Any plans of doing the check and removal of inactive Reps from the program on a regular basis?
Mentors should work with their mentees to help them. If a mentee has no longer time for the program and he/she is inactive, the mentor should have a conversation and inform the Council for a transition to alumni.
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So if there are reps that are not active but they are not in Alumni is a fault of the mentor that is not following them? Only to understand rightly what is happening 
I liked the two years ago the automatic move to alumni and I think that is something that the program needs to be more accountable.
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What if the mentor is too busy to check on his/her mentees, who are inactive as well? Is there a mechanism to report inactive Reps with their last logged (significant) activities dating as far as a year ago?
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It’s mentor’s responsibility to keep their mentees active.
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Inactive mentors should be reported to the Reps Council, who will evaluate their status and re-assign mentees if needed.
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Folks,
I see this in a completely different light than what is being said here. I may be wrong but I think we’re approaching this the wrong way on this thread and I’d like to provide another point of view.
If someone is a Rep or a Rep Mentor, it means that at some time in their volunteer life they were quite active contributors. If they become inactive then our first priority should be to understand why they became inactive. Are they busy? Did something happened that made them move away? I have seen countless cases of volunteers moving away from Mozilla due to bullying, you know that, I almost moved away myself. So first order of the day, to understand why.
Once we know why, and the reason is not “no time anymore” but something that happened to make them disillusioned with Mozilla or not excited about it, then we should try re-engage them with Mozilla. If they are inactive due to sour relationship with other community members or due to attrition/toxicity in the community, we should try to pair them with a proactive coach/mentor and see if they would be excited about conducting a small/quick project together. It should be something more tailored to functional-doers as this requires less interaction with the larger community and has immediate takeaways and deliverables. If the Rep completes this task, we should survey/talk with them asking if this was a good experience and if they’d like to engage more experiences like this, if so, they should be directed into other functional-doer types of tasks, possibly with various coaches/mentors and see if this sparks their contributions back.
I believe in having an energetic and proactive stance against volunteer attrition. We should try to find opportunities for contributions for our Reps when we see them drifting away.
We already lost too much marketshare, if we start loosing our most strong contributors then life becomes a lot harder. Instead of transitioning Reps into alumni, we should be trying to support them coming back into active volunteering.
Takeaways:
- We need to conduct study on Reps attrition that is able to answer the following questions:
- What has been the leading causes of attrition during the past year?
- Is there a pattern that happens in a community before we start loosing Reps?
- What is the most effective way to encourage alumni and MIA Reps to come back into active volunteering?
- If a Rep/Mentor seems inactive, we need coaches and mentors to reach out for them with a plan that includes:
- finding out why?
- trying incremental steps for moving them back into active volunteering
- FINDING OUT WHY!!!
Only after all these, we should move someone into alumni.
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only a little bit of question: I think that reps are not doing so much survey or other stuff so I saw the last people (with automatic move to alumni) that there was asking why they became alumni automatically. So I think that is better to have something automatically to remember them “hey we exist!” because an email is easy to trash. In that wat we can ask to them to reapply without lose so much time because I think that will be not an easy job ask why to everyone why they are not active anymore.
Of course I think that is important to understand why they are not active anymore but I think that is something to be in the reps portal.
What you have described is what mentors are asked before transitioning inactive Reps to alumni, have a conversation, understand why, take a final decision together.
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Nuke,
Yes, I understand that but I believe we could benefit more from something more organized. The way we current use where mentors ask mentees before transition is good ans allows us to evaluate why that specific person is leaving but it doesnt:
- answer why mozilla is loosing contributors? What is the leading cause of attritition?
- doesn’t provide a framework for trying to reengage them.
We don’t have data on what makes people leave. We don’t have proactive methods for mitigating attritition and foster reengagement.
Or maybe we do and I am not aware, but what I am saying is that I have watched the bulk of the best contributors I have seen here leave and it was not because they were out of time. I have heard similar stories from other communities. I want to understand more and create ways of loosing less people.
I don’t think that’s part of mentors work scope, but other initiatives like the Communities and Contributors research.
The orientation call for people re-entering the program is an approach, as well as the coaching a lot of mentors have been trained on, but I would love to hear more ideas on other the elements we feel this framework should have.
Cheers.
What I am talking is not for people re-entering the program, those are already committed to coming back. What I spoke above was about ways of re-engaging those that are leaving, attracting them back. There is a different mindset at work here, where you’re at the same time trying to sort out what is going on while trying to re-engage people.
Both things need to happen – an onboarding for those coming back, and am attempt of attracting those that appear to be in danger of leaving (when the problem is not lack of time but something else) – maybe just a little thing that allows one to reconnect them before they leave and then maybe move them into this onboard procedure you talked about.
I understand, that’s what the coaching session mentor-mentee should be about, guide, mentor, coach, engage, attract, empower.
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