Year End Update: Haiyya

[Sukhmani_Grover]

Hello Mozillians,

In the past 6 months, I and the rest of the Haiyya team has been working closely with the Community Development Team (CDT) to support them with key community insights and help them get a better sense of the community. With this blog, we want to share what have we been up to and what are our plans till the end of the year 2017!

Since July, we had two key areas of focus:

• Deepening staff understanding of the community: We were involved with staff to provide them key community insights. I interviewed 15 people from provisional Meta team, Functional teams and Regional teams through calls and attended local community events in Delhi including Privacy Meet up and Firefox testing workshop Additionally I observed Telegram groups and campaign activities to understand of how the community works, where it exists, and what the biggest opportunities and challenges are. At the end of October, I shared my findings and recommendations with the Community Development Team and you can have a look at it here

• Supporting Community Leaders: We have had 8 calls with the people from Functional Leaders, Regional Leaders and other members in the community who were interested to share their ideas and inputs This helped us uncover the key challenges being currently faced:

• Lack of time and direction from staff: The community is not getting the right direction from the staff and finding it difficult to seek staff support for their work. At present, there are limited channels and ways to reach out to staff and seek support.

• Lack of time to channelize goals into outcomes: Like any other volunteer driven community, Mozilla India community is also challenged by lack of time to channelize their goals into desired outcomes. Having different roles & responsibilities and teamwork gets intense at times; demands time and may affect the nature and quality of the work.

• Stronger focus on regional work and teams: Regional teams are active and doing great work to push their goals. There is a prevalent and long outstanding question in the community around Mozilla regional teams vs Mozilla India community, which is raising lot of concerns and unrest.

• A big question on community leadership model: The community members have not seen success of the leadership model that came into existence after MInM2016 meetup. This has led to mistrust, limited cross collaboration and skepticism on any leadership to offer them direction.

We are grateful to the community members who shared their ideas and experiences with us and look for potential gaps and solutions to mitigate the situation.

We will continue to actively work with the Community Development Team and until end of 2017 and beyond and we will be working on following key areas:

• Facilitate Community Engagement in Strategy: We will be working closely with the CDT to increase their awareness of the structures and the activities currently happening in the community. We will facilitate discussions between the provisional meta team, key community leaders and Mozilla staff to shape a collaborative and informed community strategy for 2018.

• Volunteer Leadership Support: We will work closely with the Meta team and key community leaders Prathmesh, Ankit, Faizal, Priyanka, Umesh, Faye, Ram, Anup, Vigneshwar, Jayesh, Dvyik, Vnisha and eventually more community members to begin establishing clear goals, roles, responsibilities and expectations from 2018 and beyond. We will also reach out to a few community members in next 2 weeks for further consultations on Volunteer Leadership

• Community Listening: We will be available to the community at large via telegram (@sukhmani and @Mrinalinid) and regular office hours December on wards to offer support and help deepen understanding both ways

We want to stay in touch with all of you so here are a few ways to get in touch with us.
Weekly Office Hours: Thursday 7 pm - 8 pm IST
For further details of office hours during December reach out to Mrinalini on telegram@Mrinalinid
For January onwards reach out at sgrover@mozilla.com or @Sukhmani on telegram

We and the Community Development Team will be working on the plans mentioned above, keep an eye for any announcements and updates. Feedback and suggestions are always welcome.

Wish you in advance a Happy New Year.

Cheers!
Sukhmani Grover
Haiyya

[lucyeoh]

Hey All,

Wanted to follow this up with a staff note about Haiyya’s role in 2018!

As you know, for the past few months Haiyya has been working closely with our team to help us get a better understand the big picture of the Indian community, support leaders, and begin to develop relationships within the community. While many of our wonderful team members: Konstantina, Ruben, Christos have and do work closely with individuals and sub-teams within India, we have been missing an overarching perspective to help us better understand the broad challenges and opportunities facing India as a community of communities.

As we we begin to better understand our mission driven communities as a deeply interconnected set of individuals with a shared passion for Mozilla and an enthusiasm to contribute, Haiyya has helped us understand some of the complex challenges and opportunities that exist in India today (see their full presentation in the post) .

As we head into 2018 I want to clarify that Haiyya’s primary role will be to work alongside community members and leaders to support, enable and facilitate strategic conversations about how to optimize community health and impact. While we are hopeful that through your conversations and interactions will also find support and encouragement on an individual level, their focus will be on being a bridge for strategic conversations.

I’m excited to join you in the conversations they facilitate and encourage you to participate as well as to use Haiyya as a megaphone to amplify your concerns, questions and challenges.

Sukhmani (and Mrinalini until Junuary) will be posting regularly about their work here, hosting office hours, and continuing to meet and learn from as many of you as possible in the coming year.

All the best,

Lucy

[rabimba (Rabimba Karanjai)]

I am literally mortified that this point came up in research as an actionable content 1

Spend conscious and pro-active time and approach to bridge the divide between North India and South India either by creating a balance between teams we select to work or invite in online learning space

Mozilla Communities should be a “Coding, Learning and Sharing Community” with inclusiveness and diversity at its heart. If this came up as an actionable content as part of the research. I am afraid we have bigger problems than just leadership.

Mandatory Tags: @lshapiro @emma_irwin
Optional Tag: @george

[rowdymehul (Mehul Patel)]

Hey Everyone,

To be honest, I have started losing my faith from the Haiyaa Team because most of the things have no sense according to what they have mentioned at some points. So many things they have said that they have supported communities and campaign like Rain of Rust, web extension and so on, but being a leader of some campaign I can say that we have not got any support from them. And and in their very recent post where they mentioned some people name of their team who dedicated assigned to some teams to look after and support or help them better, there also I found no support there, moreover no communications at all.

Being an active member in some teams, this is what my feedback and I have lot more feedback but as @heyvp7 said in Mozilla India telegram group I have also raised multiple times this concern, mailed some of them but no update from them at all. Sadly but that’s true, this way it won’t work now and in future as well.

As per the all recent communication in various thread, I & many ones have this question, "Is Haiyya still active? because we Haven’t heard them for long. They always come as a surprised post, research, and work which mostly none of aware of. Good example is: Update: What Haiyya has been working on?

[umeshagarwal]

@Sukhmani_Grover Kindly dont include my name in your post. If its any other Umesh you are refering to then its fine but DO NOT use my name.

[lucyeoh]

Hey Rabimba!

This was also reflected in the D&I research where people reported being in a region that felt disconnected from other regions, that they were not invited, or that some regions seemed favored.

I think it’s at the very least an important issue to surface, and while it may go beyond “leadership” it’s an interesting place to start these discussions.

-Lucy

[rabimba (Rabimba Karanjai)]

I had a talk with @lshapiro yesterday regarding this.

I am sad that this issue exists, but glad that it surfaced. At least we took the first step , admitting that there is a problem.