Mission Driven Mozillians - Leadership Principle 4

Mozillians
#1

This is the discussion section for Mozilla’s Volunteer Leadership Principles & Practices. Please read the original post before participating.

Principles 4. Leadership should be diverse & inclusive

  • Leaders should strive to include diverse voices and groups
  • Mozilla should enforce the Community Participation Guidelines consistently and strictly
  • Roles should be transparent and visible so that people know what opportunities are available to them and the expectations of them
  • Leadership pathways should explicitly consider inclusion dimensions (i.e. time, language, bandwidth, cultural norms)

Please respond to the following question:

What would implementation of this principle & practices look like in your community or area?

Here are a few more questions to help you think about implementation:

  • How do we ensure leadership roles are available to diverse groups?
  • How can we make Community Participation Guidelines a bigger part of our culture?
  • How can we make it easier for everyone to know what opportunities are available to them?

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Mission Driven Mozillians - Volunteer Leadership Principles & Practices
#2

I wonder if this is in general any different from the second principle. I do not know if there are problems in these areas, but the questions are the same here and in the second principle. What I understand is you want to define how to communicate leadership positions to people (either it is to have more leaders or diverse leaders).

#3

Yes, probably related with distributed leadership, but in this case going deeper into diversity and inclusion where there are other dimensions to have in consideration to ensure it.

How do you see this principle and practices being applied to your community/area? What would be different?

#4

In small groups, like the local Czech community is, I think having a visible list of areas or activities the team is involved in is enough. If someone is interested in taking part in any of them, it won’t be hard to communicate who is currently leading the initiative in the specific area.

The list could be in a form of page on a website, living document or pad accessible by everyone in the group, Trello or Waffle.io dashboard, GitHub issues, maybe even dedicated Discourse sub-forum with one thread per activity in progress or area to track open questions or tasks. I can imagine anything where you can quickly post updates, feedback, questions to the topic, and also see the names who is involved either in the activity or discussion.

For larger groups, there should be probably a dedicated place to list the leaders, what they do and are, and ways how to contact them. I can imagine in larger groups people know each other less and having some introduction of all the leaders, so they are recognized as people and not directors sitting in an upper floor.

A question is what about a case when the community does not actually meet online, but mostly having meetups once a time, or just meet each other in their common lives.

#5

Here are some thoughts on the subject:

  • Leaders should strive to include diverse voices and groups

Could the Diversity & Inclusion team keep leading the charge and provide best practices on how this can be done, with the leaders having to compile and then complete a checklist based on the profile of their respective community? Different communities may struggle less or more with this challenge.

  • Mozilla should enforce the Community Participation Guidelines consistently and strictly

Kinda goes without saying, but cannot be left unsaid lest we stumble.

  • Roles should be transparent and visible so that people know what opportunities are available to them and the expectations of them
  • Leadership pathways should explicitly consider inclusion dimensions (i.e. time, language, bandwidth, cultural norms)

This sounds like a gargantuan task to pull off with potentially huge payoffs in the future for anyone interested in such pathways, anywhere. Another good starting point for a “leadership manifesto” applicable across Mozilla?

  • How do we ensure leadership roles are available to diverse groups?

By raising awareness of vacancies/needs for those roles existing, across the board - and ensuring that as few as possible of them (ideally: zero) are in direct contradiction to our Participation Community Guidelines. On the other hand, if a role is geo-specific (e.g. coordinating a community in location X or Y), we’ll definitely go against the “Geographic location” neutrality principle from the Community Participation Guidelines :confused:

  • How can we make Community Participation Guidelines a bigger part of our culture?

As boring and obvious as it sounds - keep talking about them, refreshing people’s memories about their existence, make them into a pledge of sorts for Mozillians old & new. Actively recognize that we adhere to them and keep an eye out for those who don’t. Train all leadership on diversity & inclusion and be prepared to have tough chats about the validity and significance of these values with people who may want to challenge them.

Just as an aside: it’s a bit funny that when I sign into some contribution-related (or community owned) sites at Mozilla, I do not get a reminder about Community Participation Guidelines under the login/password field or anywhere else that’s prominent enough for me to be reminded that I’m in a space that respects and believes in those guidelines.

  • How can we make it easier for everyone to know what opportunities are available to them?

Perhaps use a central, frequently visited place (mozillians.org? careers.mozilla.org?) to advertise such positions to Mozillians? If pretty standardized, these opportunities could be localized.

#6

Something that I have recomended before is a kind of “app store” type approach, where a team could say that they need “x” number of l10n contributors for a locale and people can read a bit more about what is involved and get connected to the team involved.

This would help contributors to get involved with projects and areas of contribution, without a team getting swamped by too many people applying.

#7

On this one, I absolutely agree. Some of the challenges I see in the SUMO community implementing this are the following:

How are we defining diverse if our leadership and valued users want to remain anonymous?
I can add them as ‘unidentifiable group’, and encourage them equally to have a voice in discussions if they wish to engage.

I see a challenge in the interpretation of the Community Principle and Guidelines consistently. I think we need to be better at the ‘unified Mozilla Community voice’.

For example, as a leader of the Social Support program, when I work with other communities more work is created for me each time a campaign is ran by the Advocate team or another team in Marketing, as the queue of conversations that we triage gets larger if I cannot create a rule that excludes those from the Social Support Inbox in the Reply tool. The need for the signatures from users replying with official @firefox and other local accounts in the tool separates one program from the other. If a user from one social program participates in both, the tasks and goals are different in both programs. The Participation Guidelines say to have good manners and to remember the impact of their contributions, my expectations as a leader are skewed when two communities using the @firefox handle have different goals. In summary consistency is a big problem I face across Mozilla communities as well as in my own.

User support is different in each language. If we focus and prioritize English speaking threads, this helps increase quality, but makes this ideal flawed. In the support forums there are about 10 forums that I can say that support.mozilla.org can enforce the guidelines, outside of that it becomes difficult. Partnerships with leadership in those external support communities become really important, self-sufficient communities are going to become very important, as Vesper mentioned to me. I can see this be a big challenge.

Time - free time
Language - limited to leadership in those locales
Bandwidth - limited
Cultural Norms - experts may be left guessing, how do we hold people accountable in an english forum of culturally diverse users?

These I don’t think we can get very specific and agree to leave this to the community leader of a region if it is outside of the mozilla.org domain. What responsibilities do you plan to enforce with these roles?

#8

You would need to ensure the universe of Mozillian is diverse enough to begin with, an herculean task on its own. End even then, what if you leave out a great “leader” for not being “diverse” enough?

I feel like @vesper is into something on making these more prominent into Mozilla login pages. What about making these visible whenever users sign up at https://accounts.firefox.com/ or making it appear on the Firefox “What’s new” page of an upcoming version https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/57.0/whatsnew/ or a snippet at https://snippets.mozilla.com/ Firefox users are a huge part of the community after all, right?
/cc @lshapiro before I forget :wink:

Post them all her in Discourse in a special category maybe?

#9

Mission Driven Mozillians - Volunteer Leadership Principles & Practices

The whole guidelines framework gives scope only to people who are good at English, to participate in the discussion and share their opinions.

All the guidelines framed are designed ONLY by people who know English will be implemented to all other communities with different languages across the globe.

The whole discussion about diversity is a discussion about diveristy within English community.

Very little efforts to localization are put on only for the purpose of localizing Mozilla products so that the market increases, but almost no effort in community engagement and welcoming communities other than English.

Communities are unique with their language. The whole program is being planned as if it is in search of English speakers across the globe, and people from other languages are only restricted to l10n.

It is structurally defective by design that, it silences voices from many other language communities and many leaders go unnoticed just because they don’t communicate in English.

#10

We might ensure that leadership roles are available to diverse groups by first knowing what are the diverse groups in a certain community, llike for example different languages, gender, geography location…One ce know who they are, when making votes for leader we try to represent each of them but taking into account capabilities as for one role if we have the choice between two, we consider who are representing existing roles already for our choice

To ensure everyone is aware of it, why not making like an agreement we accept electronically, when we join as Mozillian for example and doing periodic reminders

Roles can be defined in a kind of organizational chart and roadmaps can maybe be defined based on these roles and on Mozillian profile, based on his role the possible roadmaps can be displayed to him. If opportunities come up (like someone who left or changed), emails could be sent to possible candidates maybe ?