Defining Participation: What Does Participation Mean?

Around Mozilla (especially around the Participation Lab!) we use the word “Participation” a lot!

It’s easy to lose track of what participation means in the context of Mozilla, so I’ve created a definition for us to use in the Participation Team and I would LOVE your feedback:

What does “participation” mean in the context of Mozilla?

Participation is when people contribute their energies, time and ideas to supporting Mozilla’s mission, programs and products. This can be volunteers contributing their ideas in a brainstorm, or engaged users helping make products better, or supporters helping to increase the reach of Mozilla’s mission, programs and way of working.

Participation comes to life when both Mozilla and Mozillians (participants) get value.

Does this capture how you think about Participation? What’s missing? What does Participation mean to you? Please comment, like (if you like it!) and share!

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I think it’s better to limit the scope.

We’ve had lengthy conversations at the 2013 summit about “What’s a mozillian”, and the conversation ended up in “What’s not a mozillian”. The latter is the same conversation in the end, and it’s not a helpful conversation.

The value that mozilla gets from any individual is likely a bell curve in a variety of aspects, and we’re better off with enjoying the grey area being around than having discussions on 50 shades of grey.

Which brings me to this:

Participation is getting shit done.

And yes, I’m old guard.

There’s two aspects that I like about that wording:

For one, it focuses on the what and less on the how and why.

Also, it focuses on impact.

I understand that the how and why are at the core of what the Lab is doing. But I think it’s important to not tie particular aspects of that into the outcome of it.

In the land of localization in which I live, I’m seeing a lot of people getting s*** done for reasons I didn’t expect, or don’t understand. They’re going about ways that are new or old, but different. None of this changes the value of their participation, though.

Thus I’d want the definition of participation to be independent of why and how.

The problem with defining participation as “getting shit done” within
Mozilla is that part of Mozilla’s problems have been it is very focused and
supportive for contributors who make obvious contributions, like code, but
make it much harder to recognize the supporting players that are needed to
see through that success. Mentors and other sorts of facilitators are key
parts of collaboration, but we tend not to include what they do when we
think of what we mean by “shit.”

BTW, I’m old guard, too. I have seen that the status quo looks like it
works, and it works very well for certain types of people. The point of the
participation team is to expand on the number of people Mozilla’s way of
doing things works for.

Having an opinion in a discussion is participating. Being a sounding
board for a new strategy is participating. I know that many people find
it frustrating when it seems like all someone is doing is having opinions
and not helping with the work, but that doesn’t actually make those
opinions any less valuable. If someone is only criticizing, but they are
always good criticisms, isn’t that of benefit? Mozilla has always felt
short-handed, and that breeds a resentment amongst the “doers” against the
"thinkers." However Mozilla has not figured out how to support the
"thinkers" who don’t have the resources to be “doers” and because of that
also loses out on “doers” who aren’t necessarily “thinkers”. We value
leaders way above followers, but it’s impossible to lead if no one is
following you.

I could really go on for a while about this, as a long time, non-coding
contributor to Mozilla.

However I very much like the term impact because the impact something has
isn’t necessarily the same as an end result. I think it leaves much more
room to value different types of participation. Take for example someone
who catches a typo in some string in a release product. It feels very
awkward to say this person “got shit done” by correcting a spelling error,
especially compared to all of the work someone else had to do to localize
those strings, but it feels very natural to say they had an impact on the
professionalism on the finished product.

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I used to do localization for a long time before I stopped, and now I do various things here and there that are related to Mozilla.

In my experience as the project got bigger it became more easier to get involved and, at the same time, more difficult to make a substantial or lasting contribution. As a result people can grab the (very appealing) colors of being a Mozillian with a single effort somewhere in the huge project landscape and disappear. (This certainly has been the case of MK community.)

So, I think it would be good to have sort of a time commitment attached to the participation. I can see the definition ending with

Mozilla’s mission, programs and way of working over a period of time.

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I’m sympathetic to the idea time commitment being attached to participation, but on the other hand I’m not sure it matters that much.

To use the example of correcting a spelling error in a product used by @majken above: does it matter if that was that person’s only contribution? The impact is the same no matter what.

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