Foundations of Mozilla - Whiteboard

Mozillians
#1

In the last few days I have interviewed a number of people across Mozilla, asking what the “Skills, Knowledge and Attitudes” that can inform a basic model basic for this community leadership curriculum. The scope of interviews was purposely diverse to include as many perspectives as purpose : Community leaders, emerging leaders, project leads, technical/non-technical/ as well as people who have been developing educational resources for community in other areas.

I’ve taken a first step to now categorize much of that feedback under topics, and would love feedback, on what skills, knowledge, attitudes you think we may be missing, or if you disagree with sorting, or identified themes. Throw it at me please!

You can respond here, or more preferably in the Github issue: https://github.com/mozilla/participation-org/issues/81

Blue Post-its = Skills
Pink Post-its = Knowledge
Green Post-its = Attitude

Thanks!

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#2

Very cool draft so far!

I’d expect to see a lot of green post-its under communication. The one I’d add would be labeled “collaborative.” It’s the difference between actively trying to see someone’s point of view and expecting them to convince you of their point of view. Actually it looks like all of the things currently categorized under communication are thinking about outward communication, ie broadcast, and not inter-communication. If we do want to focus specifically on broadcasting information a different label might be more descriptive.

I see the post-it labeled “Servant Leader” and I would call it “Facilitator” but maybe there is a nuanced difference? Also, I’m curious why mentorship is a different category than managing/helping people now that I take another look. Maybe you want to call “managing” “leadership?” Mentorship being more focused on helping people get done what they want to get done, and leadership being how to get people to follow you on your ideas or responsibilities. Two sides of the same coin, of course.

#3

Kensie,

Thank you so much for this fantastic feedback, I cobbled this together after my interviews, and very much needs more eyes and lots of questions to bring it.

  • You’re right about communication category appearing outward, and that’s a great flag, will change that.
  • When I did this I tried to keep the language of people I spoke to, so I didn’t lose their voice and intent: thus ‘Servant Leader’,which was explained to me as someone who leads in service of the things other people need to be successful. Are there other words for that?
  • On mentorship vrs managing/helping people, this might be my own bias, and I am happy to be called on it - that there is a deeper human connection in mentorship than the mechanics of moving people towards success.
  • Managing could = leadership, I suppose I felt that because we were defining leadership attributes, saying leader was redundant. maybe it’s OK? More words - we need our thesaurus! Maybe we just do that…

I am about to drive home and will think on that - I will repost a new version tomorrow based on your (and hopefully others feedback). This is great, thanks so much.

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#4

Update and Request for Feedback

Since last week, I took everyone’s feedback (captured in the first whiteboard) , stepped back and identified what I thought were three separate buckets, and worked on defining those:

This helped me think more deeply about knowledge, skills and attitudes, which I was more intentional about this round. And then I left the computer walked, drove home, walked some more talking out loud came up with a first draft of what I think the Foundations of Mozilla ‘for Community Leadership’ curriculum might be emerging as (with brief descriptions)

Activating: Activating people, making ideas real, generating excitement, unblocking, inspiring
Connecting: People to projects, people to each other, bridges between communities, people to Mozilla, energy to ideas
Empowering: Diversity & Inclusiveness, mentoring, teaching, conflict resolution, me/myself/i
Building: Community, planning, structuring, iterating, tools, evangelism,
Sharing: Open practices, publishing, writing, social media, story telling

Would super, extra love your thoughts and feedback.

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#5

I would say the empowering heading needs an explicit section called “Saying Yes.” I think this is really the biggest stumbling block to empowerment at Mozilla. People are afraid to say Yes to ideas, or they think it’s their job to say no and guide people to existing ideas.

I was watching Mr. Selfridge on Netflix, and the character comes across as a little eccentric, he’s always giving his employees an enthusiastic “yes” when they come up with bold ideas. Until the episode where he gently said no to someone. I realized that the difference between the times he said yes, and the time he said no, was how confident the person making the suggestion felt. If his employees had an idea they were passionate and confident about, he trusted them to follow it through. Some clips from these scenes would be great examples of what empowerment looks like!

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#6

If I might reframe these three buckets (to make sure I understand them and the intentions behind them):

  • Mozilla 101 is all about onboarding and shared context
  • ‘Lens of Empowerment’ - Building Bridges for People is all about the meta-work of giving people tools but also aligning with our values
  • Impact Planning for Community Leadership is about doing the front-line and mission critical work.

Am I understanding this right?

In the empowerment section, I feel like there may be something missing on our relationship with tools (frameworks for collaboration, participation infrastructure, etc) as well as human-centered design practices. Discussion on how our relationships with each other can lead to empowerment without acknowledging how technical/cultural infrastructure frees and/or limits our abilities to relate paints an incomplete landscape of empowerment opportunities and risk… and creating environment where non-technical/expert contribution to evolving tools and processes is important so that they continue to serve us rather than us serving them.

#7

here is the slide deck.

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#8

Hi Lyre,

I wouldn’t say Mozilla 101 is all about onboarding, because in a way this is a living evolving set of knowledge. Onboarding is a piece, but continued relevance and alignment, and right to challenge is as well.

Lens of Empowerment - focused on the human side of what helps us move forward, feel supported, feel understood, feel informed, valued and empowered and then yes tools can further enable that sense of agency.

Impact Planning - I would say it’s more about the mechanics of enabling success while the previous was more about human. At least this is how it is currently emerging to me.

I don’t think these buckets are quality yet, but I see them as places we draw-on based on the primary ethos of workshops we build. For example. A workshop on Working Open would draw more heavily from Lens of Empowerment attributes, while ‘Building Bridges between Communities’ might draw more heavily from Impact Planning. So there is an emphasis, or primary, and then a subset informed by the foundations.

If this make sense, I am working on the taxonomy of these this week, including how people can contribute to their evolution. https://github.com/mozilla/participation-org/issues/120 So thanks for the feedback (and keep it coming), this won’t be nearly as good without you.

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#9

It makes sense. Definitely like the idea of Mozilla 101 as more of a grounding we can all revisit.

What’s the relationship between these buckets and the five proposed themes in the last slide of the deck?

#10

I should note this is starting to feel like the ‘Mozilla Literacy Map’ I’ve been wanting! :smiley:

#11

Currently thinking in this workflow. Each of the 5 will have associated workshops

  1. Identify workshop primary bucket (although coming up with a new word than bucket) , so this is one of the 3.f
  2. From the primary bucket inform the attributes that are primary .
  3. For each of the other 4, identify what could be called a secondary attribute /

So we end up with a workshops listed under each with draw on primary ethos/pathos from one of the 3 buckets, but with informed pieces representing all 5 foundations. In the end this can be more like a recipe with building blocks/units

I’ll have the language sorted soon.

On web literacy map - I realized over the weekend that build and connect are identified there as well (although connect became participate). I think that’s good.

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#12

Latest - for feedback (sorry I had to do a weird screenshot thing to avoid overload of content. Thanks for your feedback in the last round, it helped a lot.

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#13

I think Empower is way too ethereal, and mostly fits under ignite. This is important to me because this word is used a lot around Mozilla, and I am not sure enough people understand the practical implications of empowering someone. In ignite you mention “removing a blocker for a person…mechanisms that help a community project iterate forward” these are really the “nut” of empower.

Empowering means to give power to someone, not just to allow them to take it. It isn’t just about making someone feel like they could be powerful (this is ignite, igniting the passion and confidence within a person) empowering them is actually giving them the resources and authority they need to accomplish something.

Mozilla is very good at telling volunteers “hey if you have a great idea, go with it, we’d love to see it!” and what it needs to get better at is recognizing when someone actually needs something other than encouragement, or when you’re encouraging someone, but then blocking them taking actual action at the same time.

Does someone want to help with bug triage? Empowering them to do that isn’t just making them feel welcome, it’s giving them Editbugs. Does someone want to contribute design? Empowering them is asking them to take a shot at the logo a team needs and not hiring an outside design firm in the mean time.

Funnily for a couple of the others, I feel like trying to turn them into prose made the meaning less clear than just the key words from the last iteration. I think maybe it’s the introduction words to each section. If they’re meant to be displayed in a chart like this, then I’d leave out the introductions and just get right to the point, and make sure the point is complete. The introductory sentences can be used as a primer above such a chart. Eg. we don’t need to know Essential Mozilla used to be called Mozilla 101, it just need to be clear what Essential Mozilla is. If it’s informative to know it used to be called Mozilla 101 then maybe it should still be called Mozilla 101 :wink:

#14

Thanks Kensie

So empower is derived from ‘Diversity, Mentoring, Me/Myself/I (agency), Teaching/Coaching’ which has quite a broad scope beyond just giving power. I wonder if there is a better word than Empower? Perhaps it’s Agency.
as for prose, I am very prose-prone, so that’s a cue to me to work on that a bit more (and already have since this). I doubt they will be displayed in a chart however.

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#15

Well I think you’re right that those are all things that help empower people, they are ways you can give power to someone. The point of diversity and mentorship is to get the end result of seeing people accomplish things. My opinion is that it wouldn’t take away from those things to call out the end goal as helping people accomplish something, as opposed to helping them “feel” like they can accomplish something.

Ignite does cover some of those aspects as well so perhaps the right way forward is to acknowledge that things got regrouped between the coloured squares and these charts?

#16

I concur with @majken on the empower piece. As I was reading her post, my thought was that the description points to something like ‘distributed authority’ but I think that’s a bit narrower than you’re aiming for.

Agency is especially interesting to me because the tip of Mozilla’s spear (ax? chainsaw?) is called a user agent… but we don’t think about agency within our culture enough which can make it difficult to recognize when technology and/or processes are empowering or disempowering. And it starts at the top with the manifesto. This post on the Mozilla Advocacy discourse succinctly makes this point I think: https://discourse.mozilla-advocacy.org/t/mozilla-manifesto/297/1

I’m not sure if agency is the right heading for this section, but I do think we need a deeper internalized understanding of agency across Mozilla… both in terms of empowering end users, but also ourselves as individual agents supporting each other (because individual agency and collective agency are inexorably linked) to make things happen.

I take that first sentence in the previous paragraph back. I think ‘agency’ is exactly what’s needed here, and we should totally be explicit about how Firefox isn’t the only thing at Mozilla we need human-centered design and intersectional perspectives for to inform its/their realization.

#17

As a side note, it’s interesting to hear that ‘empowerment’ is always talked about at Mozilla when at the same time we never talk about power and power imbalances. Empowerment can’t happen if we don’t first acknowledge who has power and who/what they have power over… and then as @majken points out, figure out ways for those with power to give some up so we can gain greater collective power. This doesn’t happen at Mozilla, and it needs to.

#18

Apologies for the multiposting, but I keep thinking of things :smile:

Regarding the other things, I love that ‘Ignite’ is on brand. ‘Connect’ and ‘Open’ feel very Mozilla as well. ‘Empower’ reminds me of Thunderbird, and I have no idea how ‘Agency’ might be depicted alternatively. Maybe people holding hands? (The old Ubuntu logo graphics come to mind…)

As for ‘Essential Mozilla’, you use the word foundation a few times… so why not name it something a tad more bold: ‘Mozilla Foundations’ :slight_smile:

#19

Not really a side note – pretty central.

Here’s a few of my favorite, practical resources on the subject of power-over and power-to:
http://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/expressions-of-power/

http://www.powercube.net/analyse-power/understanding-power/

http://p2pfoundation.net/Power-To_vs_Power-Over

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#20

Thanks again you guys, all this feedback continues to help. I’ve moved
on already from this, and perhaps better to follow along and add comments
there. Lyre, I think your point about aknowledging who has power is
important, but also what power we may be holding onto that we should let go.

link to current work.