Improving Program visibility and accountability

Reps
#1

This topic was created because the previous topic was too much for people to go through.

A summary of the questions and answers provided

A couple of questions are included in the thread about improving application & onboarding and budget system.

What are the questions that are still open?

Leaving this empty because rhetorical questions are being considered as literal questions by the people who are responding. Converting most of the questions into problems because the questions are actually about problems.

What are the problems that we want to solve?

Lack of anonymous feedback sharing mechanism about the reps program

With no invitation for anonymous feedback, community members are not able to give honest feedback about the reps program to anyone. There are people who don’t want to speak up because they are scared it will affect their reps application.

Lack of accountability to community

  • Reps are accountable to reps-council and mentors only.
  • The goals/plans/vision of reps aren’t visible to the community.
  • There is lack of clarity in the role/duties of individual reps in the community which makes it impossible for the community to hold them accountable to anything. This also could be because the role of reps aren’t visible.
Feedback regarding the reps program in India
#2

I think anonymous feedback is a great idea, but it may lead to false feedback.
Solution: Feedback is not anonymous, but it is displayed without revealing the identity of the person.

I agree with this.

#3

@nukeador, @lucyeoh - is the feedback in this thread being considered? If they’re irrelevant, please let me know so that I can restate the relevance.

#4

This depends how should be made, feedback about Reps behavior or about the program itself?

In the first case it is something that is not clear now in the program, because right now you can reach the council but is not anonymous to ask more questions and get details usually for conflicts management.
It’s true that people don’t leave feedback or join discussions on discourse public because they are afraid of their names showed.
I can say that because when I started my thread about open discussion:

People thrusted me as ex Reps council member and talked with me privately about those and when I asked to write public they prefer to avoid their names disclosed.
I think that is not a Reps issue but inside the mozilla volunteer community and the Reps program as representative should do something for that.

This is something that when I was in the council was for me the first point. I renewed the rules for onboarding and also for mentors, removed a lot of mentors as their role for inactivity and pushed to move inactive reps as alumni. This now is a tasks that others are managing and moving on, maybe slow for my standards (but I have high standards about task’s speed) but still going on.

Right now the accountability in the program is not something that can be trusted at 100% because the only reference is the portal and they (reps) are not updating but not cover a lot of things, like you said.

Honestly the big problem for me is that OKR in the council changes at every All Hands and doesn’t represent the real needs of the whole community but only of the council members and the reps at All Hands that join the discussions.
There was a lot of OKR never finished that was important but the priority changed so is difficult to move on a program with few people doing things, when the council members are doing things (basically if a council member miss 3 weekly call in a row there are no updates about what they are doing, in my experience).

After my leaving few things are changed, now the council notes are published again, the OKR are introduced better on discourse and so on.

#5

I think feedback is being discussed here in the open, so other people will chime in, including Council, who is the accountable body.

@couci Do we know if someone from the council is owing this topic?

#6

@nukeador, @lucyeoh, @couci is the feedback in this thread being considered? If they’re irrelevant, please let me know so that I can restate the relevance

@fminelli you may be interested in some of these perhaps? (Welcome, BTW)

#7

Hey Akshay - the feedback is definitely being considered, as is your proposal. The Reps will be reviewing it in 2020 once the end of year work around OKRs is complete.

In 2020 someone a Rep be made accountable for the anonymous feedback working project. If you have ideas about good anonymous feedback collection processes and have time to put together some ideas and research around different systems that would be a great way to help move this forward and help this project hit the ground running in the new year.

#8

You know what would be another great way to move this forward? Actually accepting there are problems in the reps program and owning it up.