Reporting - How and Why?

Reps
#1

Hello Everyone,

We are moving from the Reps portal to Community Portal day by day, and in doing so, we want to make sure that we have tools and processes in place that enable us to fulfill our Reps role.

Reporting plays a significant role in our Reps life. As the new community portal doesn’t enable Reporting as we were used to, we would like to start the conversation on how we will accommodate Reporting in the future. To do so, we would like to ask you the following two questions:

  • How are you using reporting right now?
  • Why do you need reporting as a Rep?

With the above questions, we want to understand, “How reporting is serving you as a Rep?”

Just to give you an idea, for example, if you do a translation on Pontoon, you as a Rep, do you need that activity to be reported under the Reps program?

Shahbaz,
On behalf of the Council

1 Like
Reporting in the Community Portal
#2

How are you using reporting right now?
At this moment I think the tool in reps.mozilla very comfortable. A form to enter the events, meetings and activities carried out. I think it would be very important to maintain this functionality and maybe you can create a form on the community portal.

Why do you need to report as a representative?
It is very important to inform and show the work that a reps are doing in the local communities. There are many reps that are inactive or do not do much work, so it is good to know if they are available or even have enough time to devote to the program. its like to make a ping to their mentors.

"How reporting is serving you as a Rep?"
I think the reports serve as a ping to inform that a reps is active and doing activities, it also helps to know how significant is the participation in certain regions.

2 Likes
#3

I agree!

How are you using reporting right now?

I use it as a way to maintain contribution - to make sure that I remain active and demonstrating that within the community.

Why do you need to report as a representative?

If there is not a reporting mechanism, how can Reps themselves, but also staff, see who is inactive, active or core?

One way would be to see how many events and activities a Rep signs up to, but does not show what someone has actually done or achieved. I may be a new member of the team, but I think that it could be very possible to have an active Rep that is not doing any of those activities and still supporting a functional team as demonstrated by their reports.

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#4

I also agree!

Also, Reps have to report their activities to be considered active and to avoid getting the alumni status.

#5

I believe that Reporting is an important aspect of a Reps since it’s a direct reflection of the accountability that we agreed to take on as a Volunteer.

Right now, the Reps Mozilla reporting tool is fairly simple and helps me log my activities once in a while every week or two. Having a lot of activities makes me go there very often and that it’s very helpful to easily report on the events, meetings, activities, etc.

It’s important to support the Community and the reporting infrastructure helps us Reps keep the Council, the staff, the Mentors and the rest of the Reps up to date about the activities in our Regional Community and the work we are doing to support our Communities. It can be better intertwined with the Mentors structure and can help them understand these activities.

#6

I will ask instead Why a lot of people is not reporting. There are reps that do a lot of things but they don’t report what they do because they localize, do support, contribute with code con github. So basically is already tracked what they do and is time consuming the reporting system and duplicated.

Anyway I usually report in one day all the things I do in a month to waste less time or live reporting when I have specific calls.

I need reporting to show that my community is alive, for me report things like Recording on common voice in he report system is not right.
I think that should involve just the things as community empowerment and not personal things.

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#7

Currently my reports mostly consist of automatic reports through organizing or attending events on the portal. Up to about a year ago I’ve filed quite a few reports manually, but nowadays I only file them when I’m in the mood for it and think of it. I’ll elaborate further down.

I think others have already said what I wanted to say here in terms of why I need reporting in terms of the programmatic aspect (seeing who is active, seeing how the program is doing, etc).

Another aspect of why I personally want reporting is that I have a place to see how much work I’ve done for Mozilla. The Reps Portal is currently not helping me with that much, as there are activities that have not much to do with me being a Rep. And I do not want to create a manual report for everything I do, as most of my work can be tracked automatically. This does of course not apply to everyone, I know. Let me give you an example. I was working on the elections, and I did several things that would qualify for reports:

  • Meetings with Peers to define a few things -> mostly captured through the meeting on the portal
  • I created a timeline for the elections and filed a GitHub bug with it -> could be tracked automatically
  • I created a discourse post for it -> could be tracked automatically
  • I reviewed the voting page before Ioana saved it -> hard to track, but not sure if that even would need to be tracked TBH
#8
  • How are you using reporting right now?

I’m a Rep from San Jose, California. I find the current MozReps reporting tool very useful, especially because there is not active community in my area so all my contributions are remote or online which reduces the frequency of them. So I currently use reporting for even the simplest activities like when I attend a reps call or meetup with my mentor or when I contribute to projects, for example, CommonVoice that I can do online. Moreover, the current tool is so simple to use, does not take much time to report an activity.

  • Why do you need reporting as a Rep?
  • How reporting is serving you as a Rep?

Reporting enables me to showcase to my mentor as well as document these small number of activities for myself. It mainly helps me keep track my own progress, things I did and when which I can quickly convert into measurable metrics. It simultaneously maintains my active Reps status because it is quite difficult to be visible in an area where there’s no community presence.

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#9

The reporting tool on the Reps portal is really great, but it lacks a few things. For a new Rep it can be confusing with so many categories. If we could show what these categories mean on the portal itself, and not just wiki but the portal itself, it would make it easy for the Rep to understand which category best fits for their activity and help report in the proper category.
Apart from reporting it on the portal, I also try to write blogs for the events. I believe these blogs help other Mozillians better understand the activity/event, which the reports fail to do so and reach out to more Mozillians, since these blogs contains images and sometimes tweets as well.

Reporting has helped me keep a track of events and activities that I’ve been a part of. They have helped a bit in deciding on the metrics for the upcoming events. Apart from that, it also shows if someone is active or not.

Although this is an example, there are categories that ask if a Rep has made contribution to a particular project. Although it is good to have that, looking at the wider perspective, the focus of the Reps program is to mobilizing the community, hence I am not sure how such categories help.

#10

How are you using reporting right now?
Some record is automatically made by reporting system of Weekly Reps Call, I appreciate it so much. The link in notice e-mail and etherpad are very convenient.
My contributions to MDN are reported when I remind the reps portal reporting dashboard, sometimes two or three at once.
I manage to keep opening a tab for reps.portal in the same browser window when I work on MDN translation and/or review, it helps reminding me to report. But sometimes increasing tabs hide the reps.portal, I forgot to report on time.

Why do you need reporting as a Rep?
Mainly for my status to be judged whether active or inactive.
For myself the record helps to estimate my available time frame for contribution in the future referring the frequency of contribution done in the past.

#11

How are you using reporting right now?
Usually, It automatically reports when I joining a Reps call, organizing an event or participating in an event. But when things are not automatically recording, I have to enter manually like common voice or translation or support things. Sometimes I forgot to report. It is better if we have a way to track all the contributions since we have a single account through the new portal.

Why do you need reporting as a Rep?
This is the best way to identify how much I spend the time with Mozilla. This helps to self evaluate how I have done my part for the community. This helps for mentors to mentor their mentees to courage to contribute and guide them to achive organizational goals.

#12

Hi,
Reporting is a important aspect of keeping track of the activities of reps. But it is a duplicate system for reps who are doing a lot of work for i.e the Sumo or L10n communities.
Personally i try to make reports once a month about what i do on a weekly basis (pick one day of week to report while i work on it for the hole week a hour a day) and mark attended events on the portal so there will be a automatic report.

It would be nice if there would be a way to show the reports of your Sumo or Pontoon account on your reps profile so you don’t need to report “translated sumo article”

#13

I am glad I do not have to report every SUMO question I answer.