Reps portal decommission, move to the Community Portal and reporting

Reps
#1

Dear Reps,

We have finalized the date for decommissioning of the Reps portal. In this post I hope to give some clarification on how the move is going to happen, how the data in the Reps Portal will be saved, and how we are going to do reporting going forward. We are looking for suggestions and feedback on how we can do reporting activities, so please comment in this thread with your ideas.

The Reps Portal will be decommissioned by the end of the July. The portal has been archived by Irvin and Michael and will be accessible here: https://mozilla.github.io/reps-archive/. The final update of the Reps Portal archive will be done immediately after the 20 of July. That means that any changes made on the website after the 20th of July will not be preserved in the archive.

Reporting in the portal:

As we discussed in the Reps Call on the 9th of July, it is possible to do some reporting in the Community Portal, enough that we feel confident in shutting down the Reps Portal.

However, the reporting of certain other activities in the Community Portal is not possible. For this reason we are asking for your help. Please suggest how you think we could carry out reporting going forward. We welcome suggestions both for temporary or long term solutions.

Looking at a Reps profile it is possible to see:

  • The Reps Groups they are part of: e.g. Reps, Reps Resources, Reps Mentors, Reps review….etc.
  • The local groups they participate in
  • The campaigns they participated in
  • The events they organized
  • The events they attended
  • Some metrics on overall reps participation (website administrators will be able to obtain those)

What is not possible to see:

  • Supporting other reps (primarily mentorship activities)
  • Reps’ working groups activities that take place outside meetings

Concerning mentorship activities: we are working to build and up-to-date spreadsheet that indicates who is a person mentor/mentee. So please here focus on advice on how to report specifically mentorship activities.

Please help us out by suggesting a solution for how we can do reporting by the 30 of July. Thank you for all your help!

Francesca

Please note: Reps groups in the community portal (reps, reps resources, reps mentors etc.). are closed groups so you cannot join them by yourself. If you have not done so yet, please take the following actions as soon as possible.

  1. Create a community portal profile.
  2. Once you have created the profile, put your username in this table near your name

Once you have done so, a community manager will proceed to put you in the appropriate reps group.

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Reporting in the Community Portal
Reporting on your role as a community coordinator
Resoconto Call Reps
#2
#3

Great News and I’m very happy to see some changes!

BTW, how can we measure and report our impact, our results with our other duties activties as Planning, defining strategies and local organization of the local communities in the new portal?

Our role it is changed during all those years and now something that we can do locally is this type of activities…

Something is changed again? :slight_smile:

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#4

I already exposed what I think on Matrix but write also here is right to keep the discussion moving on.

Honestly I don’t like the workflow of this decision, I mean we are deprecating the tool and in the meantime we are asking to find a way to track what reps does.

It is like we drop this connectivity provider on 29 and in the meantime we will find an alternative.
This not ensure the connectivity every day.

On the point exposed by @edovio, I think that this will enforce the point of view that is not important the accountability inside the reps program, because we are just allowing now events but all the tasks to organize an event are not activities themself as example? Or activities like speak to a journalist, organize a call for marketing plans of the community, doing mentorship to a volunteer?

I remember that is a pain point define what is an activity in the program, but this plan without a real alternative before the date is kind of bad planning.

With this decommission what is the purpose of the reps program? Just get swab/budget? Because everyone can create events in the portal now, so I don’t see a future for the program.

And it is talking someone that contributed as developer to the portal but also a Reps Council member for 2 years.

#5

May I suggest to add an “other” category at least , then based on reports you can decide to create new category, and other option is to let users add some tags to activtiy reports, then it will evolve more organically.

Meanwhile something is ready I am considering to use my wiki page to list newer activities, would this be helpful ? https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Rzr

#6

HI Edoardo, this is for sure the kind of activities we want to capture, but that we cannot capture in the portal. That is why we are asking for some suggestions on how we can capture them :smile: . I would be very happy to start a discussion here on the best way to capture these activities, so that we can set up a system as soon as possible.

#7

Hi Daniele, I am sorry that you do not like the workflow of this decision. However, you can definitively put a call or meeting within your local/functional community to organize future activities as an event in the portal. For example, the Reps Council Meetings are all put as events in the portal, as are all Reps Calls. Mentorship activities, on the other hand, are not captured. We do want to capture those, and we are asking for your input on how to do that.

#8

Hi, thank you very much for the suggestion! It could be an idea to capture the activities in a different site (maybe not necessarily the wiki) and then link to the profile, I would like to know what others think of this idea :slight_smile:

#9

I am sorry but I completely agree with Danielle! I don’t like this at all and I also wonder about the future of the program!
Is the program just about events and requiring swag? I don’t think so!
There will be lots of Rep’s activities that will be impossible to report!

I like @rzr’s idea: adding an “other” category. Then it should be possible to report whatever Reps need to report to avoid being considered inactive and therefore “alumni”.

Wiki pages could be good too, but how would they acquire visibility in the Reps world?

#10

Hi Gabriela, the move to the portal does not mean that reps program is only focused on organizing events. Furthermore, an event in the community portal can have quite a broad meaning. Many of the community activities that reps undertake as community coordinator can be captured in the portal (e.g. meeting with core members of your community, contribution to working groups). But you are right, there are some activities that we are not capturing at the moment.

@rzr could you give us some details on your idea to add an “other” category. Are you talking about the tags on the community portal (I am not sure that would be possible)? Or about a new system of reporting altogether?

Wiki pages (or links to another external site) could be added to a rep profile. Does someone have any ideas on how we could make such a system easy to use and visible?

#11

I feel we have a tendency to focus too much into “I want to be seen as active” or “I want to see if someone is active” without asking ourselves why.

That was super important in the past because any Rep could ask for budget, but right now the budget requests are reviewed by the review team and they ensure the person asking has been active, I don’t see any big risks here.

My personal view on this one is that we have ways to understand if a Rep is active or not and, in my experience, self-reports are not the best way and often not reliable (i.e. some Reps with no reports were super active helping communities, and some Reps with reports were not really doing anything to help communities).

Seeing a Rep activity on his community discourse/matrix, coordination meetings, blog posts… all of this can be easily checked if needed without the need of self-reports.

We need to find the balance between trusting Reps commitment to be there to help their communities and making sure we regularly check with Reps if they want to renew their commitment, without the burden of having to manually report each email you sent :wink:

#12

Well my idea is simple it would be good to have a simple form to fill random input and then optionally add a free text area for adding custom tags.

Then I can imagine system can filter recent inputs from any reporter by selecting the tags that matters.

This generic approach may lack some structure but at least it not blocking anyone to say what’s going on.

My 0.02EUR.

#13

Hello,

You say “But you are right, there are some activities that we are not capturing at the moment”.

Then can I suggest some way to capture them, to avoid lots of Reps feeling left out and risking being considered inactive?

Gabriela

#14

Yes, that would be much appreciated. What do you think of @rzr idea:

However, I also agree with Ruben, that we should not focus too much on Reps having to self-report every single thing they do (especially if those activities are already captured elsewhere). It would be good, however, to have a way to capture activities that reps do to support the community that are not an event (e.g. helping onboarding new community members, mentorship activities…).

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Next steps for the reps mentorship program - Survey
#15

Reps Program is, as is whole mozilla, dead. Thats true.

@fminelli Ask for what should be done, rather than what one think of sth…