Restore the trust, looking for thoughts from Reps Council 2015 candidates

Hello Reps Council 2015 candidates,

I have a good opportunity to share with you to restore the trust between the Reps council and the Reps in general. Of course I believe your answers here and the efforts that you are going to take based on that will improve the Reps program.

It’s all started after a mozillian called Watson Vinro (I believe this name is not the real one just like you all believe) sent an email questioning the Reps application of @gautha91. Most probably the sender was a Rep. I agree we need to respect the privacy and stands with our fellow mozillians.

To protect the privacy of the rep applications, just after the incident @r_oVhPfcJCUUC5wbm6i4_C2Q updated the access level of reps application forms from open to all Reps to open to only Reps admins. I seriously thought it would be a temporary action, I never thought it would last this much longer.

As a use case, imagine there is a Mozillian who applied for joining the program, but unfortunately he may not eligible to become a Rep. How a local Rep whom residing near to the applicant’s location can flag the application? What if a Reps Mentor wants to verify the application by seeking opinion from any Rep whom might know the person.

Well, by the way I don’t feel here we do have a need for justification. We all are contributing here based on a trust. The trust that we built so far. Just because of a negative question, how we can put our trust at risk? What if a normal Rep asks, in what basis the program drivers keeping trust over the members of the Reps admin group only? Not just Mentors or Council members, normal Reps are also handling sensitive information.

Will revoking the access level entirely based on an anonymous mozillian helps to keep our Reps program more secure? Instead of discussing about the real issues, we just pointed our doubts on to every Reps.

We are a community, negative sentiments may rise over the time, but instead of identifying and cleaning the cause, we are just working with a temporary solution.

Now my question is how we can restore the trust within and beyond the Reps program to help overall Mozilla contributors?

This question is not to the Council candidates only, indeed. Lets all can discuss about this.

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Hello Jafar,

I would like to appoint that all Reps signed a NDA agreement, and yet some of them doesn’t respect it, so I assume that we hit with the reality in this case too, and while we know that we can trust in the vast majority (for not saying 99%), there’s a small percentage that we don’t know and we need to protect the others.

Frankly, I don’t see the problem on your statement. When you apply for being a Rep, you have to indicate a reference person (and I think that you can indicate more than one). To follow that bug is as simple as be included in the CC of it.

Other discussion should be the reasons why a candidate is accepted, and why not, and I think that here is where rely the statement you made.

We had a leak, and I think that the procedure was correct, probably it could be better communicated, but according the email from Nuke the solution was until we find out a better process, which doesn’t mean that it’s temporary in a short term.

Regards,

Hello Franc,

Thanks for your input :smile:

Hi Jafar,

Just to be clear, because I think that I was too direct at some point.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t worry about it. Your concern is very valid, and probably we have a lack of communication about next steps and the status of the “security” leak. So I agree on that part.

But maybe this can be used as a broad discussion about how mentors evaluates new candidates. I don’t know if your position is about this, or only to open again the bugs so we can see the nominees (it would be great if other mentors can comment and say if they look for applications in general, or if they check for applications of people that they know).

The bad part is that there was a leak, so I don’t know how easy will be to find a solution. I don’t know if the next council will be able to discuss this, and solve it.

Cheers,

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Hello Franc,

I am really happy to see you replied again.
Can you help me to understand who all are having access to the Reps admins?
Are they members of current Council or all Mentors?

Happy to discuss further after getting that information.

Council and all mentors have mozilla-reps-admins in bugzilla.

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Thank You @nukeador

Hello Franc,

Yes, I agree, sadly we had a leak. It happened.

This is just one of many use cases that came in my mind. I hadn’t been a crawler in the Mentorship Component, but I do believe many of our fellow Reps/Reps Mentors used that access based on many more reasons including but not limited to help the Reps program. So lets please skip the discussion based on the use case that I have outlined.

Talking about the leak, other components, including Budget Requests and Swag Requests are still open and an anonymous Reps can still leak the information and deface any mozillian even beyond the Mozilla. (Let’s not make ourself to be soo bad like that).

My sentiment is built on top the below scenario.
Reps in general and Reps within RepsAdmins got classified after the leak, while all Reps are signed the same NDA and committed to the same mission and stands for the same values. The interesting but scary questions are What if the said leak made by a frustrated member from RepsAdmins? What if the next leak would be made by a RepsAdmins group member? (Again, I am not encouraging that very bad incident, but still I am just asking).

I love to see more thoughts from many people here. Let’s fix it.

Once again Franc, I appreciate your reply.

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Hello @pmjcreations,

Sorry for the late reply.

I strongly suggest to comment this with the council, give specific examples, because it would help to understand the context. My point of view is that at some point, some communities believes that being a Rep is better than be a mozillian, and I don’t like that separation. I think that mozillians and Reps are equal (or at least should be equal). This probably belongs to another discussion, but I would like to understand the position about a Mentor suggesting a mozillian to become a Rep… perhaps we should start thinking how Reps can help local communities and active mozillians?

Well, I think that the leak was based on a different thing. Budgets and Swag are quite different to an application.

So, if I understand correctly, if you are “suggesting” this, that means that it should be ok to keep the applications bugs “closed”?. It’s a complicated situation, I don’t think we will find an easy solution… I actually don’t know what would be the best solution for this. I do believe that at this point, if we have a “frustrated” member, we need to understand why he/she feels like that, and I would try to work on solve that problem rather to be worry about the next leak.

We have several channels to express “frustration” about the program… but maybe I’m wrong and we are not encouraging people to give feedback about the program in a proper way? (From my experience, I was able to write to the council several times, but could it be that some people prefer anonymity).

Cheers,

Hello Franc,

Let me be clear with my thought. I am standing here for getting the bug access open to all Reps as it was. Lets discuss frustration or Mentoring in another thread :smile:

Ok, so probably would be great if other people comment here, but as I comment above, I don’t think we will have an easy solution… and my question would be: do you really think that mentors checks applications bugs, if they are not involved?

Cheers,

I don’t know if I am Disclosing the public yet closed discussions that I heard and participated during many regional community Meetups, both online and offline.
However, I can say that, those discussions are not the Reps Mentors only level. We used to discuss it, within the very active and trusted mozillians. In fact, those discussions are to make the program even better and make sure the eligible and capable mozillians are part of the Reps program. I am just not going into the details of that because this thread has not belongs to that. But I can ASSURE that a few Reps who are not at all part of the application process -because they are not Reps Mentors- commented/flagged applications which are from their regions. I have seen those bugs. They might do that to make the program better. I am not again going to deeper.

As you said, I am also interested in hearing from other fellow mozillians here.