After sending that I realized I forgot to mention another major bottleneck.
The reps council which is a 9 member body with 7 of them being volunteers is another bottleneck. (From what I know and read the reps mentors do not actively contribute to the governance of the reps program) Many of the problems have been brought up by nominees to the reps council themselves. Let me quote: "When I will join the Council again I will continue to work on the accountability of the Council and of the Reps starting from the onboarding to the report system." "not all reps seem to feel involved in the program" "lack of resources (time) to keep engaging and motivating long-time participator. People still contribute, with or without Rep program seems less different." "Too many people, who do not even have the potential to bear the responsibilities, have been appointed as Reps." "But we still need to work on the balance between different parts of the world. Have thousands of people from one area is good but if we are not able to get even hundreds from another area means something is not right from our side. We have to keep updating and make a ecosystem which can sustain diverse group of people from diverse region." "There is no easy fix but it’s an ongoing process. Creating a special group of Volunteer and Staff to study the ecosystem of regions which lakhs representation can help to better support them. Council can play a big role in this to under regional diversity and can encourage volunteer Leadership" "By encouraging regional leadership and initiatives which aligns with Mozilla goals helps to get better outcome from small group of people." "Mozilla Reps council together with the participation team must first adopt a bottom-up model that engages volunteers, reps and staff when drafting participation strategic plans." "Its biggest weakness is in its ability to sustain itself, through onboarding, branding, amplifying and inspiring new volunteers." These are from April 2018. https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/important-council-elections-spring-2018-nominee-q-a/27331 Things could have changed in one year. Here is the ones from October 2019 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/important-council-elections-h2-2019-nominee-q-a/46004 "Since the last election, I started to believe that our biggest weakness is the monitoring/tracking of the local communities’ health. Sometimes we lose a community as a whole because of small local problems that go unsolved." "Keep improving the onboarding process" " Reps and Rep Mentors’ inactivity hurts the Community the most" " Onboarding experience should be improved to better understand the Reps background and their work." "Refinement in the Mozilla Reps application and onboarding process." "Establishing a bridge between Mozilla Reps and Council team for sorting out community conflicts." "Geographical diversity of reps, if you see the reps map, there are some places where we don’t any presence and a global community we should try to have someone who can spread some MozLove around." The point of this exercise is not to fix all the problems that have been mentioned above. (Some of them may not even be real problems). The point is to ask *whether a 9 member reps council (7 of whom are volunteers) is the best structure to take care of the reps program*. I believe the reps council as it is now can at best improve reps program only incrementally. Volunteers have limits on how much they can engage/contribute. There are various existing tasks for the council members that they may not be able to think about new ideas in their short time. *Alternative models* I don't know all the things that reps council does. So, I'm not in the best position to recommend an alternative model. But consider this one as an example of how there could be alternate models: Divide the tasks of reps council into 7 categories. Make reps task forces for each category and keep that task force be responsible for that task in the reps program. Keep the membership to these task forces open to any rep. Periodically elect representatives for each task force (you'll have 7 representatives who resemble the current reps council). This model may not fit the role of reps governance. That's okay. I'm not saying use this model. I'm saying there are alternate models and that someone should put their thought into whether reps council is having the best model at the moment. *Accountability while allowing Mozillians to request funds* Emma asked me on Telegram "how [do] you see financial acountability occuring/possible without formailty of role?" and asked for "examples of where that works outside of such structures [like reps]" I did a quick search and found out that wikimedia has a program called Rapid grants https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid Here is how the selection criteria is > > Strategic priority: Do your activities improve one or more of > Wikimedia’s existing websites? > Potential outcomes and impact: What are the concrete outcomes that are > anticipated as a result of the activities? What difference do you expect > your project to make? > Contribution record: Do you have a history of engaging with Wikimedia > projects and communities? > Support and endorsement: Do you have sufficient volunteers to complete > the project and endorsements from community members? > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/Learn It seems to me an example of funding without formality of role. There could be problems in this model. There could be alternate models. But, again, my question is whether we need a mechanism to enable mozillians (not reps) to request funds or do we not trust them. Please feel free to question my assumptions and I'll try to defend why I make those assumptions. Akshay On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 10:22 AM Akshay S Dinesh <asdofin...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am writing as per Emma's advice to email someone I'm comfortable with > about the problem I'm most focused on. > > The activate.mozilla.community has been relatively successful. As per > Ruben's previous email to the governance list, there are 40k+ people > getting activated. Also there is a community portal that will come up where > all these people will be able to create events and groups. > > These changes are all good. But I believe they have to be followed by a > few more major changes to meaningfully empower all the people who come > onboard mozilla's mission through campaigns like activate (also other > means). > > *The problem * > > The problem is that the reps program as it is designed now is a > bottleneck. In > https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/feedback-regarding-the-reps-program-in-india/47657?u=asdofindia > I've written about how that plays out in India. There are about 161 reps in > India at the moment. Many of them are inactive and waiting to be removed in > the routine/regular cleanup by the reps council. > > I don't see how such a large movement as we're envisioning can be > successfully mobilized by so few reps. And I don't see that as a fault of > the existing active reps. They're trying their best. But in widely diverse, > large, and populous countries like India, there are hard limits on what a > few individuals can do. > > *The bottleneck* > > The bottleneck arises at multiple places. One is in onboarding. There are > very few people who are able to successfully onboard as new reps. > > The other is in remaining active. Many people by the time they gain enough > experience to "qualify" for the reps program are in full time jobs where > they have very little time remaining. > > Yet another bottleneck is created by not being able to remove inactive > reps quickly. What happens is that many community members who want to > organize events try to reach out to these (inactive) reps and get > lukewarm/unhelpful responses. This is counterproductive. > > *The suggestion* > > I'm nobody to suggest solutions. So, my first suggestion would be that > people who care about the mozilla mission and the reps program ask > themselves whether I make sense and try to figure out ways to modify the > reps program to address the bottlenecks that I mentioned above. > > Another thing that could be done is to build mechanisms that allow many > more people to become reps. In the past reps were "official > representatives" of mozilla. Now they are just community mobilizers. I > don't see why there should be very strict criteria and "qualifications" for > this role. > > An alternative to do could be to make budgeting available for non-reps as > well. There are many mozillians who may be interested in doing a one-off > event. (Let's say one of the events in activate campaign). With the current > bottlenecks, they can neither find a rep to help them, nor ask for budget > on their own. Imagine if a system can be built to hold these people > accountable and allow them to use funds from Mozilla. You may ask me how > they can be held accountable. But should that be a negative question or a > positive question? Do you want to find solutions or use accountability as a > stumbling block to not allow mozillians to use funds? > > These are questions to ask. > > Akshay > > -- > https://mozillians.org/u/asdofindia > _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
