Improve the Reps Program - Please help us by driving change!

Hi everyone

Tldr - too long, didn’t read

The Council will be driving two topics in 2020. There are more than these topics to tackle though. We are looking for volunteers who want to drive other topics and work together with other Reps towards solutions for problems. If you’re not interested in driving any of these, please still have a look at the Discourse category from time to time to participate in upcoming discussions around these. For any of these topics, your participation in discussions will be crucial.

Background

We’ve just published the OKRs for the Reps Program for H1 2020. These include two main areas, but there are more topics to tackle! We will need all your help driving discussions and implementation around these. Anyone is encouraged to think about the following topics and coordinate a deep-dive towards implementation or improvement.

The topics are:

  • Reps Infrastructure
  • Mentors
  • Reps Onboarding (Tim Maks van de Broek has already made great progress on this one - more to come soon)
  • Community Growth and Activation

You can find more information including what isn’t working, and what the vision could be at All issues we have for 2019 - OKR draft for 2020 H1. Note that this was a working document, this doesn’t capture all issues and visions are brainstormed and do not reflect decisions.

These topics were surfaced before the last All Hands, but they are not exclusive. If there is anything else that needs solving, feel free to work on these as well using the framework below.

If you’re interested in driving forward any of these, please consider the following framework. These suggestions are meant to provide a guide on how to efficiently tackle issues and to make sure that the solution will fit the problem statement.

Leading a working group can also be a task split by several people and includes the following:

  • Encouraging others to provide feedback and their opinion
  • Ask for clarifications in a discussion if something is not clear
  • Keep the discussions going
  • It does not mean that you need to lead a meeting every week, all work can be done on Discourse!
  • It does not mean that you need to write a “Executive Summary” for the Reps Peers or Council every week - discussions on Discourse are open so that’s not needed

Framework

Some of you might remember the RepsNext initiative we did a few years ago. Every Council member was leading a specific group and worked with other Reps on solution finding and implementation. We want to take this spirit and bring it even further. This time we want all Reps to be able to drive forward certain topics, and of course Council members, as well as Peers, will help in discussions.

Finalizing the problem statement and setting a goal

The initial working document mentions quite a few “what is not working” statements per topic. These might not be current or complete yet. The first step is to finalize the problem statements through discussions. You can read more about Problem Statements here: http://www.ceptara.com/blog/how-to-write-problem-statement

We recommend creating a Discourse post for coordination, so anyone can jump in and mention their problems. An anonymous way of providing problems to consider might also be a good way, as long as they eventually are posted to the Discourse post as well.

Brainstorming solutions/experiments

Once you have one or multiple Problem Statements defined and agreed upon, we know what we need to solve. Any problem can possibly be solved using different mechanisms, which one fits the Reps program best though? This phase tackles this question.

Also, note that for many solutions we probably won’t know if it’s effective, so consider running an experiment to validate any solutions. If it doesn’t work, let’s experiment with another idea until we find the solution that works.

Periodic status updates

To make sure that feedback is gathered regularly from as many Reps as possible, consider posting a status update in a separate Discourse post from time to time. This allows anyone not to follow every single discussion post to still be informed about your work. Maybe this will spark some interest as well.

Meetings

While most of these tasks can be done through Discourse, sometimes it might be more efficient to have a call. This is completely okay, but please consider the following: the meeting time will not fit everyone, so please document any discussions and outcomes in a Discourse post.

We hope that many Reps would like to help out with this! If you have any suggestions, ideas or questions, please comment here and we will give our best to address these.

Thanks

Michael

on behalf of the Reps Peers and Council

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Admit it, the mention of RepsNext was for me :joy:

Anyway I am in!

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I’m onboard, Mister Michael :blush:

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@Mte90 @rtsayles happy to hear you’re interested! Are you interested in any specific topic? Would you like to lead a topic? To make this work this needs to be driven by Mozillians and Reps, so we (Peers and Council) won’t give you orders on what to work on :wink:

Edit: it’s also great to start a Discourse post with a rough idea and go from there!

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I would like to work on Communication, Recognition criteria or Activity tracking that were topics that I tried to move on when I was in the council :slight_smile:

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I am in the Onboarding Reps group and I’d like to keep working in that area.
I’d also like to discuss the time of the weekly reps meeting, quite impossible for LATAM countries and surely other countries as well.
Regards, Gabriela

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To clarify what leading a working group includes, I’ve added the following paragraph to the original post:

That’s great! I’d suggest leading one group per person, to make sure the workload doesn’t get too high and others can lead working groups as well. However participation in all discussions are encouraged! :slight_smile: Do you want to take one of these topics and start a problem statement thread?

I personally think it would be great if somebody who can’t regularly join the Reps Call would tackle that, indeed! Do you want to create a post to gather exact problem statements and lead that?

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I would like to but I don’t think I have enough free time to do it though.

Yeah of course, mine was just a list to see if someone is interested so I can work on something else.

It isn’t a problem, just define the first topic :joy:

Just to be clear, I won’t tell you what to do :wink: personally I think something around communication on the Reps program might be interesting. Note that communication of Mozilla’s direction is already a goal driven by Council. But I think there are also Reps internal communication issues to be explored. And maybe also communication towards Mozillians in general?

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I’m delighted with this step, I just want to appreciate this decision before moving ahead. Reps responsibilities seemed a bit disarrayed to me moving forward and I think I talked about this in the Reps Feedback form as well. This certainly will help, kudos! :partying_face:

I’m definitely interested in working on the topic, Mentors. I love to mentor students and whosoever needs help and I was even a Mentor for Mozilla Open Leaders for three Cohorts, and I think I can use that experience to contribute here.

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Any plans of reviving the support to Student organizations and groups? Something similar to what was the Firefox Student Ambassadors program?

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What is the best description those two topics? I obviously get Community Growth, but not so sure about the others ones. Please clarify :smiley:

Reps Onboarding: anything related to how Reps are being added to the program. This can range from the application process to learning how the program works, to going through the onboarding period to become an official Mozilla Rep.

Community Growth and Activation: the activation part in here refers to initaitives that activate the community to contribute to Mozilla. One such effort for example is Campaigns and Activities on https://community.mozilla.org/.

Hope that helps :slight_smile:

Hey Michael! :wave:

Any updates here? Anything we can help with?
We haven’t heard back still.

What exactly would you have liked to hear back?

I was wondering:
a. If anyone has started a topic. A reply here for those who had shown interest around that would’ve been nice.
b. The problem statement has to be agreed upon by? The Peers? The Council? The Reps?

See https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/reps for the recent topics. Mentioning those here might be nice, but kinda hard to track.

My hope is that topics being worked on will get traction by multiple Reps trying to work on something that will benefit all. Therefore we won’t require any sign-off, but we will certainly post opinions and tips on the topics once they come up. The whole point of this is to have a way for Reps to step up and lead improvement, without any interaction needed of groups that have a limited amount of time available. I personally will definitely comment on all resulting Discourse posts to give my feedback.