Dear MOSS mentors/selection committee/governance, This is a two part email. The first part is about transparency and very important. The second part is my idea on how to make better use of MOSS and may be skipped.
*PART 1 - transparency in MOSS* I believe the MOSS GMP India track winners have been selected already because the applications were in 2017. I have checked the following links for the result https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS/GMP_India https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/01/03/moss-2018-year-in-review/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/moss/mission-partners-india/ It is nowhere on the google indexed internet. There is a partial list of MOSS recipients being maintained at https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS#Recipients Now, I understand that gerv was maintaining these wiki pages and therefore his passing away is one of the reasons why these pages aren't getting updated with newer recipients. But, Mozilla is giving away so much money under MOSS grants, and transparency should automatically come with that. I believe we should maintain a complete list of all MOSS winners with at least the date of winning and the money won. More details on the MOSS contract are desirable, if that does not cause any unintended side effects. This is not just for transparency, it helps in improving the projects' visibility and gives the projects much valuable external validation. *Part 2 - giving better recognition for MOSS projects (optional)* Money alone does not help free software projects. These projects are developed by lonely developers working in isolation. What really helps to propel development is other developers working with them. Now, I'm not asking Mozilla to assign Mozilla engineers to work on MOSS projects. But let us not forget that a large, extremely large number of young programmers are attracted to Mozilla every day. The contribution opportunities for them is currently restricted to Mozilla's projects listed on https://codetribute.mozilla.org/ or https://whatcanidoformozilla.org But if, like our plan with MOSS, these projects advance Mozilla's mission then they should also get bigger prominence in our contribution opportunities. We should consider anyone who contributes to any of the MOSS projects as "Mozillian". This allows a large number of mentors (through MOSS projects) to enter Mozilla community and also gives young programmers a wide variety of projects to work on. CC'ing Lucy Harris of community development team to consider this idea. Akshay _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
