RepsNext 2.0 - Reps internal communication

Reps
#1

Tldr - too long, didn’t read

It is clear that in the Reps program there are issues on communications inside the program itself. People that is not active, not reading the emails, not replying on Telegram, not joining the discussions on Discourse, not aligned with was Mozilla is doing and so on.

What the program did to fix those problems?
Remove or aggregate some communication channels was the first step but how we can act also on the awareness and accountability of the Reps program members?

The story

https://github.com/mozilla/Reps/issues/272 - Migrate mailing lists to Discourse was the first step achieved just only for Mentors, achieved by the Reps Council 2 years ago as I can remember (I leaded that task). Now there is a Reps Mentors category private just for them/us and is unused.
Migrate to this solution was hard because required to add all the mentors to a Mozillians group, check if all of them has an Identity provider also to access to the dedicated Google Drive folder to this group of people.
This required a lot of effort to reach all of them, at the same time helped to remove the inactive mentors and doing some cleanup.
As today this task is in standby mode because for a long time (3 years) it wasn’t possible for the members of a Mozillians group to auto follow a category on Discourse and receive the emails without a manual subscribe, but now this feature is achievable!

PS: Discourse can be used as mailing list and replying by email is possible but it will be public and also with a web version compared to before.

Mozilla is moving to Matrix after the dead of IRC, the bridges with the telegram groups are already on.

The open questions floor

Just some examples of what the Council can do to open new opportunities:

  1. Remove the mailing list for everyone now and move on something else (finally) for reasons explained above
  2. Telegram/Matrix can live together for a while, we will lose the ability to our stickers but is something that we can accept for a serious and improved quality of communications (and is talking one of the most used sticker pack owner in the Mozilla community :rofl:), with Matrix we can get access to Mozilla employee discussion or about Mozilla internals discussions and let people to discover new things
  3. Autowatch the Discourse Reps category (and see if this improves the communications) because now the mailing list is just a remainder of the call or an update with some links on it. It is difficult that people start a discussion over there maybe for the spam or because discuss by email is not so a modern way (compared to the past)
  4. More Reps Council updates on Discourse to improve the awareness about the program and what is doing
  5. Autowatch the https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/mozillians/tldr/253 and https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/mozillians/nda/207 to be more aligned with Mozilla is doing

Thanks for your time and I am looking for your ideas and feedback!

2 Likes
#2

Thanks for creating this topic.

For now, I’d like to focus on that part. Let’s create problem statements, and then dive into solutions and experiments.

I’d like to throw in the following into the mix:

  • There is not a lot of knowledge sharing between Reps, so potentially there is opportunity to share learnings between Reps to not do the same mistakes over and over again

Do others have other observations that can be used towards defining problem statements? Or something you don’t agree with that has been mentioned?

#3

The point is how we can track those cases?
Maybe improve the reps wiki adding resources to that https://wiki.mozilla.org/Reps/Leadership?
Maybe it is something that Mentor have to do or not? Can I have some example? maybe if it is something like a campaign is easy to act but if it is event organization we need to do a community playbook as we did in the past.