What are the top three issues that you would want the Council to address were you to join the Council?
I’d like to address following three issues if I get elected for Council:
1. Getting Aligned with 2016 Goals:
We have seen an amazing energy and enthusiasm in reps with recent initiatives driven by council & participation team. I’d like to put more focus on how we can align our reps with upcoming strategies. 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 events. 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 would be my primary objective to explore best possible way to bring our reps on a common pathway.
2.Improving the reporting & feedback system
We love events! Yes! However, in majority of cases reporting back about event is so tedious, specially for large scale events. To successfully justify post event metrics, a rep need to invest a lot time in gathering and reporting data like pictures to blogs. We can seek some help from technology to automate some part and make reporting more visible, comprehensive and productive. If we are successful in doing this, hopefully a rep can focus more on quality of events and it would also help mentors to evaluate and help their mentees to achieve a significant impact post his event.
3.Growth,Recognition & Diversity
With a continuous wave of improvements in process,operations and platforms, we are expanding in numbers day by day, Growth is what we are seeing today in numbers and impact, and since we are scaling internationally, the challenges would also grow with us.so we need to prepare ourselves with more efficient approach to handle this scaling community.
We need to come with more innovative ideas about recognizing reps, I’ll explore ways how such recognition( in any form) can help reps in their personal and professional growth. Certainly recognition are always motivating for everyone and it surely helps in running a healthy community.
Last year I have observed some awesome emerging Womoz contributors, Mozilla believes in maintaining a healthy ratio in gender diversity, hence I’d like to motivate Women contributors to come forward and lead the communities. We already have some inspiring Womoz Leaders in Mozilla which surely act as inspiration to new generation of Womoz.
What is in your view the Mozilla Reps program’s biggest strength and weakness?
In my all these years as Mozilla Volunteer, I found the biggest strength of Mozilla Reps program is visibility and ease of communication. At many trouble instances I seek help from council,peers and mentors, and they always helped me by advising the best solutions to those issues. The generous supporting attitude is the biggest strength of this program.
Well, I think we need to focus on inactive reps, lack of activity is a prime concern as we have people who do have ample time for reps program so they might replace them and help us in maintaining consistent pace of activities.
Identify something that is currently not working well in the Mozilla Reps program and which you think could be easy to fix?
As I have already mentioned, Reps “inactivity” is a stumbling block in path of Mozilla Reps program, even mentors inactivity is now a concern, we need to identify root cause for this inactivity and we can fix it by either replacing the inactive reps with new fellows or revamp inactive members by helping them with their challenges.
What past achievement as a Rep or Mentor are you most proud of?
I consider myself fortunate to be part of multiple regional communities, I enjoyed putting foundations of communities in different regions and helping them to grow day by day, This is an amazing experience to learn from challenges of community building, The greatest achievement for me this year is revamping Mozilla Madhya Padesh community, I merged all sub-communities under one roof as MozMp. We have designed a roadmap for it and with team of amazing reps we achieved many milestones so far and become one of the most happening community in India where our contributors are marching in different functional areas like SuMo, L10n, AOA,Webmaker and many more. Its a proud moment for a mentor to see a community growing in such a great pace!
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 is first thing that drives me, being one of the earliest contributor and volunteer from community I have gained a variety of experiences in community building, driving initiatives and conflict resolution. I have worked with contributors of different countries and shared my opinions and suggestions with them. I am easily approachable to reps hence they usually find easy to communicate and share their thoughts with me. I am always open for healthy discussions and feedbacks to improve myself.
As a Mentor, what do you do to try to encourage your inactive Mentees to be active again?
The best thing worked so far for me is engaging inactive mentee in some task of his/her interest. The sense of attention to mentee would motivate them and also they enjoy being part of task that suits their interest.Also, following up with all mentees bring some great feedbacks which we may help in enhancing their productivity. I believe a mentor should appreciate his mentee on a public platform and make him understand that how special you are in Mozilla Reps program. Sense of responsibility always drive people to deliever best out of them.
Thanks,
Faisal