Employees and the community (II)

[Nukeador]

Hi,

We discussed in the past about employees coming from the community and
their time once they get hired involving community activities, but now I
want to discuss a different situation.

As we grow, more an more people is getting hired, we have more employees
than ever and this number is growing each month. Since employees are
investing a lot of time and work in the project, it's normal that they get
a position where they have to make decisions that affect the project.

One of the things a lot of volunteers and some old employees noticed is
that most new employees don't know about community or some of our values,
and this leads to some problems regarding controversial decisions or lack
of communication with the community. This is getting more noticed as we
grow more and more, and from my point of view is one of the key problems
mozilla has currently.

As I've already pointed out in other threads, I think it's very important
that when a new person is hired, he gets a mandatory formation about who we
are, what we care about, our values (open source, open web...), why the
community is a key part, who the community is and how employees are
bringing a service to help the community and not the other way around. Also
it would be interesting to actual employees that don't know this topics.

What do you think?

Regards.
--
Rubén Martín (Nukeador)
Mozilla Reps Council member
http://mozilla-hispano.org
http://twitter.com/mozilla_hispano
http://facebook.com/mozillahispano

[David Bruant]

Hi,

As a non-employed contributor, it's something I have noticed as well and
some other contributors I have discussed with have too.

Le 09/05/2012 12:38, Nukeador a écrit :
> We discussed in the past about employees coming from the community and
> their time once they get hired involving community activities, but now I
> want to discuss a different situation.
>
> As we grow, more an more people is getting hired, we have more employees
> than ever and this number is growing each month. Since employees are
> investing a lot of time and work in the project, it's normal that they get
> a position where they have to make decisions that affect the project.
>
> One of the things a lot of volunteers and some old employees noticed is
> that most new employees don't know about community or some of our values,
> and this leads to some problems regarding controversial decisions or lack
> of communication with the community. This is getting more noticed as we
> grow more and more, and from my point of view is one of the key problems
> mozilla has currently.
>
> As I've already pointed out in other threads, I think it's very important
> that when a new person is hired, he gets a mandatory formation about who we
> are, what we care about, our values (open source, open web...), why the
> community is a key part, who the community is and how employees are
> bringing a service to help the community and not the other way around.

I don't think employees are serving the community or the other way
around. I do think both contribute to the Mozilla project.

> Also it would be interesting to actual employees that don't know this topics.
>
> What do you think?

I understand and agree with your intention, but I disagree with how to
achieve it. Instead of acting *when a new person is hired*, what about
acting *before hiring a new person*? I mean, by hiring only people who
already understand the value of open source, of community.

Assuming there are enough resources to provide this formation on values,
what about recruiting people who would have less technical skills, but
values already and spend the training resources on technical training?
You can teach technical (or legal or marketing or whatever) things, but
I'm not sure you can "teach" values.

I understand that it's likely I won't necessarily have a sufficient
answer to these questions on a public mailing-list due to the nature of
the question which is more about Mozilla internal recruiting policy, but
I think it's important the questions are being shared.

David

[Pascal Chevrel]

Le 09/05/2012 12:38, Nukeador a écrit :

> Hi,
>
> We discussed in the past about employees coming from the community and
> their time once they get hired involving community activities, but now I
> want to discuss a different situation.
>
> As we grow, more an more people is getting hired, we have more employees
> than ever and this number is growing each month. Since employees are
> investing a lot of time and work in the project, it's normal that they get
> a position where they have to make decisions that affect the project.
>
> One of the things a lot of volunteers and some old employees noticed is
> that most new employees don't know about community or some of our values,
> and this leads to some problems regarding controversial decisions or lack
> of communication with the community. This is getting more noticed as we
> grow more and more, and from my point of view is one of the key problems
> mozilla has currently.
>
> As I've already pointed out in other threads, I think it's very important
> that when a new person is hired, he gets a mandatory formation about who we
> are, what we care about, our values (open source, open web...), why the
> community is a key part, who the community is and how employees are
> bringing a service to help the community and not the other way around. Also
> it would be interesting to actual employees that don't know this topics.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Regards.

Agreed on all points, I would also add that we need to clarify the term
'community' used in the Mozilla project and to new employees. It sounds
more and more in Mozilla communication that community is becoming a
synonym for "people paid to work on Mozilla stuff" while most of the
people in the global community are volunteers.

Pascal

[Nukeador]

2012/5/9 David Bruant <brua...@gmail.com>

> I understand and agree with your intention, but I disagree with how to
> achieve it. Instead of acting *when a new person is hired*, what about
> acting *before hiring a new person*? I mean, by hiring only people who
> already understand the value of open source, of community.
>
> Assuming there are enough resources to provide this formation on values,
> what about recruiting people who would have less technical skills, but
> values already and spend the training resources on technical training?
> You can teach technical (or legal or marketing or whatever) things, but
> I'm not sure you can "teach" values.
>

Yes, you are completely right, it's better to handle it before hiring.

[L. David Baron]

On Wednesday 2012-05-09 13:07 +0200, Pascal Chevrel wrote:
> Agreed on all points, I would also add that we need to clarify the
> term 'community' used in the Mozilla project and to new employees.
> It sounds more and more in Mozilla communication that community is
> becoming a synonym for "people paid to work on Mozilla stuff" while
> most of the people in the global community are volunteers.

I think I've observed some of the opposite problem: people talking
about the "community" as separate from paid staff, rather than (as I
view it) paid staff as being some of the members of a community that
also includes others, and in which being paid or not largely doesn't
affect what types of roles you can fill.

-David

--
𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
𝄢 Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂

[Pascal Chevrel]

Le 09/05/2012 13:42, L. David Baron a écrit :
> On Wednesday 2012-05-09 13:07 +0200, Pascal Chevrel wrote:
>> Agreed on all points, I would also add that we need to clarify the
>> term 'community' used in the Mozilla project and to new employees.
>> It sounds more and more in Mozilla communication that community is
>> becoming a synonym for "people paid to work on Mozilla stuff" while
>> most of the people in the global community are volunteers.
>
> I think I've observed some of the opposite problem: people talking
> about the "community" as separate from paid staff, rather than (as I
> view it) paid staff as being some of the members of a community that
> also includes others, and in which being paid or not largely doesn't
> affect what types of roles you can fill.
>
> -David
>

I think that given the size of Mozilla now, it is very possible that the
informal definition or the perception of what the community is depends
on the department you are working in and the level of interaction it has
with the larger Mozilla community. On the developement, documentation
and l10n levels which are traditionnal ways to be involved in Mozilla, I
think community is still key and volunteers are empowered. I think it is
also the case for events, I am very unsure about new Mozilla activities
though, I think there is a need to transplant the community culture we
have traditionnally benefited from in the project into the new Mozilla
activities.

Pascal

[L. David Baron]

On Wednesday 2012-05-09 12:59 +0200, David Bruant wrote:
> I understand and agree with your intention, but I disagree with how
> to achieve it. Instead of acting *when a new person is hired*, what
> about acting *before hiring a new person*? I mean, by hiring only
> people who already understand the value of open source, of
> community.

I don't think we should lay down strict requirements of that sort,
on either technical or social issues.

We're hiring individuals, not members of a category. Every
individual is different, and nobody comes with all the knowledge
they'll need for their new role. So we expect to teach things to
new hires, both technical and social.

> Assuming there are enough resources to provide this formation on
> values, what about recruiting people who would have less technical
> skills, but values already and spend the training resources on
> technical training?

When hiring in the platform engineering areas where I'm involved
with the interviewing process, we do try to consider how well
potential employees will fit with the community (among many other
considerations) when we're hiring. Like everything else with
hiring, we can't predict with certainty how a new person will fit
in.

But I agree we could probably do better explaining how the project
works -- both to new hires and to other outsiders.

[Alina Mierlus]

Hi,

I agree w/ David here. In the last time I hear often the community vs.
employee topic which is a bit odd (is not what "one mozilla" wants to be).

Personally, I don't make distinction between paid and volunteer staff
(both are part of the community) when comes to *working together for the
project* or bring individual contributions and ideas to the project.

And I don't like the approach of "let's train the employees on how to
work with community". I don't think that this is empowering, for the
community of volunteers in the first place.

Designing a collaborative, diverse, flexible and open environment is
totally different, and probably the right approach (and it requires not
only new ways of thinking about community organizing and support but
also the flexibility and openness to relearn).

As for carrying the traditional way to new activities, I'm a bit
skeptical about (though that may be some things that should be considered).
I think that fulfilling the Open Apps Ecosystem or building an
Identity infrastructure for the web (and fulfilling Mozilla mission
overall) requires a different kind of community and methods (or at least
that's what I've learned in the last year, by working w/ local folks and
community that really *build* apps and things on the web).

If this all started from the Linux support for marketplace
conversation, my question is: where is the Linux community of developers
to help?

My first 2 cents,
-Alina

> Le 09/05/2012 13:42, L. David Baron a écrit :

>> On Wednesday 2012-05-09 13:07 +0200, Pascal Chevrel wrote:
>>> Agreed on all points, I would also add that we need to clarify the
>>> term 'community' used in the Mozilla project and to new employees.
>>> It sounds more and more in Mozilla communication that community is
>>> becoming a synonym for "people paid to work on Mozilla stuff" while
>>> most of the people in the global community are volunteers.
>>
>> I think I've observed some of the opposite problem: people talking
>> about the "community" as separate from paid staff, rather than (as I
>> view it) paid staff as being some of the members of a community that
>> also includes others, and in which being paid or not largely doesn't
>> affect what types of roles you can fill.
>>
>> -David
>>
>

> I think that given the size of Mozilla now, it is very possible that the
> informal definition or the perception of what the community is depends
> on the department you are working in and the level of interaction it has
> with the larger Mozilla community. On the developement, documentation
> and l10n levels which are traditionnal ways to be involved in Mozilla, I
> think community is still key and volunteers are empowered. I think it is
> also the case for events, I am very unsure about new Mozilla activities
> though, I think there is a need to transplant the community culture we
> have traditionnally benefited from in the project into the new Mozilla
> activities.
>
> Pascal

> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance

--
Alina Mierlus
@alina_mierlus

[Rubén Martín]

El 09/05/12 15:08, Alina Mierlus escribió:

> And I don't like the approach of "let's train the employees on how to
> work with community". I don't think that this is empowering, for the
> community of volunteers in the first place.
>
> Designing a collaborative, diverse, flexible and open environment is
> totally different, and probably the right approach (and it requires
> not only new ways of thinking about community organizing and support
> but also the flexibility and openness to relearn).

Sorry, I don't get your point, do you think that it's not a good thing
to teach some employees about our values and community work?

>
> If this all started from the Linux support for marketplace
> conversation, my question is: where is the Linux community of
> developers to help?

No, this is not about any specific situation (there is an independent
thread on marketing list to discuss this), it's about a lot of
situations that volunteers and employees have expiremented during the
last years.

Regards.

--
Rubén Martín [Nukeador]
Mozilla Reps Council Member
http://www.mozilla-hispano.org
http://twitter.com/mozilla_hispano
http://facebook.com/mozillahispano

[Alina Mierlus]

No, I don't like the "teaching" approach (even more when it is about
values :) ).

But I do think that newcomers (both new employees and volunteer
contributors) should understand to a certain degree the nature/history
of the project - through a better dialogue, a more open/community like
event formats (MozCamps), shared learning/working processes etc.

-Alina

> Sorry, I don't get your point, do you think that it's not a good thing
> to teach some employees about our values and community work?

--
Alina Mierlus
@alina_mierlus

[Santiago Hollmann]

El Wed May 9 09:07:26 2012, L. David Baron ha escrito:

>
> On Wednesday 2012-05-09 12:59 +0200, David Bruant wrote:
>>
>> I understand and agree with your intention, but I disagree with how
>> to achieve it. Instead of acting *when a new person is hired*, what
>> about acting *before hiring a new person*? I mean, by hiring only
>> people who already understand the value of open source, of
>> community.
>
>
> I don't think we should lay down strict requirements of that sort,
> on either technical or social issues.
>
> We're hiring individuals, not members of a category. Every
> individual is different, and nobody comes with all the knowledge
> they'll need for their new role. So we expect to teach things to
> new hires, both technical and social.
>

When we set requirements for a specific role, we are setting a category
(or sounds like that to me). What if we add community experience as
requirement or focus more on that than in technical (js, marketing,
legal) skills. At the end, everything can be developed but a wrong move
with the community could make you loose many contributors or
communities. We have seen that before and that's not an easy mistake to fix.

>>
>> Assuming there are enough resources to provide this formation on
>> values, what about recruiting people who would have less technical
>> skills, but values already and spend the training resources on
>> technical training?
>
>
> When hiring in the platform engineering areas where I'm involved
> with the interviewing process, we do try to consider how well
> potential employees will fit with the community (among many other
> considerations) when we're hiring. Like everything else with
> hiring, we can't predict with certainty how a new person will fit
> in.
>
> But I agree we could probably do better explaining how the project
> works -- both to new hires and to other outsiders.
>
> -David
>

I think we could specify some common things about Mozilla that all the
employees should know. Something like:
- There is no distinction between paid-staff and volunteers.
- Employees' emails and volunteers' emails have the same priority.
- Employees help to increase the number of contributors in the project.
- Employees must work as open as they can.
- We are open. Integrate volunteers in your team.
- Feedback from volunteers is so important as any other employee's feedback.
- Employees are facilitators of the community, help to them every time
time they need it.
- Volunteers love Mozilla and the Open Web. They do all what they can to
achieve our mission.
- Mozilla is driven by the community.

We could improve this list and also add descriptions. I think having
this in mind will help to avoid some problems in the future.

Cheers,
Santiago.

--
Santiago Hollmann

t: @santihollmann <http://twitter.com/santihollmann>
Piedra Libre! <http://piedralibre.wordpress.com>

[Majken Connor]

It has been my understanding that employees are in fact meant to support
the community. If this has changed it should be intentional (and I think
this is one of the fears people had when the corp was formed). For me, and
for many others I think, Mozilla is first and foremost an open community.
Employees exist to help community contributions be more successful.
Sometimes it's a step removed, some employees jobs exist to help make sure
Firefox can still compete, but for me that still falls back to helping the
community be effective at Mozilla's goals. Mozilla still promotes its heavy
contributor population, so I think this is still a value that is aspired
to. I think if we flat out describe it this way, Mozilla is a community
first, it will go a very long way to helping new hires understand their
relationship to the community.

> t: @santihollmann <http://twitter.com/**santihollmann<http://twitter.com/santihollmann>
> >
> Piedra Libre! <http://piedralibre.wordpress.**com<http://piedralibre.wordpress.com>
> >
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/**listinfo/governance<https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance>
>

[Mitchell Baker]

Nukeador

I agree completely. And I know we havent done a good enough job at this
in the last couple of years. I feel it's an area where I personally
have not done a good enough job. It's partly what you noted; some
people aren't as aware as we'd like. It's partly that some need
guidance in how to work within the broad Mozilla community. Contributing
to a small open source project via github isn't the same as working in
the far-flung Mozilla world, and so some help with "how to" would be
useful as well.

Recently Deb Cohen and the HR team have started thinking about where and
how to add this sort of information to our new hire process and
orientation.

Perhaps we might form a working group of some sort to assist Deb and the
HR team in developing information that reflects the Mozilla community
well? And perhaps figuring out some good ways to help people start to
interact?

mitchell

[Rubén Martín]

El 09/05/12 19:09, Mitchell Baker escribió:

> Recently Deb Cohen and the HR team have started thinking about where
> and how to add this sort of information to our new hire process and
> orientation.
>
> Perhaps we might form a working group of some sort to assist Deb and
> the HR team in developing information that reflects the Mozilla
> community well? And perhaps figuring out some good ways to help
> people start to interact?

That sounds great. As you can see, we have a lot of feedback based on
previous experiences, and this combined with programs like Stewards can
also help to improve all the situation and communications from both
sides (also new volunteers need to lear how to communicate with
employees and other volunteers :) ).

[Nick Hurley]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Mitchell Baker <mitc...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Nukeador
>
> I agree completely.  And I know we havent done a good enough job at this in
> the last couple of years.  I feel it's an area where I personally have not
> done a good enough job.    It's partly what you noted; some people aren't as
> aware as we'd like.  It's partly that some need guidance in how to work
> within the broad Mozilla community. Contributing to a small open source
> project via github isn't the same as working in the far-flung Mozilla world,
> and so some help with "how to" would be useful as well.

As a relatively recent MoCo employee (just over a year) who did not
come from the volunteer community (I lurked and filed a bug once, but
that was it), I too would love to see some guidance on this. It's hard
for some of us to feel connected to the volunteers if we don't
interact with them very often, because they're "those people, over
there, doing that stuff" (not meant to be derogatory, just a
description of how it feels sometimes). For the record, I'm in
engineering, but my team seems to have less interaction with the
community than most (I don't think that's my team's fault, but perhaps
because the stuff we do (networking) is a little less visible than
things like cool new firefox features or something). So even in the
areas generally considered to have higher concentrations of
volunteers, some of us may not get as much volunteer interaction as
others, which can sometimes make it feel less like a community and
more like "just" a company (though certainly more awesome than most
other companies).

> Recently Deb Cohen and the HR team have started thinking about where and how
> to add this sort of information to our new hire process and orientation.

This would've been great to have; perhaps we can have a refresher
course for those (like me) who weren't lucky enough to have this when
we were first hired (or for those who just want a refresher)? (Once it
all gets figured out, of course.)

-Nick

[Mitchell Baker]

On 5/9/12 11:56 AM, Nick Hurley wrote:
> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Mitchell Baker<mitc...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>> Nukeador
>>

>

> This would've been great to have; perhaps we can have a refresher
> course for those (like me) who weren't lucky enough to have this when
> we were first hired (or for those who just want a refresher)? (Once it
> all gets figured out, of course.)
>
> -Nick

Absolutely! and maybe you can help us test some ideas? (the price of
showing interest :-)

for example, i wonder if we might develop a program where whatever sort
of mentor / buddy system for new hires we have includes connections
between paid staff and a volunteer community member. It might need to
be something close to the work, or maybe if new hires have an interest
in a particular local that would be enough of a connection. Someting to
build human ties and doesn't feel constrained or made up.

At MozCamps there is a buddy system. It worked well for me. My buddy
is Gloria Meneses. At the first event the buddy system introduced us
and encouraged us to exchange some mail and introduce ourselves before
the event, and to have lunch and make sure to spend some time together
at the event. It was really helpful. Now she asks me questions
sometimes when she doesn't know the right person to contact, and i know
to do the same.

An early thought. I'm sure we can develop a bunch. Including some that
might lead to more contributors. It's amazing how having an people
understand your work can lead to new connections.

mitchell

[Santiago Hollmann]

El Wed May 9 17:51:41 2012, Mitchell Baker ha escrito:

>
> On 5/9/12 11:56 AM, Nick Hurley wrote:
>>

>> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Mitchell Baker<mitc...@mozilla.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Nukeador
>>>
>>
>
>
>>
>>

>> This would've been great to have; perhaps we can have a refresher
>> course for those (like me) who weren't lucky enough to have this when
>> we were first hired (or for those who just want a refresher)? (Once it
>> all gets figured out, of course.)
>>
>> -Nick
>
>

> Absolutely! and maybe you can help us test some ideas? (the price of
> showing interest :-)
>
> for example, i wonder if we might develop a program where whatever
> sort of mentor / buddy system for new hires we have includes
> connections between paid staff and a volunteer community member. It
> might need to be something close to the work, or maybe if new hires
> have an interest in a particular local that would be enough of a
> connection. Someting to build human ties and doesn't feel constrained
> or made up.
>
> At MozCamps there is a buddy system. It worked well for me. My buddy
> is Gloria Meneses. At the first event the buddy system introduced us
> and encouraged us to exchange some mail and introduce ourselves before
> the event, and to have lunch and make sure to spend some time together
> at the event. It was really helpful. Now she asks me questions
> sometimes when she doesn't know the right person to contact, and i
> know to do the same.
>
> An early thought. I'm sure we can develop a bunch. Including some that
> might lead to more contributors. It's amazing how having an people
> understand your work can lead to new connections.
>
> mitchell

> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance

Great idea! A buddy program would be nice and helpful. I don't know how
complicated it could be but we can figure it out.

Also, I was thinking about a "30 minutes video-conference" program. For
example, we have an IRC channel dedicated to this program (or do it on
every irc channel) where somebody (employee or volunteer) says:- "Hi,
anybody free to have a buddy meeting? My language is
english/spanish/etc". So, the other person says:- "I can" and for 30
minutes they discuss topics (we can have a topic list), learn a new
language or make a friendship. A good thing about this this program is
that we don't need to set up meetings or timezone hours and we allow
everyone to interact with everyone.

--
Santiago Hollmann

[Majken Connor]

I think more opportunities to connect in person as well would help. This
was one of the great things about summits. You could have the director of
one area talking to a contributor in a completely different area, and
sometimes they would even realize how their work affects each other. But on
a more direct scale, making it easier for (expecting?) teams to spend time
with their volunteers would be great.

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:18 PM, Santiago Hollmann <
santiago...@gmail.com> wrote:

> El Wed May 9 17:51:41 2012, Mitchell Baker ha escrito:
>
>
>> On 5/9/12 11:56 AM, Nick Hurley wrote:
>>
>>>

>>> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Mitchell Baker<mitc...@mozilla.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Nukeador
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>>

>>> This would've been great to have; perhaps we can have a refresher
>>> course for those (like me) who weren't lucky enough to have this when
>>> we were first hired (or for those who just want a refresher)? (Once it
>>> all gets figured out, of course.)
>>>
>>> -Nick
>>>
>>
>>

>> Absolutely! and maybe you can help us test some ideas? (the price of
>> showing interest :-)
>>
>> for example, i wonder if we might develop a program where whatever
>> sort of mentor / buddy system for new hires we have includes
>> connections between paid staff and a volunteer community member. It
>> might need to be something close to the work, or maybe if new hires
>> have an interest in a particular local that would be enough of a
>> connection. Someting to build human ties and doesn't feel constrained
>> or made up.
>>
>> At MozCamps there is a buddy system. It worked well for me. My buddy
>> is Gloria Meneses. At the first event the buddy system introduced us
>> and encouraged us to exchange some mail and introduce ourselves before
>> the event, and to have lunch and make sure to spend some time together
>> at the event. It was really helpful. Now she asks me questions
>> sometimes when she doesn't know the right person to contact, and i
>> know to do the same.
>>
>> An early thought. I'm sure we can develop a bunch. Including some that
>> might lead to more contributors. It's amazing how having an people
>> understand your work can lead to new connections.
>>
>> mitchell

>> ______________________________**_________________
>> governance mailing list
>> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
>> https://lists.mozilla.org/**listinfo/governance<https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance>

>>
>
> Great idea! A buddy program would be nice and helpful. I don't know how
> complicated it could be but we can figure it out.
>
> Also, I was thinking about a "30 minutes video-conference" program. For
> example, we have an IRC channel dedicated to this program (or do it on
> every irc channel) where somebody (employee or volunteer) says:- "Hi,
> anybody free to have a buddy meeting? My language is english/spanish/etc".
> So, the other person says:- "I can" and for 30 minutes they discuss topics
> (we can have a topic list), learn a new language or make a friendship. A
> good thing about this this program is that we don't need to set up
> meetings or timezone hours and we allow everyone to interact with everyone.
>
> --
> Santiago Hollmann
>

> t: @santihollmann <http://twitter.com/**santihollmann<http://twitter.com/santihollmann>
> >
> Piedra Libre! <http://piedralibre.wordpress.**com<http://piedralibre.wordpress.com>
> >
>
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> governance mailing list
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[Nick Hurley]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Mitchell Baker <mitc...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Absolutely!  and maybe you can help us test some ideas?  (the price of
> showing interest :-)

I'd be more than happy to help test ideas. I wouldn't have shown
interest if I weren't, well, interested!

> for example, i wonder if we might develop a program where whatever sort of
> mentor / buddy system for new hires we have includes connections between
> paid staff and a volunteer community member.   It might need to be something
> close to the work, or maybe if new hires have an interest in a particular
> local that would be enough of a connection.  Someting to build human ties
> and doesn't feel constrained or made up.

A buddy system definitely sounds like it could be helpful. Like you
said, just some way to connect both volunteers and paid staff who may
not have other ways of interacting (or who wouldn't realize how
beneficial it could be).

[willy...@mozilla-hispano.org]

Hi,

I totally agree with Nukeador. In fact, we have had some discussion for the last couple of months (mostly informal) about how paid staff are not trained enough that they are in a community and they should work in that way. But my point is that they should not work *with* a community or *for* a community, but *in* a community.

For example, I know some cases recently where we don't know that there were Spanish speakers hired recently and we don't have any conversation or just "hi, I'm me" with them. Yes, I know that there are a lot of people to track, but I think that a week at the begining to teach the tools, different communities, channels and even mailing lists (this reminds me about Persona and world-read) would be awesome to work better in community.

In the other hand, lastly we've seen some paid staff working with us (both virtually and in the Mozilla Hispano work day back in Buenos Aires) and that's great for two things:

1) New hires know how we are working, how we are organized and know more about us.

2) We have contacts in the case we need it (evangelism, webdev, QA…).

Regards

[willy...@mozilla-hispano.org]

[Mary C]

Really good discussion! I think knowing how to effectively work within the Mozilla community expands beyond employees who are new to new volunteers as well. Mitchell mentioned Debbie's work above and for those not at MozCamp LATAM, Debbie and I did an overview of Grow Mozilla (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16435035/debbie%20%2B%20mary%20talk.pdf). One ask at the end of the presentation was to help shape what a Mozilla orientation curriculum could look like: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/grow-moz-session Two specific questions that were asked:

* What skills do you need to contribute and/or grow?
* What content or subjects would you include in “Mozilla Orientation” curriculum to train up new paid and volunteer staff? Is there content that is region or or language specific?

David Boswell will also be helping drive this - he can chime in more, but wanted to share the etherpad in case folks want to start collecting these ideas so we can be sure to act on them :)

[Mary C]

On Wednesday, May 9, 2012 3:56:53 PM UTC-7, willy...@mozilla-hispano.org wrote:

[Mitchell Baker]

Yes, we'll have a bunch of regional MozCamps for this reason.

mitchell

[Nukeador]

2012/5/10 Mary C <mary....@gmail.com>

>
> Really good discussion! I think knowing how to effectively work within
> the Mozilla community expands beyond employees who are new to new
> volunteers as well. Mitchell mentioned Debbie's work above and for those
> not at MozCamp LATAM, Debbie and I did an overview of Grow Mozilla (
> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16435035/debbie%20%2B%20mary%20talk.pdf). One
> ask at the end of the presentation was to help shape what a Mozilla
> orientation curriculum could look like:
> https://etherpad.mozilla.org/grow-moz-session Two specific questions that
> were asked:
>
> * What skills do you need to contribute and/or grow?
> * What content or subjects would you include in “Mozilla Orientation”
> curriculum to train up new paid and volunteer staff? Is there content that
> is region or or language specific?
>

I've added some ideas about the "Mozilla Orientation" curriculum.

Also I think that doing video-chat between employees and volunteers
regularly can help too, letting volunteers to attend regular meetings
remotely via video. There are great meetings and talks just for employees
that would be nice to open to the rest of the community.

[Robert Kaiser]

Nick Hurley schrieb:

> I don't think that's my team's fault, but perhaps
> because the stuff we do (networking) is a little less visible than
> things like cool new firefox features or something

And still necko has a module owner who isn't paid by Mozilla. ;-)

Robert Kaiser

[Robert Kaiser]

Mitchell Baker schrieb:

> Absolutely! and maybe you can help us test some ideas? (the price of
> showing interest :-)

FWIW, as someone who has been in the community since 1999 and only
relatively recently (slightly more than a year) started contracting for
Mozilla, I'd surely be willing to help with efforts in that direction!

Robert Kaiser

[Nick Hurley]

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Robert Kaiser <ka...@kairo.at> wrote:
> Nick Hurley schrieb:

>
>> I don't think that's my team's fault, but perhaps
>> because the stuff we do (networking) is a little less visible than

>> things like cool new firefox features or something
>
>
> And still necko has a module owner who isn't paid by Mozilla. ;-)
>
> Robert Kaiser

Indeed! Hence why I said we only have (in my view, at least) LESS
volunteer interaction than it seems other groups do, not none at all
:-) (I knew someone would bring up Biesi in response to my comments at
some point...)

Of course, I could also be wrong entirely, and it could be that my
team has no less (or more) volunteer interaction than other
engineering teams. Just my perception.

-Nick

[Robert Kaiser]

Mary C schrieb:

> * What content or subjects would you include in “Mozilla Orientation” curriculum to train up new paid and volunteer staff? Is there content that is region or or language specific?

I like the fact here of making this something for new people both paid
and volunteer.
It should include the "History of Mozilla" talk of Mitchell from the San
Jose all-hands, either the recording from there or a newly made one of
that, this is really great insight to see where this all comes from.
There's probably a couple more good resources we have, I'll keep
thinking about those.

Thanks everyone for thinking about that!

Robert Kaiser

[Gervase Markham]

On 09/05/12 19:56, Nick Hurley wrote:
> This would've been great to have; perhaps we can have a refresher
> course for those (like me) who weren't lucky enough to have this when
> we were first hired (or for those who just want a refresher)? (Once it
> all gets figured out, of course.)

You may find this talk I gave at the last All Hands useful:
http://blog.gerv.net/2011/09/how-to-be-a-mozillian-how-to-work-in-community/

Gerv

[Gervase Markham]

On 09/05/12 11:38, Nukeador wrote:
> One of the things a lot of volunteers and some old employees noticed is
> that most new employees don't know about community or some of our values,
> and this leads to some problems regarding controversial decisions or lack
> of communication with the community. This is getting more noticed as we
> grow more and more, and from my point of view is one of the key problems
> mozilla has currently.

I certainly agree this is a problem, although it's not uniformly
distributed across Mozilla.

> As I've already pointed out in other threads, I think it's very important
> that when a new person is hired, he gets a mandatory formation about who we
> are, what we care about, our values (open source, open web...), why the
> community is a key part, who the community is and how employees are
> bringing a service to help the community and not the other way around. Also
> it would be interesting to actual employees that don't know this topics.

At the last MozCampEU in November 2011, Debbie Cohen told me that there
was a plan to create a unified onboarding process - that is, there would
be a set of "introduction to Mozilla" materials which were public, and
used both for new employees and new volunteers (and could be improved by
either). I believe this is something Dave Berz was working on. I'm not
sure what the current status is. Perhaps you could enquire how that
effort is going?

Gerv

[davidwboswell]

> David Boswell will also be helping drive this - he can chime in more

This thread is really interesting and the timing is great too.

I talked to both Dave Berz and Debbie this week about how to take the
Grow Mozilla effort and expand it to cover not just how to grow by
bringing more people into Mozilla, but also how to grow the skills of
Mozillians and grow our culture as more people join.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Grow

All of these issues are related and I think it's great seeing them
come together. For instance, I work with many Stewards (both paid and
unpaid) who want to bring volunteers into their projects and some need
assistance to learn how to do that and some also need help addressing
an issue with our culture that is preventing volunteers from getting
involved.

This would be a great discussion to include in the next Grow Mozilla
meeting on Thursday, May 17 at 10 AM Pacific. I'll also invite Dave
Berz to present about his Brain Builders work so we can see how that
could tie in to some of the ideas in this thread.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Grow/Meeting_05_17_12

David

[davidwboswell]

> You may find this talk I gave at the last All Hands useful:http://blog.gerv.net/2011/09/how-to-be-a-mozillian-how-to-work-in-com...

I've been tracking links like this that could be useful for people
interested in community building on the wiki at

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute#Guides_and_Documentation

Please feel free to add any thing else there that would be helpful.

David

[L. David Baron]

On Wednesday 2012-05-09 15:56 -0700, willy...@mozilla-hispano.org wrote:
> I totally agree with Nukeador. In fact, we have had some
> discussion for the last couple of months (mostly informal) about
> how paid staff are not trained enough that they are in a community
> and they should work in that way. But my point is that they should
> not work *with* a community or *for* a community, but *in* a
> community.

Absolutely. I agree this is important.

Back when I was not paid to work on Mozilla (which was long ago,
back when the people paid to work on Mozilla were working for
Netscape/AOL), this difference frequently bothered me: when it
seemed like employees were treating non-employees as a separate
group within the project, it felt somewhat like being treated as a
source of free labor rather than a participant, or at least like an
inherently second-class part of the project.

I want employees to view non-employees as colleagues rather than as
resources to be used.

However, many of the people in leadership positions in the project
are going to be employees; in many cases that's why they were hired.
And those in leadership positions should certainly help direct
others towards the work at which they'll be most effective. So I
think it's great for employees to direct others towards work that's
most useful (though when there's not an employment relationship
there is, of course, less ability to insist on it).

-David

--
𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
𝄢 Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂

[Anonymous.]

I'm totally agree with all the above discussions, actually I'm feel soo moved that to knowing there's other peoples in other regions faced the same community-employee problem as we do dealing with recently.

As the youngest region to have MoCo start, I was think it may help us a lot once the Mozilla open in our own country before, althought we'd actually thought of some hard point we'll have to cooperation with the company guys, and we'd set meeting before the company set up to discussion with the company manager and leader (we even had a document fulfill with the issues we think it may be problems), somehow it turns to be so depress that the actually situation is far more complicated as we thought before.

The problem we faced on the employment and community relationship is so much complicated these days. And sometimes I felt deeply upset and low on the company turned out to be not the same Mozilla as my imagination.

For ex., we feel that some of the company's project will going to formed another community, that is more official than we do. There's no mistake that we're just one part's of whole One Mozilla, and the company should serve all, but the company's projects with more resource both on mankind and money side, I'm so worried that it turned to be so success, that our community will hard to compared to in the future. (In other way I'm really eager to see that project of company to be success, it good to the whole Mozilla no mistake, only despite on our own existence people.)

Some of the problem comes from the company is going to do the same things we do before in the past years, it turned out to be kinds of competition between company and community. For example if the company is going to translate some lately news articles the same as community does before, the company do actually a good job and community will hard to catch, and company with resource is actually going to do better with no doubt. If the company making a portal sites on the local language to spreading Firefox and doing well on catching the eyeball of users, community sites is absolutely dimming out. If the company is going to held sessions and luctures in local school, it'll turned out to be far more large scale than we did years before and as we can do in the future.

Other problems emerging from the formal community people employee. We thought that a key contributor to join the company will be so good thing to be, take considered that the one doing so well these years as volunteer, to be an employee means he can works fully on Mozilla, no longer need to be part-time to earned living, the increase time will bring increase achievement of our, but it turn out to be my own dreaming. The employee has different mission and different duty as volunteer, he had to be serving 'the whole community' instead spending times on 'our own' community. In final we lost our most powerful and leader.

But it's definitely good to have a formal community peoples in local office, as we can cooperation much much much easier on this people than some other employees new to Mozilla. I just can't even imagine that I'd to called for open open please be more open the whole days to company, if I haven't faced it this year. We always think openness is the born to be of Mozilla, but it's NOT that way. It's really hard a style to live and to understand for formal non mozillians. The problem will be far more severe if the one without open in mind is on duty of marketing or direct related to the community, it will be a Nightmare to everyone, for that it'll absolutely increase the pressure of competition between formal community and company.

I'm absolutely totally agree that the employee should understand the Mozilla and out values, our working style and the most important, openness. Such attitude will ease the hard time for all of us, and enable the operation of community with company far more easier. I just can't imagine that I can know the monthly plan of SanFrancisco and Silicon Valley anytime but knowing nothing on local office's plan for next week. No one like the surprise, if it appear to be some competitive project on our own.

These months I'd happiness and sadness altogether, it really good to see the Mozilla widely spreading out and more new faces to meet, but sometimes I'll really sadness on some of the side effects a new company will brining, and how the company is different to what we thought. It's really not easy to all of us, both new employee, formal community employee and community people. We're still trying to find better way to go together, and to try to make it more open. I do believe that we can do it better and better, the things will more easy after the beginning monthes, and the strength of the Mozilla and internet will increase. It just not so easy as we all thought, and sometimes it hurts in the process of compromise.


Mitchell Baker於 2012年5月10日星期四UTC+8上午4時51分41秒寫道：

[fantasai]

On 05/09/2012 03:07 PM, Majken Connor wrote:
> I think more opportunities to connect in person as well would help. This
> was one of the great things about summits. You could have the director of
> one area talking to a contributor in a completely different area, and
> sometimes they would even realize how their work affects each other. But on
> a more direct scale, making it easier for (expecting?) teams to spend time
> with their volunteers would be great.

I once suggested opening up our work weeks to participation from
volunteers in the community, at least those that happen to be in
the area. Got a less than enthusiastic response...

~fantasai

[L. David Baron]

On Thursday 2012-05-17 22:04 -0700, fantasai wrote:
> On 05/09/2012 03:07 PM, Majken Connor wrote:

> >I think more opportunities to connect in person as well would help. This
> >was one of the great things about summits. You could have the director of
> >one area talking to a contributor in a completely different area, and
> >sometimes they would even realize how their work affects each other. But on
> >a more direct scale, making it easier for (expecting?) teams to spend time
> >with their volunteers would be great.
>

> I once suggested opening up our work weeks to participation from
> volunteers in the community, at least those that happen to be in
> the area. Got a less than enthusiastic response...

In Layout we've decided that we want to do this.

One problem, however, is that non-employees don't necessarily have
focus areas that match MoCo's organizational structure, so they may
not match a particular team. For example, we have some contributors
who focus on Web standards across layout, content, and Web API work;
it probably doesn't make sense to invite such contributors to all
the work weeks for those groups (too much travel), but then there's
the question of how to pick.

Then again, I think we have the same issue for employees, except
that we just automatically invite employees to the work weeks for
the piece of the org chart that they're in, whether or not that
makes sense in terms of what they're working on. (I think there's a
bit of tension here between wanting to plan travel in advance vs.
wanting to have meetings with a particular agenda and set of people
when that meeting is needed.)

[Majken Connor]

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 11:25 AM, L. David Baron <dba...@dbaron.org> wrote:

> On Thursday 2012-05-17 22:04 -0700, fantasai wrote:
> > On 05/09/2012 03:07 PM, Majken Connor wrote:

> > >I think more opportunities to connect in person as well would help. This
> > >was one of the great things about summits. You could have the director
> of
> > >one area talking to a contributor in a completely different area, and
> > >sometimes they would even realize how their work affects each other.
> But on
> > >a more direct scale, making it easier for (expecting?) teams to spend
> time
> > >with their volunteers would be great.
> >

> > I once suggested opening up our work weeks to participation from
> > volunteers in the community, at least those that happen to be in
> > the area. Got a less than enthusiastic response...
>
> In Layout we've decided that we want to do this.
>
> One problem, however, is that non-employees don't necessarily have
> focus areas that match MoCo's organizational structure, so they may
> not match a particular team. For example, we have some contributors
> who focus on Web standards across layout, content, and Web API work;
> it probably doesn't make sense to invite such contributors to all
> the work weeks for those groups (too much travel), but then there's
> the question of how to pick.
>
> Then again, I think we have the same issue for employees, except
> that we just automatically invite employees to the work weeks for
> the piece of the org chart that they're in, whether or not that
> makes sense in terms of what they're working on. (I think there's a
> bit of tension here between wanting to plan travel in advance vs.
> wanting to have meetings with a particular agenda and set of people
> when that meeting is needed.)
>
> -David
>
> --
> 𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
> 𝄢 Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂

> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>


This is good to hear! One other possible reason for the push back might be
because the people against it thought the invite was to have anyone from
the local community coming and going, which would take time away from
working having to answer their questions or catching them up. That said I
think it would be really great if whenever there was a workweek there was a
couple hours set aside for some sort of local event, either lightning talks
or a test event or that type of thing related to the work being done that
the community (maybe broadcast via air mozilla even) could attend.

[Mitchell Baker]

don't think that's the case today

mitchell

[fantasai]

On 05/18/2012 08:25 AM, L. David Baron wrote:
> On Thursday 2012-05-17 22:04 -0700, fantasai wrote:
>>
>> I once suggested opening up our work weeks to participation from
>> volunteers in the community, at least those that happen to be in
>> the area. Got a less than enthusiastic response...
>
> In Layout we've decided that we want to do this.

That's news to me! Last I heard was a bunch of reasons why we shouldn't.

> One problem, however, is that non-employees don't necessarily have
> focus areas that match MoCo's organizational structure, so they may
> not match a particular team. For example, we have some contributors
> who focus on Web standards across layout, content, and Web API work;
> it probably doesn't make sense to invite such contributors to all
> the work weeks for those groups (too much travel), but then there's
> the question of how to pick.

An easy place to start would be to simply make the work weeks open
to participation from any interested volunteers in the community.
Right now they're closed. Nobody knows when they happen or where,
and the community is neither asked nor encouraged to participate.
If they're open, then volunteers can show up to whichever work weeks
they can get to and want to participate in. Or show up for part
of the work week. Or whatever. You don't need to choose for them; if
participation is open, then they can choose for themselves. Just make
it clear what you're going to do ("we're working on layout together
in Toronto; you can come join us, but this is not an introductory
session"), and chances are you'll get the right people.

Sponsoring particular volunteers is a second step, and could be done
based on their interest, involvement, and need for logistical support*
for that particular work week. It's not a prerequisite for making the
work week open.

(* Sure, you can set the bar at "either handle the volunteers'
logistics like the employees', or don't invite them", but there could
be volunteers who live in the area, or who'll cover their own travel
out of pocket, or who just need a flight and will crash with a friend.
If there's someone particular you want at a work week and are willing
to pay for, offer to help and ask what they need help with. Sometimes
it's everything. And sometimes it's nothing. I've paid for plenty of
W3C travel out of pocket; in my case no one offered to help, but I
went anyway.)

~fantasai

[Gervase Markham]

On 18/05/12 21:55, fantasai wrote:
> An easy place to start would be to simply make the work weeks open
> to participation from any interested volunteers in the community.
> Right now they're closed. Nobody knows when they happen or where,
> and the community is neither asked nor encouraged to participate.

Indeed. It is hard to claim that work weeks are open when there is often
no external sign that they are actually happening.

I think we should apply an "assume good things will happen" principle
and start publishing the details of all work weeks, with an open
community invitation to attend and listen, and a polite admonishment to
respect the nature and purpose of the event. If we eventually get a case
where someone comes along who is net-negative, we may have to institute
some screening rules - but I hope that day will be a long time in
coming, if it ever comes.

Gerv

[Robert Kaiser]

Gervase Markham schrieb:

> Indeed. It is hard to claim that work weeks are open when there is often
> no external sign that they are actually happening.

BTW, that's not just an issue of "external" as in "outside the paid
circle of people" but also of "external" as in "outside the invited
people" in many cases. I had a few experiences of "oh, those guys have a
work week right now?" in the last few months, when it would have been
nice to know before, e.g. when I could have contacted some people before
about a topic they might be able to more easily talk about when they are
right there together in a room.
We should definitely have some public calendar of events that includes
things like work weeks.

Robert Kaiser

[Rubén Martín]

El 21/05/12 22:07, Robert Kaiser escribió:

> BTW, that's not just an issue of "external" as in "outside the paid
> circle of people" but also of "external" as in "outside the invited
> people" in many cases. I had a few experiences of "oh, those guys have
> a work week right now?" in the last few months, when it would have
> been nice to know before, e.g. when I could have contacted some people
> before about a topic they might be able to more easily talk about when
> they are right there together in a room.
> We should definitely have some public calendar of events that includes
> things like work weeks.

The future mozilla events calendar should help with that :)

Regards.

--
Rubén Martín [Nukeador]
Mozilla Reps Council Member
http://www.mozilla-hispano.org
http://twitter.com/mozilla_hispano
http://facebook.com/mozillahispano

[Gervase Markham]

On 21/05/12 21:30, Rubén Martín wrote:
> The future mozilla events calendar should help with that :)

Can you tell us when we might see this happen? :-) It doesn't sound like
something that requires much work; a Google calendar with a couple of
maintainers who have a shared email address, "newe...@mozilla.org",
would do the trick just fine.

Gerv

[Nukeador]

2012/5/22 Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org>

> Can you tell us when we might see this happen? :-) It doesn't sound like
> something that requires much work; a Google calendar with a couple of
> maintainers who have a shared email address, "newe...@mozilla.org",
> would do the trick just fine.
>

I don't have dates, from Aakash last post about it:

*Events Manager*: A platform to uplift and share all contributor-facing
> events in our community into one easy to find app. It’s purpose is for
> contributors to easily find and participate in any event happening in our
> community anywhere in the world at any given time.
>

http://aakash.doesthings.com/2012/03/19/community-tools-platforms-roadmap-2012/
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozillians/Events_Manager

[Majken Connor]

I think a single approach won't scale. I think a few things need to happen.

1. The global calendar needs to be several calendars so people can pick and
choose which ones to follow

2. The spaces should have calendars and since work weeks spill into these
areas those would be a very good place to track local work weeks. We were
just discussing this at the Toronto community meeting. Practically speaking
we should know when there is a work week in the Toronto office because then
we know the space isn't available for us to use.

and a big one:

3. Teams need to announce their work weeks to their communities, let them
know in advance when, where and what they're hoping to accomplish

A change in attitude will make the tools follow. Having the best tool for
the job isn't very helpful if people aren't on board with the idea that
this is something that should be public at least to their public channels.
This change can also happen right now without new tools.

[:mrz]

I'll add that event scheduling is a cross-group coordination.

Air Mozilla, Moz Spaces both have the same needs and both are working together to create some sort of calendar. It extends beyond just those two.

I imagine I could pop up in some part of the world, go to some website that geolocates me and tells me about all the nearby Mozilla/Open Web things going on.

We're not there yet. I'm lacking developer resources and I'm trying to figure out how to get the same with less resources.

[:mrz]

[Gervase Markham]

All of that would be great, but can't we solve at least some of the
problem with an interim solution along the lines I proposed? Something
now and a pony later is better than nothing now and a pony later,
particularly if the date of arrival of the pony is hard to determine.

Gerv

[:mrz]

> All of that would be great, but can't we solve at least some of the
> problem with an interim solution along the lines I proposed?

Yes. That certainly doesn't block on me.

I think Ryan and Ben did a great job with https://webmaker.org/en-US/events/ and we're starting to talk to them about taking that and expanding it. I think a Mozilla-wide community events platform is important.

Moving as fast as I can and welcome anyone who wants to volunteer some time here (and you all know my email address).

[Gervase Markham]

On 24/05/12 05:07, :mrz wrote:
> I think Ryan and Ben did a great job with
> https://webmaker.org/en-US/events/ and we're starting to talk to them
> about taking that and expanding it. I think a Mozilla-wide
> community events platform is important.

That's great for their use case, although I don't see a calendar-like
view. I guess we need to decide what we want - do we need some
EventBrite/MeetUp like thing? Or something simpler that just tells you
when events are happening and who you should contact if you are
interested in going?

> Moving as fast as I can and welcome anyone who wants to volunteer
> some time here (and you all know my email address).

The reason I suggested a curated Google Calendar is that I don't have
time to contribute, and it's a solution which doesn't require that much
time from anyone. I think there's a good chance we could find a couple
of volunteers to do the curation, and it requires zero software to be
written and could be set up tomorrow. I'd be happy to blog to try and
find some people.

Gerv

[Robert Kaiser]

Gervase Markham schrieb:

> That's great for their use case, although I don't see a calendar-like
> view. I guess we need to decide what we want - do we need some
> EventBrite/MeetUp like thing? Or something simpler that just tells you
> when events are happening and who you should contact if you are
> interested in going?

I'd already be happy with a wiki list of all those work weeks, MozCamps
and similar things, possible even the tentative planned ones with an
appropriate notice. That is, as long as there some way to make sure that
really all those events get entered into that list.

Robert Kaiser

[Nukeador]

2012/5/24 Robert Kaiser <ka...@kairo.at>

> I'd already be happy with a wiki list of all those work weeks, MozCamps
> and similar things, possible even the tentative planned ones with an
> appropriate notice. That is, as long as there some way to make sure that
> really all those events get entered into that list.
>

Mozilla wiki has a Semantic Extension that can be easily used for sorting
events and having an "add your event" form, It's what we use for Mozilla
Hispano:

https://www.mozilla-hispano.org/documentacion/Eventos

That could be a solution while we have a complete app which is able to
syndicate calendars and other advanced stuff.

[Majken Connor]

I know this is a bit more overhead but it would be nice if Mozilla hosted
the calendars, not google. I know it's a bit moot when people will check
the calendars through google anyway, but Mozilla has (and has stopped
supporting) the only great cross-platform and free calendar app that's out
there and still has Lightning (though omg I need a standalone cal app). Now
google has a total lock-in because it's the only user friendly and free app
that's easily accessible. This is one area that I feel very passionately
that Mozilla could and should be doing more to fight for users rights to
own their own data and against a monopoly.

The semantic extension for the wiki is *so great* we've done some awesome
things with it for the Reps Program. The forms make it really easy to keep
things up to date, too.

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 8:59 AM, Nukeador <nuke...@mozilla-hispano.org>wrote:

> 2012/5/24 Robert Kaiser <ka...@kairo.at>
>
> > I'd already be happy with a wiki list of all those work weeks, MozCamps
> > and similar things, possible even the tentative planned ones with an
> > appropriate notice. That is, as long as there some way to make sure that
> > really all those events get entered into that list.
> >
>
> Mozilla wiki has a Semantic Extension that can be easily used for sorting
> events and having an "add your event" form, It's what we use for Mozilla
> Hispano:
>
> https://www.mozilla-hispano.org/documentacion/Eventos
>
> That could be a solution while we have a complete app which is able to
> syndicate calendars and other advanced stuff.
>

> Regards.
> --
> Rubén Martín (Nukeador)
> Mozilla Reps Council member
> http://mozilla-hispano.org
> http://twitter.com/mozilla_hispano
> http://facebook.com/mozillahispano

[:mrz]

On Thursday, May 24, 2012 7:42:02 AM UTC-7, Majken Connor wrote:
> I know this is a bit more overhead but it would be nice if Mozilla hosted
> the calendars,

Great. File an IT bug for a Zimbra-hosted calendar!

The problem with Wikis, for me, is a consumption problem. I tend to look at a calendar when I think of calendars of events, not a wiki. One ends up in iCal & my iOS & Android devices. One doesn't.

[:mrz]

On Thursday, May 24, 2012 7:42:02 AM UTC-7, Majken Connor wrote:

> I know this is a bit more overhead but it would be nice if Mozilla hosted
> the calendars,

[:mrz]

On Thursday, May 24, 2012 3:08:51 AM UTC-7, Gervase Markham wrote:
> On 24/05/12 05:07, :mrz wrote:
> > I think Ryan and Ben did a great job with
> > https://webmaker.org/en-US/events/ and we're starting to talk to them
> > about taking that and expanding it. I think a Mozilla-wide
> > community events platform is important.
>
> That's great for their use case, although I don't see a calendar-like
> view.

Dude, that's why I said "expanding it" :) You don't see it today but you might tomorrow.

> I guess we need to decide what we want - do we need some
> EventBrite/MeetUp like thing? Or something simpler that just tells you
> when events are happening and who you should contact if you are
> interested in going?

"Yes"

I want to fly to Chicago, goto events.mozilla.org, geolocate myself and see what's happening around me tonight. I might even want to filter based on my interests. I might even want to click on an event and figure out details & contact info (and maybe that's on EventBrite).

I might even want to build my own ics subscription to add to my calendar of choice.

I might even want to embed this on a wiki (!).

If I can find some time, I'll start a different discussion on this topic.

[:mrz]

On Thursday, May 24, 2012 3:08:51 AM UTC-7, Gervase Markham wrote:

> On 24/05/12 05:07, :mrz wrote:
> > I think Ryan and Ben did a great job with
> > https://webmaker.org/en-US/events/ and we're starting to talk to them
> > about taking that and expanding it. I think a Mozilla-wide
> > community events platform is important.
>
> That's great for their use case, although I don't see a calendar-like
> view.

Dude, that's why I said "expanding it" :) You don't see it today but you might tomorrow.

> I guess we need to decide what we want - do we need some
> EventBrite/MeetUp like thing? Or something simpler that just tells you
> when events are happening and who you should contact if you are
> interested in going?

[Majken Connor]

filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=758239

Hope it's ok, please add/edit!

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 11:44 AM, :mrz <m...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, May 24, 2012 3:08:51 AM UTC-7, Gervase Markham wrote:

> > On 24/05/12 05:07, :mrz wrote:
> > > I think Ryan and Ben did a great job with
> > > https://webmaker.org/en-US/events/ and we're starting to talk to them
> > > about taking that and expanding it. I think a Mozilla-wide
> > > community events platform is important.
> >
> > That's great for their use case, although I don't see a calendar-like
> > view.
>

> Dude, that's why I said "expanding it" :) You don't see it today but you
> might tomorrow.
>

> > I guess we need to decide what we want - do we need some
> > EventBrite/MeetUp like thing? Or something simpler that just tells you
> > when events are happening and who you should contact if you are
> > interested in going?
>

> "Yes"
>
> I want to fly to Chicago, goto events.mozilla.org, geolocate myself and
> see what's happening around me tonight. I might even want to filter based
> on my interests. I might even want to click on an event and figure out
> details & contact info (and maybe that's on EventBrite).
>
> I might even want to build my own ics subscription to add to my calendar
> of choice.
>
> I might even want to embed this on a wiki (!).
>
> If I can find some time, I'll start a different discussion on this topic.

[Rubén Martín]

El 24/05/12 17:39, :mrz escribió:

> The problem with Wikis, for me, is a consumption problem. I tend to look at a calendar when I think of calendars of events, not a wiki. One ends up in iCal & my iOS & Android devices. One doesn't.

Well, in this case, the Semantic Wiki can generate ical or rss files
with the populated information, so you can forget about visiting the
wiki anymore. But, as I said, this would be just a temporal tool while
the Events Manager App is developed (5-6 months?)

[Henri Sivonen]

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 12:19 PM, L. David Baron <dba...@dbaron.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday 2012-05-09 15:56 -0700, willy...@mozilla-hispano.org wrote:
>> I totally agree with Nukeador. In fact, we have had some
>> discussion for the last couple of months (mostly informal) about
>> how paid staff are not trained enough that they are in a community
>> and they should work in that way. But my point is that they should
>> not work *with* a community or *for* a community, but *in* a
>> community.
>
> Absolutely.  I agree this is important.

I think working *in* the community and in the open isn't just a matter
of paid versus non-paid. It's also a matter of Mountain View/San
Francisco/Toronto versus everywhere else (or maybe just Mountain
View/San Francisco versus everywhere else).

I got involved in 1999 without getting paid, first got paid to work on
Firefox in 2006 but not by Mozilla, first got paid by Mozilla but not
to work on Firefox later in 2006 and first got paid by Mozilla to work
on Firefox in 2008. So I've been around for a long time and I've done
stuff with without getting paid and with getting paid by Mozilla and
by someone other than Mozilla. For all this time, I've never been
based in any Mozilla office (never been an employee of Mozilla).

>From my vantage point, it looks like over the last three or so years
of unprecedented growth in the number of staff Mozilla has become more
opaque both to people who are not getting paid by Mozilla to
participate and to people who are getting paid by Mozilla as
contractors or employees but not in one of the largest offices.
Sometimes, it feels like the gap between the theory of how the Mozilla
open source project operates and the practice is wider now than it was
in the Netscape days. Since I don't work at one of the large offices
(Mountain View, San Francisco and perhaps Toronto), I can only make
guesses about why this has been. My guesses are:

1) When the number of people at one office becomes sufficiently large
especially when the whole team is located in one office, ad hoc
face-to-face discussion with the people who are there just happens and
people elsewhere are excluded as a side effect.

2) When new hires aren't drawn from pre-existing contributors and
start at an office where you can get stuff done by communicating
within the office, without specific openness and community
participation training it might be easy for new hires to discuss
things at the Mountain View or San Francisco office instead of
adopting and "everyone is remote" mindset and posting to mailing lists
(and potentially embarrassing themselves in a forum that's publicly
archived forever).

3) It seems that some people who have been around for a long time and
who started in the Netscape days outside Netscape (i.e. people who
you'd expect to be more openness-oriented than an average new hire)
have been disappointed in the value the project gets out of being open
to contributions that aren't razor focused on Mozilla's Web mission
and have shifted towards Firefox product-orientation and away from
treating the Mozilla project as a common technology provider that has
a variety of stakeholders.

4) Paid developer time has consolidated under Mozilla's payroll when
previously IBM, Red Hat, Sun and Novell contributed paid engineer time
on a level that required (Netscape and subsequently Mozilla) to
coordinate more with people who were working on the project full-time
but didn't belong into the same management structure.

5) As Mozilla has become bigger, Mozilla does more things and now
there's more to track and observe, so even at the same level of
openness as before, it looks like things are more opaque because they
are harder to keep track of.

I feel is hard to say anything about this without it appearing as
general "why wasn't I consulted" whining. (See
http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html ) However, I think it is a problem
that Mozilla seems to want to be an open and global community while it
seems to become more opaque and Bay Area-centric. I think it's a
problem if the gap between the aspirational Mozilla and the actual
Mozilla widens accidentally instead of a conscious decision about what
Mozilla wants to be like. I don't think all the points I mentioned
above are necessarily bad. In particular, #1 and #5 are probably
natural and impossible to avoid and #3 might actually be the best
option given the circumstances. However, as a person who is remote, I
wish new hires especially in the largest offices were trained to
think in terms of "everyone is remote" and discussing things in the
open as opposed to face-to-face in one large office or in a
network-based but behind-NDA channel.

(I expected the launch of the San Francisco office to boost the
"everyone is remote" mindset, since some people would be in San
Francisco and others in Mountain View of the set of people that were
previously all in Mountain View. However, from outside the Bay Area,
it doesn't look like the launch of the San Francisco office boosted
the "everyone is remote" mindset. Or maybe it did and things would be
even more opaque if all the growth had happened in Mountain View.)

> However, many of the people in leadership positions in the project
> are going to be employees; in many cases that's why they were hired.

To me, this seems like another gap between what Mozilla is like in
theory and what Mozilla is like in practice. I'm not saying that this
is a bad thing (I think Mozilla needs to hire talent that's not
suitably already at hand in the Mozilla community), but it seems like
a gap between theory and practice anyway. May be the way to close the
gap would be to stipulate that Mozilla-the-open-source-project isn't a
meritocracy in the sense of only merit earned in the project, but
merit from elsewhere is portable by the means of the
Mozilla-the-entity-with-HR hiring process recognizing merit earned
outside the project as part of the hiring process.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsiv...@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

[L. David Baron]

On Monday 2012-05-28 15:19 +0300, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 12:19 PM, L. David Baron <dba...@dbaron.org> wrote:
> > On Wednesday 2012-05-09 15:56 -0700, willy...@mozilla-hispano.org wrote:
> >> I totally agree with Nukeador. In fact, we have had some
> >> discussion for the last couple of months (mostly informal) about
> >> how paid staff are not trained enough that they are in a community
> >> and they should work in that way. But my point is that they should
> >> not work *with* a community or *for* a community, but *in* a
> >> community.
> >
> > Absolutely.  I agree this is important.
>
> I think working *in* the community and in the open isn't just a matter
> of paid versus non-paid. It's also a matter of Mountain View/San
> Francisco/Toronto versus everywhere else (or maybe just Mountain
> View/San Francisco versus everywhere else).

I think it's actually less a matter of place than a matter of time
zone and of synchronous vs. asynchronous decision making. I don't
see a lot of things being decided in side conversations at the
office, but I do see a lot done in meetings (with phone/video,
though often such that the video is only accessible to employees),
on IRC, and in Bugzilla (which is technically asynchronous but very
hard to find or follow or participate in later given its linear
model and its spread across huge numbers of bug reports). I think
some of that comes down to people wanting to choose who they want
involved in a discussion, and I think it's also related to a bunch
of established decision making processes being meeting-based (e.g.,
triage, despite the promise that the switch back to meeting based
triage for rapid-release would only be temporary).

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 10:18 AM, L. David Baron <dba...@dbaron.org> wrote:
>
> I think it's actually less a matter of place than a matter of time
> zone and of synchronous vs. asynchronous decision making.

I am (a) remote and (b) in an unusual timezone, and I concur that the
latter is a bigger handicap.

Notably, during the southern hemisphere summer I have an easier time
of it because, thanks to daylight savings, my clock is only 5 hours
different from California, but in the winter it's 7 hours different
and so I overlap with North Americans a lot less.

Nick

[Gervase Markham]

On 28/05/12 13:19, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> From my vantage point, it looks like over the last three or so years
> of unprecedented growth in the number of staff Mozilla has become more
> opaque both to people who are not getting paid by Mozilla to
> participate and to people who are getting paid by Mozilla as
> contractors or employees but not in one of the largest offices.
> Sometimes, it feels like the gap between the theory of how the Mozilla
> open source project operates and the practice is wider now than it was
> in the Netscape days.

I think there is desire at the top that this not be the case - if we can
believe Gary's keynote at the last employee All Hands (and I have no
reason to doubt him). But I'm not certain that it's working itself out
on the ground.

> 2) When new hires aren't drawn from pre-existing contributors and
> start at an office where you can get stuff done by communicating
> within the office, without specific openness and community
> participation training it might be easy for new hires to discuss
> things at the Mountain View or San Francisco office instead of
> adopting and "everyone is remote" mindset and posting to mailing lists
> (and potentially embarrassing themselves in a forum that's publicly
> archived forever).

I think this is a big factor - lack of understanding of how we do
things. I shouldn't be having discussions in bugs where I have to
explain that it's not a good thing that work weeks are employees-only,
and people shouldn't be using the word "community" in a way which means
"the people we don't pay".

> 3) It seems that some people who have been around for a long time and
> who started in the Netscape days outside Netscape (i.e. people who
> you'd expect to be more openness-oriented than an average new hire)
> have been disappointed in the value the project gets out of being open
> to contributions that aren't razor focused on Mozilla's Web mission
> and have shifted towards Firefox product-orientation and away from
> treating the Mozilla project as a common technology provider that has
> a variety of stakeholders.

That is perceptive; however, as you hint, I think we need to consider
whether they may be right about this. Mozilla is playing for high stakes
- the future of the open web. In that light, whether (to take a random
example) Songbird succeeds in making a nice media player, or Red Hat
Linux uses NSS as a system-wide library for all crypto, or Camino
manages to deal with changes in Gecko, are not so important.

The real crunch comes when the needs of non-core objectives require time
or attention from people who would otherwise be working on core
objectives, with the difficulty being that sometimes only those people
are capable of doing whatever thing needs doing.

> option given the circumstances. However, as a person who is remote, I
> wish new hires especially in the largest offices were trained to
> think in terms of "everyone is remote" and discussing things in the
> open as opposed to face-to-face in one large office or in a
> network-based but behind-NDA channel.

One thing which is quite frustrating is that 12 months ago there was a
lot of talk about doing an onboarding process which featured this in a
big way, and would contain resources shared between employee onboarding
and community onboarding. But nothing has come of it - and, what's more,
the development of those resources is not happening in the open either.
It's impossible to tell if any progress has been made, and it's
impossible to find out how to help. We now have a large People team, but
their electronic community visibility is close to zero. (They do go to
MozCamps.) They announce things on Yammer. :-|

Gerv

[Majken Connor]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 6:10 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 28/05/12 13:19, Henri Sivonen wrote:

> > From my vantage point, it looks like over the last three or so years
> > of unprecedented growth in the number of staff Mozilla has become more
> > opaque both to people who are not getting paid by Mozilla to
> > participate and to people who are getting paid by Mozilla as
> > contractors or employees but not in one of the largest offices.
> > Sometimes, it feels like the gap between the theory of how the Mozilla
> > open source project operates and the practice is wider now than it was
> > in the Netscape days.
>

> I think there is desire at the top that this not be the case - if we can
> believe Gary's keynote at the last employee All Hands (and I have no
> reason to doubt him). But I'm not certain that it's working itself out
> on the ground.
>

> > 2) When new hires aren't drawn from pre-existing contributors and
> > start at an office where you can get stuff done by communicating
> > within the office, without specific openness and community
> > participation training it might be easy for new hires to discuss
> > things at the Mountain View or San Francisco office instead of
> > adopting and "everyone is remote" mindset and posting to mailing lists
> > (and potentially embarrassing themselves in a forum that's publicly
> > archived forever).
>

> I think this is a big factor - lack of understanding of how we do
> things. I shouldn't be having discussions in bugs where I have to
> explain that it's not a good thing that work weeks are employees-only,
> and people shouldn't be using the word "community" in a way which means
> "the people we don't pay".
>

> > 3) It seems that some people who have been around for a long time and
> > who started in the Netscape days outside Netscape (i.e. people who
> > you'd expect to be more openness-oriented than an average new hire)
> > have been disappointed in the value the project gets out of being open
> > to contributions that aren't razor focused on Mozilla's Web mission
> > and have shifted towards Firefox product-orientation and away from
> > treating the Mozilla project as a common technology provider that has
> > a variety of stakeholders.
>

> That is perceptive; however, as you hint, I think we need to consider
> whether they may be right about this. Mozilla is playing for high stakes
> - the future of the open web. In that light, whether (to take a random
> example) Songbird succeeds in making a nice media player, or Red Hat
> Linux uses NSS as a system-wide library for all crypto, or Camino
> manages to deal with changes in Gecko, are not so important.
>
> The real crunch comes when the needs of non-core objectives require time
> or attention from people who would otherwise be working on core
> objectives, with the difficulty being that sometimes only those people
> are capable of doing whatever thing needs doing.
>

> > option given the circumstances. However, as a person who is remote, I
> > wish new hires especially in the largest offices were trained to
> > think in terms of "everyone is remote" and discussing things in the
> > open as opposed to face-to-face in one large office or in a
> > network-based but behind-NDA channel.
>

> One thing which is quite frustrating is that 12 months ago there was a
> lot of talk about doing an onboarding process which featured this in a
> big way, and would contain resources shared between employee onboarding
> and community onboarding. But nothing has come of it - and, what's more,
> the development of those resources is not happening in the open either.
> It's impossible to tell if any progress has been made, and it's
> impossible to find out how to help. We now have a large People team, but
> their electronic community visibility is close to zero. (They do go to
> MozCamps.) They announce things on Yammer. :-|
>
> Gerv

> _______________________________________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
>

It's really great to see this discussion. There is definitely a gap in some
places between what Mozilla says it does and what it really does, and the
gaps are different depending on where you look. Which of course is
natural. For me, for a while, I think the biggest problem is that it has
just been taken for granted that Mozilla does things in certain ways and no
one is making sure it actually happens. I don't think this problem needs to
be fixed through calling anyone out or shaming anyone, but it's my
impression that's why these types of evaluation have been avoided - people
are doing their best, give them the benefit of the doubt. But we still have
all sorts of other evaluations even when people are doing their best
because we know it helps people stay focused.

I think the brand video (
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/video/?video=brand ) does a really
amazing job at listing the best ways Mozilla is different, it could be as
simple as typing out the script and asking how a team is living up to those
points, and if there are ways it could do better. I think the lines about
being "fiercely unconventional" not holding "rockstars" above anyone else
and doing things in the "open" are especially relevant to this conversation.

[:mrz]

> One thing which is quite frustrating is that 12 months ago there was a
> lot of talk about doing an onboarding process which featured this in a
> big way, and would contain resources shared between employee onboarding
> and community onboarding. But nothing has come of it - and, what's more,
> the development of those resources is not happening in the open either.

You and I run in some of the same circles but somehow I know that there has been progress. I know Dave talked about it at MozCamp LATAM. I know People is looking at www.silkroad.com.

Perhaps this is something where "we" (the Community) can sit down and interview various People people and help communicate this process?

[:mrz]

> One thing which is quite frustrating is that 12 months ago there was a
> lot of talk about doing an onboarding process which featured this in a
> big way, and would contain resources shared between employee onboarding
> and community onboarding. But nothing has come of it - and, what's more,
> the development of those resources is not happening in the open either.

[davidwboswell]

> I know Dave talked about it at MozCamp LATAM.  I know People is looking
> at www.silkroad.com.

FWIW, Dave from the People team also came to the last Grow Mozilla
discussion and talked about their onboarding and learning and
development efforts. Notes from that are at

https://etherpad.mozilla.org/grow-mozilla-notes-05-17-12

I'll reach out to their team again and suggest that they post more
about their plans and take part in more discussions about this issue.

David

[Gervase Markham]

On 29/05/12 17:20, :mrz wrote:
> You and I run in some of the same circles but somehow I know that
> there has been progress. I know Dave talked about it at MozCamp
> LATAM.

OK. I wasn't able to be there (along with, numerically, most of the
Mozilla community). Is there a recording?

> I know People is looking at www.silkroad.com.

I didn't know that. Their onboarding product:
http://www.silkroad.com/HR_Solutions/Onboarding-Software/Overview.html
looks like it's more about the paperwork than the "indoctrination", but
perhaps I've missed something. I hope that whatever they provide would
be compatible with a collaborative and interative approach to course
development. I suspect they have more traditional companies in mind when
creating their offering.

> Perhaps this is something where "we" (the Community) can sit down and
> interview various People people and help communicate this process?

That would be awesome. I've offered to help them do this in the open in
the past, and that offer still stands.

Gerv

[Gervase Markham]

On 29/05/12 22:39, davidwboswell wrote:
> https://etherpad.mozilla.org/grow-mozilla-notes-05-17-12

says:

> Mozilla Brain Builders and new hire orientation changes: Dave Berz
> reports:
>
> * all Mozillians can join orientation

Great :-)

> * Is there an additional orientation we are working on for Mozillians
> that have already been hired?

Did this question ever get an answer?

> * DBoswell asks: how are community members invited to onboarding
> process - could we tie it in to conversion points for contributors?
>
> * DBerz - leads can invite contributors, looks to employees to weigh
> in.

This seems strange to me. This is an orientation process - therefore, by
definition (although there are some existing community members who may
want/need to take it) it's aimed at people who are new, tentatively
getting involved and little known. If you have to have done enough to
come to the attention of a lead, then you are already past the best
point of orientation.

Also, why is an invitation process necessary at all? Why can't people
just come along and use the resources at their leisure when they want?
This seems to me to be an unfortunate consequence of the tool choice.
Even if we are rolling out Silk Road for the paperwork parts of
onboarding, it would be good to understand what advantages it provides
specifically for the orientation program over e.g. a simple organized
set of wiki pages with things to read and pointers to videos to watch etc.

> * New resources: Safari books online (tech, business/self-help &
> video) Rosetta Stone (language learning program) - available to
> community via mobb at mozilla dot com - open to hundreds more - core
> contributors

Other than these notes, can someone point me at the publicity for these
excellent programs? I'm happy to admit I may have missed it; but, if
not, let's do some. :-)

Gerv

[Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu]

As a non-employee who bumps into this thread by accident and doesn't
really think Mozilla as of now isn't open to its community, my
impression is that some people talk about this in a very abstract way
(perhaps intentionally?) under the "employees and the community
relationship" umbrella. I would like to help by making some of the
problem statements clearer.

I do agree that thinking in a broad sense and coming up with a general
solution such as training and HR-process change have some value, but
some specific problems do have easier solutions, or so I believe.

(12/05/10 6:56), willy...@mozilla-hispano.org wrote:
> I totally agree with Nukeador. In fact, we have had some discussion
> for the last couple of months (mostly informal) about how paid staff
> are not trained enough that they are in a community and they should
> work in that way. But my point is that they should not work *with* a
> community or *for* a community, but *in* a community.

This seems a bit vague to see what the problem is, from a outsider's
point of view...

> For example, I know some cases recently where we don't know that
> there were Spanish speakers hired recently and we don't have any
> conversation or just "hi, I'm me" with them. Yes, I know that there
> are a lot of people to track, but I think that a week at the begining
> to teach the tools, different communities, channels and even mailing
> lists (this reminds me about Persona and world-read) would be awesome
> to work better in community.

Problem 1: When a speakers of a particular language gets hired by MoCo,
the community of that language don't get noticed.

Solution 1.1 (proposed by willyaranda):

A week for the new hire at the begining to teach the tools, different
communities, channels and even mailing lists (this reminds me about
Persona and world-read).

Solution 1.2 (proposed by kennyluck, me):

When a new person is hired, the HR person, after querying what languages
the new hired speaks and getting permission of the new hire, sends a
canned notice to the mailing list of the relevant community or community
leader.

(12/05/18 4:27), Anonymous. wrote:
> For ex., we feel that some of the company's project will going to
> formed another community, that is more official than we do. There's
> no mistake that we're just one part's of whole One Mozilla, and the
> company should serve all, but the company's projects with more
> resource both on mankind and money side, I'm so worried that it
> turned to be so success, that our community will hard to compared to
> in the future. (In other way I'm really eager to see that project of
> company to be success, it good to the whole Mozilla no mistake, onl
> despite on our own existence people.)
> [snip some other statements]

Problem 2: MoCo forms a competitive and official community, local site,
translated material.

This seems like the question of a higher level relating to the direction
of the MoCo, and certainly has very little, if at all, to do with
individual training and hiring process.

This problem doesn't seem to be addressed in this thread.

> Other problems emerging from the formal community people employee. We
> thought that a key contributor to join the company will be so good
> thing to be, take considered that the one doing so well these years
> as volunteer, to be an employee means he can works fully on Mozilla,
> no longer need to be part-time to earned living, the increase time
> will bring increase achievement of our, but it turn out to be my own
> dreaming. The employee has different mission and different duty as
> volunteer, he had to be serving 'the whole community' instead
> spending times on 'our own' community. In final we lost our most
> powerful and leader.

Problem 3: Community members *changed* after getting hired.

This seems to be mostly relevant to uninteresting personal matter, but
perhaps we should have a collection of "how does my role in the Mozilla
community get changed after I get hired?" statements like the ones we
have about "how do I get involved in Mozilla?".

(12/05/18 4:27), Anonymous. wrote:
> I just can't imagine that I can know the monthly plan of San Francisco
> and Silicon Valley anytime but knowing nothing on local office's plan
> for next week. No one like the surprise, if it appear to be some
> competitive project on our own.

Problem 4: Monthly plans are not open to the public.

I do think most engineering teams work in public mode. Whether there are
exceptions I don't know. Some other teams do need to operate
confidentially because they need to do so (mostly marketing and
business-relevant teams, I think). Therefore, either this problem is
already covered by Problem 2 or this is just asking too far.

The opposite question is: do some Mozilla community people think
everything should be all public, including all business details of
partners and so forth? If yes, do we have relevant material to say this
is not beneficial to the community, if every adopted?

(12/05/18 13:04), fantasai wrote:
> I once suggested opening up our work weeks to participation from
> volunteers in the community, at least those that happen to be in
> the area. Got a less than enthusiastic response...

Problem 5: Work weeks (and perhaps some other employee-central events)
are not open to the public.

This problem seems to be properly addressed with various solutions in
this thread already. This is an interesting one and I hope its progress
can be tracked in some way.

(12/05/29 8:00), Nicholas Nethercote wrote:
> I am (a) remote and (b) in an unusual timezone, and I concur that the
> latter is a bigger handicap.

Problem 6: Timezone/Remote locations makes it harder for non-paid
contributor to contribute like an employee.

Solution 6 (proposed by Henri):

New hires especially in the largest offices should be trained to think

in terms of "everyone is remote" and discussing things in the open as
opposed to face-to-face in one large office or in a network-based but
behind-NDA channel.

dbaron also identifies meeting-based decision making as a source of
problems.



I don't mean to turn down some branches of discussions in terms of my
own interpretation and conclusion, but this thread has grown into a big
one with some problems properly addressed, some not, some I can't
identify problems. So this is just my try to make a summary and
potential revive some problems that have not been addressed.



Cheers,
Kenny

[Irvin]

On 2012年6月4日Monday at 上午6:28, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu wrote:

>
> (12/05/18 4:27), Anonymous. wrote:
> > I just can't imagine that I can know the monthly plan of San Francisco
> > and Silicon Valley anytime but knowing nothing on local office's plan
> > for next week. No one like the surprise, if it appear to be some
> > competitive project on our own.
>
>
>
> Problem 4: Monthly plans are not open to the public.
>
> I do think most engineering teams work in public mode. Whether there are
> exceptions I don't know. Some other teams do need to operate
> confidentially because they need to do so (mostly marketing and
> business-relevant teams, I think). Therefore, either this problem is
> already covered by Problem 2 or this is just asking too far.
>
> The opposite question is: do some Mozilla community people think
> everything should be all public, including all business details of
> partners and so forth? If yes, do we have relevant material to say this
> is not beneficial to the community, if every adopted?
>

I personally think not everything should be all public, but we need to do our best on most of the things not confident.
The problem is, are we try at all? Or Are every staff in mozilla think so?
At least some of the Mozilla branch not as open as we thought. Is it acceptable?

After all, we can formed a team to check the openness and reachable of all office,
make somebody of the office notice of the problem if it exist, should we?

[Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu]

(12/06/04 11:06), Irvin wrote:
> On 2012年6月4日Monday at 上午6:28, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu wrote:
>> Problem 4: Monthly plans are not open to the public.
>>
>> I do think most engineering teams work in public mode. Whether there are
>> exceptions I don't know. Some other teams do need to operate
>> confidentially because they need to do so (mostly marketing and
>> business-relevant teams, I think). Therefore, either this problem is
>> already covered by Problem 2 or this is just asking too far.
>>
>> The opposite question is: do some Mozilla community people think
>> everything should be all public, including all business details of
>> partners and so forth? If yes, do we have relevant material to say this
>> is not beneficial to the community, if every adopted?
>>
> I personally think not everything should be all public, but we need
> to do our best on most of the things not confident.
> The problem is, are we try at all? Or Are every staff in mozilla
> think so?
> At least some of the Mozilla branch not as open as we thought. Is it
> acceptable?

Asking everyone to think in some "open" way in your imagination is
certainly not your goal, and I have yet to see what your problem
statement is. What exactly are the "Monthly plans" you are referring to?
As I said, I believe all the plans about engineering is open enough and
I think that's not likely what you are referring to. If MoCo wants to
compete with the local community than they certainly won't reveal their
plan publicly, so that's covered by Problem 2.

[[

Problem 2: MoCo forms a competitive and official community, local site,

or makes translated material that are originally done by the community.
]]

I don't think your way of describing the issue it either healthy or
"open" since I can't formulate what you issue is (and if that's already
covered by Problem 2, we don't need to state this as another problem).

> After all, we can formed a team to check the openness and reachable of all office,
> make somebody of the office notice of the problem if it exist, should we?

You are raising a proposal but I don't see what the problem is. What
exactly is not reachable about your local office? Or, since you mention
"monthly plan San Francisco and Silicon Valley", can you provide a
pointer (from wiki.mozilla.org maybe?) to the kind of monthly plan you
would like to see from your local office?


Here is my question. In this thread, are people talking in a subtle way
because it relates to certain particular individuals/offices? And if
that's the case, are these people contacted privately for detailed
information about what's going on?

Cheers,
Kenny

[Henri Sivonen]

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 8:18 PM, L. David Baron <dba...@dbaron.org> wrote:
> On Monday 2012-05-28 15:19 +0300, Henri Sivonen wrote:

>> I think working *in* the community and in the open isn't just a matter
>> of paid versus non-paid. It's also a matter of Mountain View/San
>> Francisco/Toronto versus everywhere else (or maybe just Mountain
>> View/San Francisco versus everywhere else).
>

> I think it's actually less a matter of place than a matter of time

> zone and of synchronous vs. asynchronous decision making. I don't
> see a lot of things being decided in side conversations at the
> office, but I do see a lot done in meetings (with phone/video,
> though often such that the video is only accessible to employees),
> on IRC, and in Bugzilla (which is technically asynchronous but very
> hard to find or follow or participate in later given its linear
> model and its spread across huge numbers of bug reports).

Yeah, it might be more of a matter of time zone than of office. The
way conversations happen between people who are at the Mountain View
office and people who are at the San Francisco office is opaque to me,
so I wouldn't know.

> I think
> some of that comes down to people wanting to choose who they want
> involved in a discussion, and I think it's also related to a bunch
> of established decision making processes being meeting-based (e.g.,
> triage, despite the promise that the switch back to meeting based
> triage for rapid-release would only be temporary).

I think there are parallels to the W3C meeting practices that led to
the HTML working group having a ban on decision-making in synchronous
meetings written into the charter.

It might be worthwhile to reassess the practice of having synchronous
meetings. When decisions are made in synchronous meetings, the
practice is exclusionary of the people for whom the meeting time is
bad. When synchronous meetings are voice-based (as opposed to
IRC-based), there's the additional exclusion of people who can't
participate in a spoken English meeting even though they are
sufficiently literate in English. (I can participate in spoken English
meetings; I hope I'm not seen as concern trolling by mentioning an
issue that's not a problem for me personally.) When decisions are made
and meetings are mainly a vehicle of making people know what's going
on, people who don't participate in the meeting due to time zone
considerations don't know what's going on and people who do
participate end up using time listening to low-bandwidth way of
staying current about what's going on.

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 1:10 PM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:
>> 3) It seems that some people who have been around for a long time and
>> who started in the Netscape days outside Netscape (i.e. people who
>> you'd expect to be more openness-oriented than an average new hire)
>> have been disappointed in the value the project gets out of being open
>> to contributions that aren't razor focused on Mozilla's Web mission
>> and have shifted towards Firefox product-orientation and away from
>> treating the Mozilla project as a common technology provider that has
>> a variety of stakeholders.
>
> That is perceptive; however, as you hint, I think we need to consider
> whether they may be right about this.

I wasn't trying to suggest that they weren't right about this (though
once the dust settles around major architectural changes to the way
Gecko paints the screen and integrates with native UI on Android, it
might be worthwhile to make Gecko embeddable again, since part of
WebKit's mind share comes from its ubiquitous embeddability and not
only from its presence in browser products). My point was that this
shift makes Mozilla seem less open. A project that tries to be all
things for all people seems more inclusive.

>> option given the circumstances. However, as a person who is remote, I
>> wish new hires especially in the largest offices were trained to
>> think in terms of "everyone is remote" and discussing things in the
>> open as opposed to face-to-face in one large office or in a
>> network-based but behind-NDA channel.
>

> One thing which is quite frustrating is that 12 months ago there was a
> lot of talk about doing an onboarding process which featured this in a
> big way, and would contain resources shared between employee onboarding
> and community onboarding. But nothing has come of it - and, what's more,
> the development of those resources is not happening in the open either.

> It's impossible to tell if any progress has been made, and it's
> impossible to find out how to help. We now have a large People team, but
> their electronic community visibility is close to zero. (They do go to
> MozCamps.) They announce things on Yammer. :-|

I didn't say "Yammer" above, since I wasn't sure how secret the
existence of Yammer was supposed to be, but now that you already
mentioned it out here:

I think the introduction of Yammer made things even worse as far as
the divide of people along the line of financial relationship with
Mozilla goes. I think the key thing that makes Yammer dangerous is
that it offers an attractive mode of communication that's not
available on any Mozilla-hosted public forum. If instead of secret
Yammer and public mailing lists we only had mailing lists--most of
them public and then private mailing lists for stuff that can't be
public--the mode of communication would be the same in either (public
and private mailing list) case so preference for a particular mode of
communication wouldn't have the side effect of making the
communication secret. In the case of Yammer, an easy mode of
communication comes with the side effect of making the communication
secret. Sadly, it's hard to complain about this without being seen as
a person who wants to take nice things away.

(You could get the Yammer mode of communication in public on G+, but
requiring a log-in that allows Google track you across the Web and
compliance with Google's real name policies would open up another can
of worms. Facebook isn't really public when you don't get to read the
content without login. And neither is really Mozilla-hosted in a way
that would let Mozilla take control of the destiny of its
communication forums. Also, considering the code of conduct threads,
using G+ or Facebook would increase the risk of decompartmentalization
of what's OK to talk about in a Mozilla forum and what's not.)

[Santiago Hollmann]

El 04/06/12 00:06, Irvin escribió:

>
> On 2012?6?4?Monday at ??6:28, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu wrote:
>
>>
>> (12/05/18 4:27), Anonymous. wrote:
>>> I just can't imagine that I can know the monthly plan of San Francisco
>>> and Silicon Valley anytime but knowing nothing on local office's plan
>>> for next week. No one like the surprise, if it appear to be some
>>> competitive project on our own.
>>
>>
>>

>> Problem 4: Monthly plans are not open to the public.
>>
>> I do think most engineering teams work in public mode. Whether there are
>> exceptions I don't know. Some other teams do need to operate
>> confidentially because they need to do so (mostly marketing and
>> business-relevant teams, I think). Therefore, either this problem is
>> already covered by Problem 2 or this is just asking too far.
>>
>> The opposite question is: do some Mozilla community people think
>> everything should be all public, including all business details of
>> partners and so forth? If yes, do we have relevant material to say this
>> is not beneficial to the community, if every adopted?
>>
> I personally think not everything should be all public, but we need to do our best on most of the things not confident.
> The problem is, are we try at all? Or Are every staff in mozilla think so?
> At least some of the Mozilla branch not as open as we thought. Is it acceptable?

Of course, there are things we can not open to the entirely world in
terms of give a surprise or market competition but it doesn't mean we
can not share that information with our circle of trust: Mozilla Reps
(plus contributors who don't want to be part of the program but they are
core people).

So, I think everything that is open to employees should be open to every
Mozilla Reps. That's why is so important to identify core contributors
who win their place to become a Mozilla Rep.

> After all, we can formed a team to check the openness and reachable of all office,
> make somebody of the office notice of the problem if it exist, should we?
>
>

I don't think it's necessary. We have the problem. Volunteers and
employees are not working together. We can realize on this if you ask to
each team how many volunteers are officially part of them. So, my
question is: If we are open, we recognize the community, and we want
contributors to reach our goals, why we don't have volunteers as part of
the teams? Also, why is taking so much time to stop this gap. According
to what Mozilla is, this should be priority 1 for many people. People
know about this problem and that's why everyone thinks that without
Google, Mozilla will die. I hate that scenario and we should start
changing now to avoid it. Mozilla is what it is because of its community
(which is bigger than ever) and not because of the money we earned.


--
Santiago Hollmann

t: @santihollmann <http://twitter.com/santihollmann>
Piedra Libre! <http://piedralibre.wordpress.com>

[Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu]

So, if I am getting closer to what this problem is, let me try again:

Problem 4: Monthly marketing plans are not shared with key people in the
community (e.g. Mozilla Reps).

Soution 4 (proposed by santiago.hollmann):

Everything that is open to employees should be open to these key people.


The reason I am doing this categorization is that I don't believe all of
them share the same solution. I believe this problem particularly can't
be really solved by training and selecting people with open mindset
before hiring alone. Even an open-minded person would know that there's
certain things in the company that can't be shared publicly so a policy
would be best to guide this kind of extension of scope of trust.

I should mention that I think this problem has different characteristic
with other problems:

> Problem 1: When a speakers of a particular language gets hired by
> MoCo, the community of that language don't get noticed.
>

> Problem 5: Work weeks (and perhaps some other employee-central events)

> are not open to the public.
>

> Problem 6: Timezone/Remote locations makes it harder for non-paid
> contributor to contribute like an employee.

in that these are problems are more of less associated with information
that can be made public when the solutions adopted while Problem 4 is
concerning sensitive marketing information that we can't make public but
the scope of trust extended.

Again, I am not all clear what the monthly plans that the original
poster refers to so this assessment might be incorrect, but I am
personally not all interested in this kind of "openess".

[Santiago Hollmann]

El 04/06/12 15:26, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu escribió:

> The reason I am doing this categorization is that I don't believe all
> of them share the same solution. I believe this problem particularly
> can't be really solved by training and selecting people with open
> mindset before hiring alone. Even an open-minded person would know
> that there's certain things in the company that can't be shared
> publicly so a policy would be best to guide this kind of extension of
> scope of trust. I should mention that I think this problem has
> different characteristic with other problems:
>> Problem 1: When a speakers of a particular language gets hired by
>> MoCo, the community of that language don't get noticed.
>>
>> Problem 5: Work weeks (and perhaps some other employee-central events)

>> are not open to the public.
>>

>> Problem 6: Timezone/Remote locations makes it harder for non-paid
>> contributor to contribute like an employee.
> in that these are problems are more of less associated with information
> that can be made public when the solutions adopted while Problem 4 is
> concerning sensitive marketing information that we can't make public but
> the scope of trust extended.
>
> Again, I am not all clear what the monthly plans that the original
> poster refers to so this assessment might be incorrect, but I am
> personally not all interested in this kind of "openess".
>

@Kenny, your categorization is great and as you said, this thread is
getting bigger.

I have created an etherpad where we can track the problems we already
have identified and their possible solutions (and I hope we can add more
and more problems/solutions):
https://etherpad.mozilla.org/volunteers-employees-gap-draft. Please,
feel free to edit.

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 10:50 AM, :mrz <m...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
>> I think the introduction of Yammer made things even worse as far as
>> the divide of people along the line of financial relationship with
>> Mozilla goes. I think the key thing that makes Yammer dangerous is
>> that it offers an attractive mode of communication that's not
>> available on any Mozilla-hosted public forum.
>

> To be clear, and not to side one way or the other, before Yammer Mozilla (paid-staff) had an intranet forum (phpBB) that also wasn't public.

The intranet forum still exists, though it's been quiet lately,
possibly because Yammer has stolen some of its traffic.

In practice, the way the two work are very different. In my
experience, the intranet forum mostly does get messages that are
suitable -- stuff that shouldn't be on a public forum.

In contrast, Yammer is much more of an informal hangout kind of place
due to its Facebookish feel. People post stuff there *all the time*
that shouldn't be limited to a MoCo-only audience. I think this is
because it's the only forum we have that has that informal hangout
kind of feel.

So, I agree with Henri. IMO, there are two sensible options with Yammer:

(a) open it to non-MoCo people;

(b) shut it down.

Nick

[matthew zeier]

On Jun 5, 2012, at 7:08 PM, Nicholas Nethercote wrote:

> So, I agree with Henri. IMO, there are two sensible options with Yammer:
>
> (a) open it to non-MoCo people;

Ideally yes, practically very difficult. I've encouraged Yammer to change their work flow to be more open (open to view, BrowserID login to post/comment).

The only current way to do that is to manually invite non @mozilla.com users or invent some other email domain and issue everyone in the world an address behind that. David tried the former and it didn't take off.

We (Mozilla IT) had thought about the latter by integrating single-signon (SAML) through the Mozillians.org phonebook when the authentication system was LDAP. LDAP's been replaced by BrowserID which shifted plans for SAML based auth. I have asked my contact at Yammer what it would take to add BrowserID.

> (b) shut it down.

I think that ignores the function is serves. You're saying I can't have a forum where I can talk to just my coworkers and that conversation will just migrate to some other tool. Having a forum where I can test out my ideas before testing them in a larger group is valuable.

- mz

[Henri Sivonen]

> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 10:50 AM, :mrz <m...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>>

>>> I think the introduction of Yammer made things even worse as far as
>>> the divide of people along the line of financial relationship with
>>> Mozilla goes. I think the key thing that makes Yammer dangerous is
>>> that it offers an attractive mode of communication that's not
>>> available on any Mozilla-hosted public forum.
>>

>> To be clear, and not to side one way or the other, before Yammer Mozilla (paid-staff) had an intranet forum (phpBB) that also wasn't public.

"An attractive mode of communication" is a key part of what I said
above. phpBB is less convenient to use than a mailing list, so it is
more of a hassle to post to the intranet forum than it is to post to
the public mailing list, so phpBB hasn't caused the problem of people
preferring that the mode of communication and getting secrecy as a
side effect.

[Asa Dotzler]

I disagree strongly. If informal hangout kind of places are required to
be fully open to the all of the Mozilla community or shut down, we've
got some offices to shut down - or at least all the non-cubicle spaces
in the offices.

A better alternative, IMO, would be to set up something like Yammer at
mozillians.org and encourage everyone to gather there. I'd still go to
the MoCo Yammer where I know the names and faces of pretty much everyone
I'm speaking too and feel comfortable saying things that I would never
say in a public forum.

- A

[Asa Dotzler]

On 6/6/2012 12:40 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 10:50 AM, :mrz<m...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think the introduction of Yammer made things even worse as far as
>>>> the divide of people along the line of financial relationship with
>>>> Mozilla goes. I think the key thing that makes Yammer dangerous is
>>>> that it offers an attractive mode of communication that's not
>>>> available on any Mozilla-hosted public forum.
>>>
>>> To be clear, and not to side one way or the other, before Yammer Mozilla (paid-staff) had an intranet forum (phpBB) that also wasn't public.
>
> "An attractive mode of communication" is a key part of what I said
> above. phpBB is less convenient to use than a mailing list

Maybe for you and some of the other hackers on the project. Not for me
and probably an overwhelming majority of potential contributors. Web
forums are way more attractive than mailing lists for most of us. The
only thing the mailing lists have is the momentum and the refusal of key
people on the project to engage in other mediums.

- A

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 6/6/12 12:55 PM, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> Maybe for you and some of the other hackers on the project. Not for me
> and probably an overwhelming majority of potential contributors. Web
> forums are way more attractive than mailing lists for most of us.

Asa, using the particular forum in question involved having to log in
twice with your LDAP credentials. Are you serious that this is more
attractive than just sending an e-mail? I'd really like to understand
why...

-Boris

[Zack Weinberg]

I'd like to reiterate this question and generalize it.

*What makes web forums (in general) more attractive than mailing lists,
for their adherents?*

We've got a two-cultures problem here: I (and a lot of other
contributors) like mailing lists, dislike web forums, and actively avoid
using the latter to the maximum extent possible. From personal
experience as well as your repeated assertions, I know there's a large
population of people who feel exactly the opposite way, but I do not
understand why, and I strongly suspect most of the people who share my
opinion feel equal incomprehension.

zw

[Majken Connor]

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Zack Weinberg <za...@panix.com> wrote:

> On 2012-06-06 10:04 AM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>

> I'd like to reiterate this question and generalize it.
>
> *What makes web forums (in general) more attractive than mailing lists,
> for their adherents?*
>
> We've got a two-cultures problem here: I (and a lot of other contributors)
> like mailing lists, dislike web forums, and actively avoid using the latter
> to the maximum extent possible. From personal experience as well as your
> repeated assertions, I know there's a large population of people who feel
> exactly the opposite way, but I do not understand why, and I strongly
> suspect most of the people who share my opinion feel equal incomprehension.
>
> zw
>

> ______________________________**_________________
> governance mailing list
> gover...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/**listinfo/governance<https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance>
>

Just because other methods of communication exclude some doesn't mean that
every exclusionary method is ok. It needs to be judged on a case by case
basis. A few people talking at an office doesn't have the same exclusionary
effect because then if they want to act on their discussion they need to
put it somewhere more public to reach the other people that need to be
involved.

The problem with Yammer as we're discussing it, is it specifically
discriminates along the lines of employee vs volunteer. It also doesn't
have the built in check of not reaching "everyone." Why should someone who
started a discussion on Yammer feel the need to take it anywhere else?
Using the branding video as a set of metrics, this fails at least two. It
doesn't make sure things happen in the open and it does hold some
contributors (employees) above others.

Yes, IRC and mailing lists have some type of discriminatory effect, but
those are much more realistic to overcome. You can sit someone down and
help them set up an IRC client or their mail client so that it works for
them. But this feels like going backwards. Earlier in the conversation
there was talk of making the mailing lists better and I know that other
tools are being explored. I think we all agree that the situation is ideal
so let's work together to find a better situation.

[David Ascher]

Have we considered recently the idea of issuing email addresses to
people @ mozillians.net or whatnot, and get a yammer instance for that
domain?

Domains don't _have_ to map to employment.

--david

[:mrz]

> A better alternative, IMO, would be to set up something like Yammer at
> mozillians.org and encourage everyone to gather there. I'd still go to
> the MoCo Yammer where I know the names and faces of pretty much everyone
> I'm speaking too and feel comfortable saying things that I would never
> say in a public forum.

I spent an hour with Yammer today talking about making it more open. They just aren't built that way. They have begun thinking about BrowserID but that's not any time soon.

Either there's an alternative tool or we build into Mozillians.org some functionality that auto-invites Mozillians to a Yammer network.

[davidwboswell]

On Jun 6, 4:04 pm, David Ascher <dasc...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Have we considered recently the idea of issuing email addresses to
> people @ mozillians.net or whatnot, and get a yammer instance for that
> domain?

If we wanted to do that, the good news is that we now have a realistic
way to identify key contributors separately from employment status.
As I understand it, that was one of the main barriers to this type of
email policy in the past.

As mrz mentions, the mozillians.org phonebook is a resource we could
use. And if we wanted to use a system beyond simple vouching to
identify key contributors, we could define what key contributions are
for given areas of the project and use that as an identifier.

This fits with the mapping of contribution paths and contribution
activities I'm working on for the Grow Mozilla dashboard. This blog
post has a sample contribution path for coding and identifies where
casual, active and core contributions occur.

http://davidwboswell.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/creating-a-superstar-radar/

For example, when someone moves in to the orange area we could send
them a shirt to thank them and when they move in to the green area we
could offer them some sort of email address to signify their status as
key contributor.

David

[Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu]

(Cc+ mozillians)

(12/06/07 3:47), Zack Weinberg wrote:
> I'd like to reiterate this question and generalize it.
>
> *What makes web forums (in general) more attractive than mailing lists,
> for their adherents?*

This is more or less off topic so I am changing the subject. Also cc+
mozillians because I think this discussion belong there.


Here are the reasons I can think of:

* To have a successful user experience using mailing list, one must
learn how to use email filters (or otherwise it blocks the basic
functionality of a mail client being a way for private communication),
and that alone already excludes many users.

* Gmail sucks but yet no one would bother downloading a decent mail client.


There is also a small reason form me but I don't think that's too
important in general (since people don't like to use hyperlinks in general).

* Creating/Following hyperlinks in a mail is just silly (the [1][2][3]),
but it has already been established as a convention that HTML emails are
avoided.


This is a commonly asked question and I sort of hope that it can have a
dedicated page (on Wikipedia or wiki.moziila.org maybe). I think many
people have iterated many reasons (and the converse) last time this was
discussed[1] on www-...@w3.org...


[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Jan/thread#msg114



Cheers,
Kenny

[Stephanie Daugherty]

To me, web forums are exactly the opposite, and it's a case of trading one
problem for another.

Rather than getting the messages where I want them, and being able to reply
to them with whatever software I choose to do so with, web forums are by
design a wallled garden, that I have to register and remember an account to
use, and that constrain me to whatever interface the forum provides. Don't
like it or find it awkward, confusing, and cumbersome? Too bad.

A web forum does improve the average experience, but it also condemns the
experience to be just that, average - no chance for me to improve the
experience by using a better email client, setting up filters, or any of
the things that power users do.

The internet deserves better, but I'm not sure how to go about it, because
we're held back by a least common denominator of users for whom forums
really are easier, if only because they don't know how to use email
correctly.

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 9:16 PM, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu <kenn...@csail.mit.edu
> wrote:

> (Cc+ mozillians)
>
> (12/06/07 3:47), Zack Weinberg wrote:

> > I'd like to reiterate this question and generalize it.
> >
> > *What makes web forums (in general) more attractive than mailing lists,
> > for their adherents?*
>

> This is more or less off topic so I am changing the subject. Also cc+
> mozillians because I think this discussion belong there.
>
>
> Here are the reasons I can think of:
>
> * To have a successful user experience using mailing list, one must
> learn how to use email filters (or otherwise it blocks the basic
> functionality of a mail client being a way for private communication),
> and that alone already excludes many users.
>
> * Gmail sucks but yet no one would bother downloading a decent mail client.
>
>
> There is also a small reason form me but I don't think that's too
> important in general (since people don't like to use hyperlinks in
> general).
>
> * Creating/Following hyperlinks in a mail is just silly (the [1][2][3]),
> but it has already been established as a convention that HTML emails are
> avoided.
>
>
> This is a commonly asked question and I sort of hope that it can have a
> dedicated page (on Wikipedia or wiki.moziila.org maybe). I think many
> people have iterated many reasons (and the converse) last time this was
> discussed[1] on www-...@w3.org...
>
>
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Jan/thread#msg114
>
>
>
> Cheers,
> Kenny

> _______________________________________________
> mozillians mailing list
> mozil...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozillians
>

[Nukeador]

Hi,

>From my point of view if we are going to use Yammer, we should open it to
active contributors, maybe first to Reps if we don't want to invite
everyone vouched on mozillians (unfortunately not everyone on mozillians is
an active contributor) and then scale to other active contributors
recommended by Reps?

But, it's desirable in the future to use a tool we can hack and adapt to
our needs ;)

Regards.
--
Rubén Martín (Nukeador)
Mozilla Reps Council member
http://mozilla-hispano.org
http://twitter.com/mozilla_hispano
http://facebook.com/mozillahispano

[Fredy Rouge Rouge]

Hi

In mailing list: You <- Information

In forums: Information -> You

In mozilla you can choise:
* Newsgroup (using usenet)
* Mailing list (using mailman)
* Web for Newsgroup (using google groups)

More info at http://www.mozilla.org/about/forums/

2012/6/6 Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu <kenn...@csail.mit.edu>:

> (Cc+ mozillians)
>
> (12/06/07 3:47), Zack Weinberg wrote:

>> I'd like to reiterate this question and generalize it.
>>
>> *What makes web forums (in general) more attractive than mailing lists,
>> for their adherents?*
>

> This is more or less off topic so I am changing the subject. Also cc+
> mozillians because I think this discussion belong there.
>
>
> Here are the reasons I can think of:
>
> * To have a successful user experience using mailing list, one must
> learn how to use email filters (or otherwise it blocks the basic
> functionality of a mail client being a way for private communication),
> and that alone already excludes many users.
>
> * Gmail sucks but yet no one would bother downloading a decent mail client.
>
>
> There is also a small reason form me but I don't think that's too
> important in general (since people don't like to use hyperlinks in general).
>
> * Creating/Following hyperlinks in a mail is just silly (the [1][2][3]),
> but it has already been established as a convention that HTML emails are
> avoided.
>
>
> This is a commonly asked question and I sort of hope that it can have a
> dedicated page (on Wikipedia or wiki.moziila.org maybe). I think many
> people have iterated many reasons (and the converse) last time this was
> discussed[1] on www-...@w3.org...
>
>
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Jan/thread#msg114
>
>
>
> Cheers,
> Kenny
> _______________________________________________
> mozillians mailing list
> mozil...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozillians

--
Fredy Rouge - Leader, Créatif, Autodidacte et Geek ☺

[Daniel Mills]

On Jun 7, 2012, at 8:12 AM, Fredy Rouge Rouge <fredy...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> In mailing list: You <- Information
>
> In forums: Information -> You
>
> In mozilla you can choise:
> * Newsgroup (using usenet)
> * Mailing list (using mailman)
> * Web for Newsgroup (using google groups)

In my experience, this does not work reliably enough (not even close) to present it as a solution.

I've created multiple Mozilla group/list monsters, and:

* they take *months* to fully set up, sometimes not at all. We depend on favors from Google to set up the Web access, it's not a standard feature.
* they sometimes do not work:
** messages will not end up on the Google group
** subscribing via the Google group appears to succeed but actually does nothing (this is the worst, I don't even know how many contributors I have lost because of this)
* problems often take a while to resolve (if at all), often accompanied with "shrug, it's a Google problem" or similar (and maybe it is - but why are we using a solution so unreliable?)

I have also used standalone Google groups -- they are (or were) the norm for Labs projects. It wasn't all rosy, to be sure, but:

* creating new groups was self-service (no need to ask, you can just do it) and near instantaneous.
* messages were always delivered, via the Web or the mailing list
* subscriptions always worked
* I don't know how long problems would take to resolve, because it never failed

TBH, that is the *low bar* for modern communications software. How Mozilla as a community accepts anything less is absolutely beyond me.

Dan

>
> More info at http://www.mozilla.org/about/forums/
>
> 2012/6/6 Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu <kenn...@csail.mit.edu>:
>> (Cc+ mozillians)
>>
>> (12/06/07 3:47), Zack Weinberg wrote:

>>> I'd like to reiterate this question and generalize it.
>>>
>>> *What makes web forums (in general) more attractive than mailing lists,
>>> for their adherents?*
>>

[Gervase Markham]

On 07/06/12 00:41, davidwboswell wrote:
> If we wanted to do that, the good news is that we now have a realistic
> way to identify key contributors separately from employment status.
> As I understand it, that was one of the main barriers to this type of
> email policy in the past.

There is an unbearable tension here between "if you are a vouched
Mozillian, you are a key contributor" and "we want everyone new to our
community to get a Mozillians account as soon as possible". Latterly,
we've emphasized the latter, but it means the former is definitely not true.

> As mrz mentions, the mozillians.org phonebook is a resource we could
> use. And if we wanted to use a system beyond simple vouching to
> identify key contributors, we could define what key contributions are
> for given areas of the project and use that as an identifier.

I think we would need a system beyond simple vouching. However, how
would it be administered given that Mozillians has none of the
originally-designed features to allow tags to be non-self-taggable and
so on? We can't have the equivalent of a "trusted" tag because people
would just give it to themselves.

Gerv

[fantasai]

On 05/24/2012 08:44 AM, :mrz wrote:
>
> I want to fly to Chicago, goto events.mozilla.org, geolocate myself and see what's happening around me tonight. I might even want to filter based on my interests. I might even want to click on an event and figure out details& contact info (and maybe that's on EventBrite).

That's pretty fancy, and probably not something I'd do. Can we start by just
posting relevant work weeks into the relevant newsgroups? And yes, putting
up an index on the public wiki. Most of the logistics are already handled on
a wiki, it's just the internal wiki that's used instead of the public one.

~fantasai

[davidwboswell]

> I think we would need a system beyond simple vouching.

Agreed.

> However, how
> would it be administered given that Mozillians has none of the
> originally-designed features to allow tags to be non-self-taggable and
> so on? We can't have the equivalent of a "trusted" tag because people
> would just give it to themselves.

As I suggested earlier, I think we can address this with the idea of
conversion paths.

We're documenting these paths for various areas to help different
functional areas bring more people into their projects.

So you can define what activities constitute core contributions for
your area and we can then use that to identify people who would be
candidates for emails (among other uses).

This is related to vouching and the phonebook in the sense that you
could use this conversion data to give badges in someone's profile for
example.

The set of conversion paths we're working on is at

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Conversion_points

David

[Archaeopteryx]

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Betreff: Re: Employees and the community (II)
Von: Zack Weinberg <za...@panix.com>
An:
Datum: 2012-06-06 21:47

> *What makes web forums (in general) more attractive than mailing lists,
> for their adherents?*

1. If you don't have message filters on the server (e.g. POP3 user,
voluntary or not), checking mail accounts on a mobile device is a pain
because mailing lists clutter it.
2. Scroll and read: In web forums, you have some messages on one page
(e.g. 25) and can read them and scroll down to replies. This has the
advantage that there is not that message history on top of most
messages. If you try to get such a view with mailing lists, it gets
problematic if some subthreads got new messages. If open messages
separately, reading mailing lists feels especially cumbersome.
3. Mailing lists are often targeted for people, not topics. So (at least
in Mozilla land) they seem to be less focused and send less interesting
things (e.g. weekly meeting reminders/announcement in planning are
something next to mailing list abuse for me). Furthermore, moderators in
forums can move messages to the appropriate subforum, providing a
cleaner view.
4. In webforums, you can start a private discussion without disclosing
your mail address to the other person.
5. For mailing lists, you have to keep the messages to get a correct
threading view.
6. If you haven't been subscribed to the mailing list since its launch,
good luck with reading ongoing threads.

If a mailing lists contains only essential messages which you have to
read or react to, i would maybe prefer it. But in Mozilla Land, mailing
lists (with one exception) and forums have mostly low importance for me,
so initiate the "communication" by browsing it, usually on a weekly
basis. This has the advantage that some issues already get solved before
I read them. I would feel uneasy if I see the mail folders for mailing
lists grow and feel tempted to read them independent of the last time I
read them (I know, lack of self-discipline).

Archaeopteryx

[Justin Wood (Callek)]

For what its worth, the "staff" tag can't be self-issued, and is only
available (at present) to those with @mozilla.com e-mail addresses. I've
complained about this shortcoming, as I'd like to have "staff" but my
primary e-mail is not my @mozilla.com one, thus I don't have a
mozillians account with it. (Of course, there are a few ways to solve that).

--
~Justin Wood (Callek)

[Gervase Markham]

On 07/06/12 21:38, davidwboswell wrote:
>> I think we would need a system beyond simple vouching.
>
> Agreed.
>
>> However, how
>> would it be administered given that Mozillians has none of the
>> originally-designed features to allow tags to be non-self-taggable and
>> so on? We can't have the equivalent of a "trusted" tag because people
>> would just give it to themselves.
>
> As I suggested earlier, I think we can address this with the idea of
> conversion paths.

The problem I am raising is not "how do we socially identify who is
trusted?" - I like your ideas in that area. The problem is "how do we
technically mark trusted people as trusted, given the limitations of the
Mozillians software?".

Gerv