[IMPORTANT] ⚠️ Council Elections - Spring 2019 - Nominee Q&A

Reps
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Hi Reps, I’m Irvin, the current Council member that seek to be re-electioned.

Here I had collect some of my previous works as member of Council in this article,

You can also check my last year’s election Q&A and video here,

Here is my answer to the questions. Some of them may be the same answer as a year ago, and some would be difference according to my previous year’s experience as Council member.

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

  • Strength - Diverse global communities that include people with different abilities, culture-background, experiences, and interests.

    We are a diverse community formed together to fight for the same goal - internet’s health and opportunity. This enable us to discuss, plan, work, and review in many different point of views. This prevent us from falling into single voice scenario.

    Whenever anything is broken inside the program, there are always someone also from Reps can point it out and urge us to fix it together.

  • Weakness - Lack of resources (time of volunteer & full-time staff) to keep engaging and motivating a long-time participation. We’re losing motivate with the time pass while people leave the program. Some people still contribute, with or without Rep program seems less different nowadays.

Identify something that is currently not working well in the Mozilla Reps program and which you think could be easy to fix. How would you approach a possible fix?

  • Report system is not working well

    It’s difficult to tell if a Rep is an active contributor or not from personal profile page (eg., https://reps.mozilla.org/u/irvin/ ) because people don’t report or report less.

    That prevent us from knowing how many Rep are still active. It’s hard to evaluate the current status of Rep program if we don’t know the accurate numbers.

    Perhaps that’s because report procedure is frustrated that need to choose from 3 lists of activities, initiative and contribution area. Many options are outdated and feel not easy to suggest or remove some categories from the list.

    My solution is,

    • periodic check with those Rep who are not active with the help of new in-active status dashboard. (I’d been work for this for a while, check GitHub issue #345, #348, #362, #375)

    • Encourage people to keep discuss and suggest new options for columns in event report on discourse (which also WIP at here)

  • BTW, I still feel event check-in system is not working well, as in my previous year’s answer. I may able to start dealing with it in my next term.

What are the top three issues you want the Council to address in case you get elected? Why? How would you approach these issues?

  1. After Firefox OS / Webmaker period, some Rep feel less motivated due to lack of projects to work. My solution is, help Rep find next focus with the info from weekly tl;dr newsletter that can help them get closer with Mozilla-verse, raise motivation of Rep by encourage them to take the mentoring role of local volunteer community to work on new projects.

  2. Rep is less visible in Mozilla-verse. My solution is help Rep who doing well to be more visible with Mozillian of Month campaign. Help Mozillian to learn about them and their following local volunteers.

How do you believe you can support regional community health? - Can this be applied to Reps program too?

  • As a member of really-old local community (formed before Firefox 1.0), I think we connecting East-Asia region community pretty well. We keep supporting other community that has similar background, culture and language by sharing our experience and help bridge resources.

  • Rep as a leadership role of mission driven Mozillian, we should encourage all rep to help mentoring local community volunteer and bridge cross-region communities to share the experience.

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

  • I had been in rep program from the beginning since 2012. I’m an experienced Mozillians participating in both regional and global community for more than 15 years. I had seen the beginning of the project and it’s evolving. I know the problems, weakness, and strength of Mozilla.

  • I know the challenge to grows the community from its birth. I can help ease the difficult of local rep and community.

Which of your contributions from the past 18 months had the biggest impact on the Reps program on a programmatic level?

Which past achievement as a Rep would you tell your best non-Mozilla friend about?

  • I had been voted as “the most influencer” of Mozilla Summit 2013 (SFO venue).

  • I had engaging/speaking to thousands of students, volunteers and users, tell them a little about Mozilla, and help them as a rep.

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