What are the top three issues that you would want the Council to address were you to join the Council?
- Transparency: 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. There certainly are things we can’t do in the open (conflict resolution for example), therefore we need to identify everything and adjust the internal processes to make sure that everything that can be open, is communicated openly.
- Impact: As our community grows Reps are an important part of impact. We do not only promote Mozilla in our countries but also help interested people to contribute to Mozilla. Therefore we need to have all the necessary information from teams within Mozilla so we can align our goals and plans our engagement with Mozilla’s top goals (which AFAIK are not publicly accessible for 2015, please correct me if that has changed in the last weeks). As with transparancy council has already started on working with teams within Mozilla to tell them how much Reps could help them out. We need to continue this effort and in my opinion Reps are the best resource to inspire new contributors to work on Mozilla’s goals.
- Recognition/Education: 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’d like to help out together with the Participation team to work on efforts to make recognition easier, in whatever form recognition might come.
What is in your view the Mozilla Reps program’s biggest strength and weakness?
Biggest strength: All of us. Every single Rep does great work and can do a lot for Mozilla to increase our overall impact. Everybody is helpful and tries the best to also help out other Reps if somebody has a problem. We’re international and active in almost all countries of the world.
Biggest weakness: There are a lot of “inactive” Reps who haven’t filed a report for the past 8 weeks. In numbers: 235 out of 448 (that’s 52,5%). I think we need to identify why this is the case. Is it real “inactivity”? Is it the reporting? (Source: KPI dashboard, this dashboard is still in testing, so that might be a bug, but I don’t think so)
Identify something that is currently not working well in the Mozilla Reps program and which you think could be easy to fix?
Transparency. The current council has done a lot of great work regarding this already and I think there is not much needed now for being more open to all the Reps. The next step would be to identify points that can’t be open (conflict resolution content, …) and make sure that everything else is in the open.
What past achievement as a Rep or Mentor are you most proud of?
As a Rep, the achievement I’m most proud of is the German-speaking Community and it’s last 2 years. I started in the Swiss community and came to know about the overall German-speaking Community. Together with other Reps we started to have regular meetups to evaluate the current status and set goals for the next year. Currently this format works out very well.
As a mentor, my proudest achievement probably is my responsiveness. I’ve managed to answer questions of my mentees and review Reps related bugs within 24 hours.
What are the specific qualities and skills that you have that you think will help you be an effective Council member?
Being a Rep since 2012 I know the processes and know where it might get tricky to engage as well as one would like. I gained a lot of experience in giving valuable Feedback and conflict resolution. Further I have a fair amount of project management skills to make sure that ideas get from ideas to implementation.
For the past 2 years I met a lot of other Reps and got to know how they work and what problems they run into. I also got to value different cultures.
As a Mentor, what do you do to try to encourage your inactive Mentees 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 tese questions we can worked together to fix problems and get my inactive Mentee back on track so they have impact again.
Elio Qoshi surprised me with the following poster/flyer, it would be wrong to not share this amazing masterpiece 
