional approach when they have to approve some requests of volunteers avoiding loose Mozilla’s money sending swags and other material that sometimes don’t get in the place in time.
Understand and Unblocking paths that are avoiding volunteers to get their tasks done can be very easy too if we have more proactive reps too.

There are so many achievements I’m proud of! I think the one that will be more useful for the other generations to come will be the Conflict Resolution Council we just did this year. After we have several inside problems with our Brazilian Community we create a internal council that we have the power to sort out problems before we handle to staff. We have one person from each state and we have a form to report a problem and a playbook to handle problems. We are very happy that this will be a very good way to avoid conflicts inside the community so we can focus in planning and results!

I believe I have a good “skills set” to be at this position. I’m a very open mind person, adaptive, proactive, good listener, e-mail killer, eager to learn anything, I’m passionate and I have strong experience about community, leadership and problem solver. I’m a business guy, so I always try to think a strategic plan to most of the things. Also I have, what I believe would be the key tool to this position: very strong communication skills

We need to change our mindset about this. I will give you an exemple of something that happens today.
A Rep is very active, he has a mentor, his mentor is kind of out of Mozilla due to work. So how this rep will be recognized for his work if to be nominated as Rep of the month he needs his mentor to put him there?
I know that Rep of the month isn’t the only way to be recognized for your work as a Rep, but while we have situations like this we won’t be using our program properly. I always try to contact inactive mozillians directly asking what can I do to help them to unblock the paths to get back to contribute. Understand if there is anything making the mozillian unhappy to contribute is also important.
Act as a Coach is a very effective way on this kind of situation, passing through all steps with the person, till (s)he back to active.

13 Likes
#7

What are the top three issues that you would want the Council to address were you to join the Council?

Responsiveness / Inactivity
In my opinion we currently have a problem with responsiveness and activity. While Reps might be active in their local community or functional areas Reports are not working and it’s hard to learn from others. One part here are inactive or less responsive mentors. This blocks a lot of their mentees on a regular basis. While the regional coaches are a good first step in surfacing local community feedback we can do more here.

What I’m quite concerned about is the Participation in the recent RepsNext working groups. While there were a few Reps chiming in and providing great leadership and feedback for the working groups, I would have expected more discussions and broader participation coming from all Reps. After all, we all want the next phase of Reps to be impactful, right? We can’t have a program that fits 10% of all and without broad discussions we might end in a one-way street which leads us to non-optimal decisions. We need to find out what is blocking Reps in stepping up and participate on a program level.

It might be that they are inactive on all activities, but I think a lot of Reps are not inactive. They might be doing amazing stuff on a local community level, but not everybody else can see this. For this we need to answer (at least) the following questions: What blocks Reps to participate on a program level? How can we better surface what Reps are doing in their local community and all learn from these experiences?

Scalability
As it is now, a lot of mentors are coming to their limit in terms of number of mentees. While this is a personal limit (there is no absolute number), we need to make sure that we are still able to scale. Currently it’s quite difficult to find mentors to reassign Reps to or welcome new Reps to the program without going over limits. The new round of coaches will help us with this, but this won’t be enough. We will need to work on a scalability concept if we want to scale.

RepsNext
We have a good base for RepsNext and the first two parts of it are currently being implemented (Review Team and an initial round of coaches). We need to keep working on the implementation.

What is in your view the Mozilla Reps program’s biggest strength and weakness?

Biggest strength is definitely our diverse backgrounds and the amazing willingness to work together for a common cause. We have such a great potential through this.

For the weakness, see the first paragraph of the first answer regarding inactivity and responsiveness.

Identify something that is currently not working well in the Mozilla Reps program and which you think could be easy to fix?
Since I’ve been on Council the last term this question is hard to answer. There might be definitely something “easy” to fix that I’m missing, but that is exactly why we need amazing Participation from all Reps in discussions as mentioned above.

One thing that I see is, as mentioned above as well, is inactivity. I’m not saying that the solution is easy, but it would be quite easy to find the root cause of this. Is it time? Motivation? Clarity on how to participate on a program level? All of them? Something else? We need to find out!

What past achievement as a Rep or Mentor are you most proud of?

Local community:
Currently I’m most proud of what we have achieved in the Mozilla Switzerland community. A few years ago it was mostly me organizing the community. Nowadays I’m still the only Rep in Switzerland, but we have established a strong core which helps each other out and takes responsibility. I’m mostly working in a supporting role now with an even distribution of work between several community members. If I would have an accident (let’s hope not!) I’m confident that the core would be able to continue to work hard and make our activities happen. Further, at our last community meetup, we had great alignment with the current strategy, even though I didn’t strictly drive the conversation in this direction. We come up with goals that are aligned and are backed by the whole community while leaving space for other activities as well if community members decide to do so. This is exactly how I wanted it to be from the beginning and I’m proud that we have achieved that.

Reps Council:
I’m proud of my achievements we made as Council in the past 15 months. We have a solid base for RepsNext which now needs to be implemented. With my passion I could successfully (co)lead several working groups and all bring to a proposal. I think we did great in the past year and we need to continue this to make sure we are working in the open and move the Reps program to the next level.

What are the specific qualities and skills that you have that you think will help you be an effective Council member?

As a Rep I’ve learned a lot in the past 4 years. I’ve learned a lot about communication and working in teams. During my previous Council term I’ve also learned a lot about framing an environment where it is easier to come to a lean implementation and run an experiment. With my skills in terms of project management and drive for communication I think I’m a good Council member.

As a Rep, what do you do to try to encourage inactive mozillians to be active again?

First of all I get in touch with the inactive mentee to get to know why they’re inactive. Here are some questions I ask:

  • Is there anything you’re blocked on? Time? Is there anything you need to know/get advice on, so that you can be active again?
  • Do you like being a Community Builder? Is there anything I can help you with to make your engagement easier?
  • Is there anything within the Reps program that needs to be changed? Are you happy with the Reps program?

These questions mostly get to the bottom of the problem. Once I have the answers to these questions we can worked together to fix problems and get my inactive mentee back on track so they have impact again.

3 Likes
#8

[quote=“Ioana, post:1, topic:10650”]
What are the top three issues that you would want the Council to address were you to join the Council?[/quote]

  • Review team: get a smooth transition between council and review team
  • Reps and non reps: rather than more reps, coach reps to help non-reps mozillians to organize activities
  • openness: sometimes people don’t feel like they are aligned with objectives of the reps program. Listen to them and realign goals if needed.

[quote=“Ioana, post:1, topic:10650”]
What is in your view the Mozilla Reps program’s biggest strength and weakness?[/quote]

The biggest strength is also its weakness: the number of people. We are legion, we are almost everywhere and it’s great. But when we need to move, it takes time. When there’s something that has to be done quickly, it’s problematic. We tend to be seen as bureaucratic. But there are a lot of awesome people and I’m sure we can figure that out.

[quote=“Ioana, post:1, topic:10650”]
Identify something that is currently not working well in the Mozilla Reps program and which you think could be easy to fix?[/quote]
Swag… It’s a real problem, because it costs a huge amount of money (to be made and sent), it’s coming too late sometimes, there’s never enough, people are complaining… If we could only have a process and standard designs in order to produce swag locally (like buttons, stickers), we would save money that could be spent somewhere else and people would be happier.

The Firefox OS launch events in France (summer’14). There were ups and downs, but I prefer to recount the good sides, while I keep in mind all the difficulties we encountered to make sure it does not happen again.[quote=“Ioana, post:1, topic:10650”]
What are the specific qualities and skills that you have that you think will help you be an effective Council member?[/quote]
I am a diplomat deep in my heart. I want people to understand each other and try to explain their point of view to their opponent. I don’t always get a truce, but at least, if I get to avoid side-effects in the community, I’m happy.

I reach to them and try to get them involved in a future event, where they can meet active mozillians from the community and give them an incentive to contribute again.

5 Likes
#9
  1. Activate campaign - I think we need to help this succeed and create a process that will help other campaigns benefit from the Reps program. I’m a bit biased, this campaign is close to my heart but I see a great deal of potential here to replicate and scale the Reps involvement in campaigns such as this.
  2. Reporting&Recognition - Currently we have a strong tie between Reporting and Recognition. But I think that is detrimental to those amazing Reps that are doing a great job in their Local Community, but they don’t have the time or are just bad at Reporting. I think we can improve Reporting on the portal to help out.
  3. RepsNext - the RepsNext initiative is doing a great job with the Coaches and the Review Team, but that is just part of it done. The Resources and Leadership tracks need our attention now as well and I think this one of the big focuses of the next Reps Council.

Strength: we are diverse and we are legion. Because of our diverse backgrounds, with any given issue, there are a lot of people available and willing to work on it. And I think that makes us great.
Weakness: we are diverse and we are legion. That means we don’t always get motivated the same way and there is no “one size fits all” solution to engage with everyone. Some of us fall through the cracks and become inactive. And I think that is our Kryptonite.

As I’ve mentioned, I think Reporting is not working really well now, and Recognition being tied into that is causing people to become frustrated. There is no issue with an easy fix, as I think the current Council did a good job this term. But this seems the most accessible issue to fix right now, with decoupling Recognition from Reporting or making Reporting more like the Tech Speakers one, in which you basically substitute a dry form for a human readable blog post.

I think I am most proud of the fact that I got elected Rep of The Month two times in my activity as a Rep and Mentor( I think I’m the only Rep with two ROTM :smiley: ). First off in May 2013 for doing a whole month of Firefox OS launch events across the Balkans and now again in June 2016 for talking about Mozilla 6 times at 5 events in 4 countries.

I enjoy talking in public in front of a big audience and I think that means I’ve got experience communicating in the open in a position of one to many. I think being transparent and communicating clearly is one on the most important skill to have as a Council member.
Secondly, I’ve held various leadership position in the organizations I’ve worked for, and I think that gave me the necessary skills to integrate and work in any team. That means I’m going to have an easy time adjusting to the Council and the existing members.

I’ve actually had to deal with this recently, so I’ll just iterate my process: I made contact with my mentee and asked about his current situation. i then offered my help with anything they might need and set a time-frame for future contribution. We are currently working on a plan for their next contribution.

I just want to end this by saying I’d be honored to join the current Council and together we could "Make Mozilla Great Again :tm: " (I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself and took the opportunity to end this in a Trump joke :joy: )

4 Likes
#10

Hello Everyone,
I am excited to share my thoughts as an Reps Council Candidate. Please read my answers and have a thought before going to vote :slight_smile:

  • Alignment in the Reps Program:
    Each module in the Reps program is important for Mozilla. Aligning Reps with
    Mentors and Council with the help of Reps Regional Coach to ensure more
    engagement to bring community contributors, Reps, Council and coach all together
    and closer to have a proper aligned scalable outcome in and around Mozilla.

  • Empowering Reps with Support & Training:
    I want to empower reps with more support/ training to help with their projects and
    initiatives or activities which will not only limited to general budget review process but
    making their initiative more impactful and more aligned that will benefit the regional
    community and also strengthen mozilla presence.

  • Improving the reporting and recognition system
    To get more output from an activity, I will try to improve the reporting system with the
    help of council by implementing post review process by giving feedback what went
    well, what not and what could be more better so that reps have an better idea about
    the initiatives.
    And with this scalable reporting and improved way of activity, a Reps can focus more
    on better event planning resulting better initiatives.
    And in the meantime, there should be an process to train him more and more so his skills grow up and we can motivate him in a way to recognize him in a more better way.

Biggest strength: The biggest strength of Reps program is each and everyone- the people. In Spite of Being from around the corners and cultivating different cultures, everyone believes in same mission and together unitedly we create an environment that makes the Reps program.

Biggest weakness: The biggest weakness of Reps program is communication gap between Reps and Mentor. And Lacking of a proper followup/ guideline/support many
Reps becomes inactive which harms the program.

There are many reps who are inactive because most of the cases they are not being followed up by their mentor. This could be easily fix by following up with mentees every week and help them by mentoring. This could bring back a long number of inactive Reps.

I am proud of many things as an Reps. Such as

  • Being Reps of the Month in September, 2015
  • Getting Shout out many times from Participation Team for my QA initiative.
  • Helped to organize Mozilla Bangladesh Meetup
  • Organized the First ever QA Hackathon in Bangladesh
  • Organized many QA Hackathon, Bug Marathon to do QA things.
  • Recruited around 100+ contributor in QA Domain for Mozilla.
  • Mobilized many mozillians to do End year campaign for Mozilla
  • Was part of Singapore Leadership summit Cohort
  • Was invited to join London All Hands

Activity as Reps in 2015 - http://www.iamikram.com/2015-my-year/

  • Community building and community engagement.
  • Conflict Resolution
  • Mentor and support Contributors ( which I am proud of )
  • Followup with them by setting up 1:1 call to know their issues, obstacles, and what steps can be taken to help them get started.
  • Fixing a plan to collaborate with some community work where they can be invited to have a role. I guess, Participation is the best part of being active.
  • And again, follow up is the best policy which I always shall prefer.
3 Likes
#11

Thanks for giving us the chance to voice our thoughts!

“What are the top three issues that you would want the Council to address were you to join the Council?”

Although I believe there are more things to improve, the following 3 points are most important to from what I observed:

  • Addressing Internal Issues

I feel that a lot of people feel uncomfortable talking about issues within the community as there is generally an “everything is awesome” attitude and people are afraid to speak up as they don’t want to look like they are being negative. Mozilla is a great place to stay in but we keep our ears shut for too long and address the problems when they are long overdue sometimes.

  • Participation Leadership Transparency

Reps are asked to plan carefully for their upcoming events, report properly, and follow up with budget and swag processes. However, this process seems to be rushed in some cases by the Participation Leadership, i.e. the European Gathering. While the process was “documented” on GitHub, it didn’t allow for transparency, rather than serving as a check list of what’s been done and what need’s to be done. Also, no volunteer contributor was involved in the discussions. I believe it is important to avoid such situations. If we ask Reps to be accountable, we need to treat everyone the same.

  • Tailored Support for Regional and Local Communities

Often we ask Reps to support Mozilla according to our quarterly goals without taking into account the local or regional circumstances of the community. We cannot treat the Italian community the same way we treat the German community and so forth. While I believe that supporting Mozilla’s global goals is priority, we need to allow for a small buffer of tailored goals of that specific local community, to allow them to have flexibility in their activities. Furthermore, Mozilla spends so much budget to get people from A to B but helping local community with basic logistics and costs coverage proves to be more hard than asking for a travel sponsorship. There needs to be a communication gateway for this. It’s discouraging when communities like Indonesia are supported, yet other communities are not, due to “not being a focus” right now.

“What is in your view the Mozilla Reps program’s biggest strength and weakness?”

Strength:
I believe that our community is built in such a way that toxic people are not tolerated. We might do professional mistakes from time to time and disagree with each other, but communication among Reps has been always respectful and civil. While this might sound like common sense to assume, it’s unfortunately not reality in many other open source projects I have contributed to.

Weakness:
There have been quite some improvements over the last year, however transparency is still an issue. While some things might technically be documented somewhere, often it is not know where to access these. Selection Processes in general need to be improved for further accountability (f.e: Rep of the Month, Mozilla Events Invitations, Regional Coach selections).

“Identify something that is currently not working well in the Mozilla Reps program and which you think could be easy to fix?”

Reps of the Month. It has a lot of potential to drive Reps to contribute more, but is not facilitated properly (due to lack of time unfortuntely). It’s one of the things which can be easily fixed by contributing just a few more monthly hours into it.

“What past achievement as a Rep or Mentor are you most proud of?”

  • Organized OSCAL and facilitate Mozilla presence through events in the local and regional communities.
  • Kicking off Mozilla Open Design and help Mozillians across different teams with their design needs.
  • I made it a habit to constantly report about my Mozilla activities on my blog, where half of the material is about Mozilla topics.

“What are the specific qualities and skills that you have that you think will help you be an effective Council member?”

  • People tell me I have great communication skills in English, German and Albanian, which helps me facilitate constructive discussions verbally and the written way. Being a Mozilla Tech Speaker has improved this skillset of mine as well. Furthermore, I like to report on my experiences on my personal blog to allow others have a glimpse into my activities.
  • I have organized events within and outside our community, ranging from MozCafes to regional flagship conferences so I know a thing or two about handling events.
  • I have experience at other Open Source Projects, including Tor, Fedora and Wikimedia, allowing me to apply lessons I learned from one project here at Mozilla as well (or prevent problems I experienced before).
  • I founded the Mozilla Open Design group and therefore have experience with creating visual materials and promo images.

“As a Rep, what do you do to try to encourage your inactive mozillians to be active again?”

Communication is key here. Listening and understanding their concerns can move mountains in such a case. We cannot take any action to improve Reps activity before we reach out to them personally. Sometimes a small chat is enough to improve things, other times it’s the start of a slow but steady process to encourage that Rep and give them a helping hand. It is to be noted however, that their concerns should be taken seriously (if there is any) and be addressed to the responsible people.

P.S: As it’s tradition, #TeamQoshi also has election materials :slight_smile:

Council-02.jpg1685×604 353 KB

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#12

Hi Reps and Mozillians!
I would like to give thanks to the Reps council for the opportunity to represent Bangladesh for the first time at the council !

1)What are the top three issues that you would want the Council to address were you to join the Council?

**

  • Visibility and Transparency:
    I think that the Reps program has reached the maturity point where it needs to rebuild itself to continue moving forward. The current council has done a lot of work regarding transparency, but it’s not totally open yet. We need to identify all points that are not open and timely communicated. We need to identify everything and adjust the internal processes to make sure that everything that can be open, is communicated openly. I would like to work with the rest of the council members on a communication channel that will help us fill the communication gap between the Reps council, Reps Mentors, Reps Regional coaches, and Reps. Many Reps feel themselves isolated in the community. We need to find a better way in order to ensure engagement of more and more community members and to get better outcome of the Reps program This will also help in bringing more transparency in the council’s work and as a result we will able to gather more feedback in order to determine our next steps as a council and as a program.

  • Reps leadership and getting Engagement:
    Mozilla Reps are the leader in their own community. It is important to make sure that every Reps in Mozilla feels enabled and empowered. I believe that this can be achieved through setting examples and to lead with their existing skill sets. I want to encourage fellow Mozilla Reps to maximize their potentials and using it to work together with contributors in strengthening their community. Also, We have seen an amazing energy and enthusiasm in reps with recent initiatives driven by council & participation team. I would like to put more focus on how we can align our reps with upcoming strategies. I do also think that Reps should get more involved with Participation team initiatives, in the upcoming months we will face a lot of challenges and reps energy and enthusiasm would significantly help in order to achieve Mozilla goals, with the strategies that together the Council. I’ll communicate, gather feedbacks and help our reps with the challenges that might be hindering their efforts. Impact is the key for us to build a great community with awesome productive initiatives. There is need to discuss the best practices among communities and try to learn from success stories of communities around the world. It is essential to convey the expectations with a right pathway to achieve our goals and this will also help us to boost our inactive Reps.

  • Education and Recognition:
    Mozilla Reps are the face of Mozilla in their region to empower and support volunteer Mozillians. Time to time we need to train and update them on various Mozilla projects and products. I have seen so many Reps are doing great contribution but not all of them work is align with Mozilla’s current goal and vision. So ultimately they are doing hard work but this is not going to help to achieve Mozilla’s current goal. So I want to make a training module for them to train them time to time and update them on Mozillans current goal and vision. Also, We should help and encourage them to improve their community building skills. Another thing is Recognizing all the hard and stellar work of the Reps is a step towards success. The reps most of the times are identified as leaders and mentors in their communities. Recognizing their hard work can bring participation and success back to the project since they will eventually engage and mentor more contributors. as Reps we do not only want to get recognized for our work, but also need to recognize our local communities for their work. I would like to help out together with the Participation team to work on efforts to make recognition easier.

2) What is in your view the Mozilla Reps program’s biggest strength and weakness?

  • Biggest strength:
    I feel the biggest strength we have is a diverse community of Reps who are passionate about Mozilla’s mission and values.We the Reps have evolved into highly trusted contributors that support our communities.

  • Weakness:
    The biggest weakness I feel the reps program faces is a lack of engagement with reps by the council. We have to work more on that and build a stronger bridge of communication between everyone.

3) Identify something that is currently not working well in the Mozilla Reps program and which you think could be easy to fix?
The main thing is currently not working well in the Reps program is Reps inactivity. Even mentors inactivity is also a concern. We have huge Reps but a big amount of Reps are inactive. Transparency is always a field to improve, the previous councils have done great improvements on this issues and we have a new mentors group selected already. so I would like to keep pushing into previous present council need.

4) What past achievement as a Rep or Mentor are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of building my Sylhet Mozillians local community and being able to go to Leadership Summit in Singapore and being able to part of Participation cohort.

5) What are the specific qualities and skills that you have that you think will help you be an effective Council member?
I am a community engagement builder and I consider myself a community builder. so I’m ready to engage all the Reps and discuss any kind of feedback regarding the council and our Remo program. I am a man of action who loves to turn effective solutions, ideas and discussions into doable tasks. I am also very social with people around me, a skill that will help me to be an effective member of this council.

6) As a Rep, what do you do to try to encourage inactive mozillians to be active again?

Good communication and mobilizing mozillians time to time with updated resources is the best way figure out what’s going wrong, and to resolve this issues easily. There might have something that blocked them. I will work on it and try to figure out and resolve this issue as early as possible.

Thank you everyone. I need all of your support.
Please VOTE for me :slight_smile:

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#13

Daniele, would you be so kind and point me to that proposal?

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#14

Hi fellow Reps,

a lot of answers circle around transparency. If you want to comment on that in a broad context, please join this thread: Working in the Open

Best regards,
Henrik

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#15

I see you unlike other candidates did not make transparency an focus of your post.

Do you believe there is a need for improved transparency in the reps program and if so could you give some examples of improvements you’d propose?

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#16

Hello Mohammed,

You day that some reps are not well connected with their regional leads could you elaborate on that more and explain how you could see some improvement in that area?

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#17

Hello Elio,

On the topic of transparency you gave selection processes as an example. Could you elaborate on how you would propose improvements into regional coach selection?

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#18

I written all the links of the things that i mention on my nominee.

The reps program now use GitHub in public to do and track the stuff in progress, like the participation team, at the same time now they started with new blogposts about the new processes explained very well!
Also the council asked on discourse about the things that we, as reps, want to know better (for the blogpost).
The council publish the meetings on discourse and also they started to apply the repsnext proposal (like the resources team), that we as reps, know because discussed and the proposal is available on discourse.
So I think that is not required more transparency because now the situation is completely different but to improve, in case, the accountability/knowledge between the mentor and mentee already discussed in the RepsNext in a way that the mentor is a mentor and not only a guy to contact to get an approval for the budget/swag request.
Transparency is a general purpose terms and I think that only after all the integrations of the RepsNext we can see if we need other transparencies about the new proposals.
The program in the last months changed so much so I think that now we have to focus in other important things.

#19

Grazie

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#20

Hello Elio,

On the topic of transparency you gave selection processes as an example. Could you elaborate on how you would propose improvements into regional coach selection?

Thanks Ben,

Last year, for the global gatherings we had good metrics and criteria on how we would select people. We however failed to do a follow up explaining these decisions properly and the classic bitter feeling of Mozillians getting rejected started to emerge sometimes. To avoid this, there needs to be ideally a follow up process explaining the decision for every rejected applicant (if there are resources, also for those who got accepted). This might sound like an utopia thing, but well, it’s important I believe. This applies generally to selection processes in the community (events,elections, etc.).

For regional coaches in particular, I am aware that the number of applications was not overwhelming, however a blog post explaining the thinking behind the selection, which would not take more than a few hours, could shine some light onto it. In this case, it’s rather about small changes which can have an impact, rather than overhauling processes.

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