Hey Everyone,
Over the last few weeks @tad has been doing awesome work thinking about volunteer integration and drafting this proposal for how the Participation Team can better integrate volunteers into our workflow.
Please take a look!
There are lots of great ideas in here and we’d love to get your thoughts on the document and the ideas generally. You can comment directly in the document or in this thread.
Thanks!
Lucy
I left some comments in the doc. I think the Independent Participation Driver section needs to be made clearer. I don’t quite get a sense of what this person is actually supposed to be doing. I think I know what is meant here, but I don’t think it’s put down.
I really like looking at these things more intentionally. I like the idea of giving volunteers of certain types quarterly goals. People work well with goals on longer term projects. Also giving them recognized goals also helps tie their teams to including their work. So often volunteers have great ideas for larger scale projects and they don’t get adopted, or the team changes direction away from that project being useful.
Is there room in this proposal for people who want to help the drivers with their projects? Is that covered under the role of “driver” or is “driver” meant to be “leader”?
Great start!
I also left a few comments. I feel like some of the background and definitions (like what is a ‘task’ exactly ?) still need to be explored before putting the pieces together as a whole. What are the attributes of the contributor you have defined, and what examples exist that help us understand and personalize? What is ‘meaningful work?’, what constitutes a ‘meeting’.
If you think of a contributor has having characteristics and actions, I believe it can help us better design for them. I did this with the Participation Personas in that detailing the risk to participation, project, benefit to participation and project, ‘sense of belonging’, and ‘characteristics’ form a whole. We can also think of tasks this way - risks, benefit to contributor (your meaningful work), benefit to project (completing the virtuous circle). If it interests you I can talk a bit more about this process.
I’m particularly interested in seeing this, and other work like it lend to a standard others can use across the project (maybe you are thinking of this as well). For example check this out: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Y-aWzzUrPhR-znuXYanl-7At5kd17fL02IvHsECeh0M/edit#slide=id.g66bfd5284_0_145 the foundation is thinking about tiers for leadership which sounds a lot like this in some ways. How can we leverage or share better to move faster?
I LOVED that you were problem solving for some situations you’ve seen like channeling feedback, and making that something people understand about roles.
wonder what your thoughts are on assigning role titles before someone is proven in that capacity ~ or measures to avoid role titles as acquistions that may not acted on ( which can erode the reputation of that role ). Perhaps that’s where your accountability piece can be leveraged (awesome), and would like to think more about the process/milestones of role-assignment .
One final comment - these are very rich (as in diverse and complex) roles which might morph with experimentation, wondering how you think this would be implemented .
Thanks for your work so far!
Hi, I’m Salman from Bangladesh, involved in Mozilla Bangladesh Community. For the last few days I was observing the works of Participation Team in Github as well as Google doc and able to guess how it works actually. Still curious and raising quite a number of questions in mind. Thanks to @tad for his awesome doc which made me more clear about the process. I’m quite interested to join participation team but I don’t know I’m capable for it or not. I mean what a volunteer should need to join participation team? Can that particular volunteer can contribute residing at his/her own country? And can one extend(by creating team) participation team in his/her own community? Want to know more about it. Thanks!
I didn’t see this reply! Discourse didn’t even send me an email to tell me, just saw it after Desh’s post.
Yes, there is a large risk in assigning role titles. However, they are powerful, and give a person the leverage they need. I think that there’s definetely some exploration to do around that.
Good question. I should think about that. For a large part, I think that we can break down that proposal into different things that volunteers can do, and those things can become pathways. I’m not sure what that would look like exactly though.
So, I think motivation, passion and understanding of our community would be the fundamental requirements for the Participation team. It’s very much experimental.
If you’re interested in working on Participation in your community, I’d ask you this: What participation problems does your community encounter? Write them down somewhere, and explore some ideas on solutions, and note that down too. Ask your community for their feedback, and use them to explore problems further. Post your research here, and I’m sure people would be more than excited to help you figure out next steps.
If you’d rather work under someone’s guidance, which also a totally awesome thing, and offers just as much help to the team, search for volunteer tasks in the GitHub Repo. That looks quiet right now, but we’re just about to go into Q4, so stay tuned.
I’d also totally suggest joining the Participation calls. Details are posted in this discourse category, and they feel like the best way to get a good understanding of what Participation is working on across Mozilla.
Thanks for motivating me. I think It’s a fabulous idea to find out the participation problems in my own community! Thanks for providing such an interesting idea. As Mozilla Bangladesh is getting bigger day by day so problems are also there and need ideas/solutions which can be done by community feedback and discussion. In that case Participation Team can also play a vital role to solve it out. I think it’s time to study more about Participation and Research. Thanks for the info. Will be in touch very soon. Right now, need to know more about it! 