Community mailing lists for office cities

[Majken Connor]

Hi all,

I know offices have internal mailing aliases for all employees, but I think
it would be really good for community building to have an opt in mailing
list for each city that can have more rich content and keep non-employees
in the loop as well. I know there is a problem of not having the strongest
local communities where offices exist, and I think this simple step might
go a long way to help solve that problem.

[Rubén Martín]

El 18/03/13 17:33, Majken Connor escribió:

What's the problem of including core contributors on the already
existing office aliases? ;)

Regards.

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

[Josh Matthews]

The existing office lists revolve around things that are not important
to non-employees (notifications that people are working from home,
discussions relating to the physical office space, etc.) A list that
is applicable not only to core contributors, but people who don't
consider themselves Mozillians but are interested in keeping abreast
of local events should definitely be a separate entity.

Cheers,
Josh

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

[Robert Kaiser]

Josh Matthews schrieb:

> The existing office lists revolve around things that are not important
> to non-employees (notifications that people are working from home,
> discussions relating to the physical office space, etc.)

Well, some of the discussions around the physical space could be
interesting to the community, esp. if some people from the community
meet there from time to time (we do have community spaces after all), or
they could come to an event there.

> A list that
> is applicable not only to core contributors, but people who don't
> consider themselves Mozillians but are interested in keeping abreast
> of local events should definitely be a separate entity.

All the above said, I agree here, as there's things that we can talk
among employees who have signed contracts with Mozilla that we can't
always share with the community (unfortunately - even if such occasions
are rare) and then there are job-related things that only concern people
there (planning of which people sit at which desk or such stuff), I guess.

That said, having more involvement between paid people and the rest of
the community is great, and more lists for that is also great! :)

Robert Kaiser

[Jeff Hammel]

Agreed with all this. +1 for more lists. In addition, I could be wrong,
but IIRC office lists are not archived which IMHO is almost a must-have
for a community list.

[Gervase Markham]

Sometimes, what you actually need is for some of the office list traffic
to actually use another list. So, in the UK, we have a
mozilla.community.uk list and a lon...@mozilla.com list. Not working out
of the London office, I unsubscribed from lon...@mozilla.com but there
was stuff on there I missed. So I have had to resubscribe and now get
informed every time the secretary leaves her desk :-|

Neither option is ideal. What would be best, at least in this case, is
for the London employees to try and pick the right list.

I think this may be true for most non-US geographies. Do you really want
an "Auckland community" list, or is a New Zealand one sufficient? After
all, one important side-effect of much of the "water cooler" chat is
getting to know other people, and that's important for the community
across the country.

Gerv

[Pascal Chevrel]

Le 18/03/2013 09:33, Majken Connor a ï¿œcrit :

Hi,

That's not an issue for the Paris office, most of the employees there
are involved in the wider French Mozilla community and participate in
the existing community mailing list (and I suspect that it is the same
for Berlin). The internal mailing list for the office is strictly
reserved to internal office matters. I would suggest checking with the
local community if they don't already have an existing mailing list
before creating a second one, if there is none, then I think it would be
a good idea.

Regards

Pascal

[irvi...@gmail.com]

Rubén Martín於 2013年3月19日星期二UTC+8上午2時49分50秒寫道：

> El 18/03/13 17:33, Majken Connor escribió:
> > I know offices have internal mailing aliases for all employees, but I think
> > it would be really good for community building to have an opt in mailing
> > list for each city that can have more rich content and keep non-employees
> > in the loop as well. I know there is a problem of not having the strongest
> > local communities where offices exist, and I think this simple step might
> > go a long way to help solve that problem.

Agree with the suggestion, not only because we got a lot of problem on communication between local community and local office, but also we can share a lot of experience on community/office relationship across the region to anyone who interesting in, and maybe we could prevent re-fault in the future when we open new office in another region.

> What's the problem of including core contributors on the already
> existing office aliases? ;)

I don't know.

I even don't know there are "office aliases" already exist, and in our experience, Taipei office just don't open about their operation to community at all.

I never got any contact/info/request they received by tw-...@mozilla.com from [Contact Us]* of local office sites, and which make the situation worse is that, they redirect all of the traffic of http://mozilla.org to their own company website http://mozilla.com.tw at local region.
* http://mozilla.com.tw/about/contact/

I'd indicate out some of the problems in my presentation* at last year's MozCamp Asia, and even after that we'd months and houndries of mails with the staff from TW office, near non had been resolve, and they'd became more and more close on all of the community building and marketing things.
* http://irvin.sto.tw/2012/11/events-of-taiwan-community-challenges.html

One thing came to my head is that, if we don't (and we shouldn't?) force the local office staff to join the list, it will reduce the effect we want to archive on this topic.

[irvi...@gmail.com]

Rubén Martín於 2013年3月19日星期二UTC+8上午2時49分50秒寫道：

> El 18/03/13 17:33, Majken Connor escribió:
> > I know offices have internal mailing aliases for all employees, but I think
> > it would be really good for community building to have an opt in mailing
> > list for each city that can have more rich content and keep non-employees
> > in the loop as well. I know there is a problem of not having the strongest
> > local communities where offices exist, and I think this simple step might
> > go a long way to help solve that problem.

Agree with the suggestion, not only because we got a lot of problem on communication between local community and local office, but also we can share a lot of experience on community/office relationship across the region to anyone who interesting in, and maybe we could prevent re-fault in the future when we open new office in another region.

> What's the problem of including core contributors on the already
> existing office aliases? ;)

[irvi...@gmail.com]

Pascal Chevrel於 2013年3月20日星期三UTC+8下午10時25分40秒寫道：

> Hi,
>
> That's not an issue for the Paris office, most of the employees there
> are involved in the wider French Mozilla community and participate in
> the existing community mailing list (and I suspect that it is the same
> for Berlin). The internal mailing list for the office is strictly
> reserved to internal office matters.

You're so lucky and the staff are so loved at Europe!

> I would suggest checking with the
> local community if they don't already have an existing mailing list
> before creating a second one, if there is none, then I think it would be
> a good idea.

We do have a community mailing list[1] for many years, most of the contributors had subscribe to it and discuss all things here, some of the staff in Taipei office had joined the list.

But basically their standpoint was that, our community list is "only a mailing list of a specific Mozilla community in local region", and they intend to create one "More official, more general Mozilla community mailing list acrossing all local communities", despite there are no other existence Mozilla community in our region (besides the "Firefox Student Rep" community they try to build).
[1] https://groups.google.com/group/moztw-general
[2] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/community-taiwan

[Majken Connor]

Regarding office city vs country, I did think about Auckland before
specifically requesting city. The info on the list will revolve around the
goings on that are interesting with the office as the hub. For the Auckland
list, you might end up with info and discussions about goings on in other
cities that are practical for people who live in Auckland to attend. Just
like in Toronto I can see we might discuss getting a community going in
nearby cities, or getting a group together to go to a nearby conference.
Also for Toronto I see us making use of the local list as well as the
country list. We would use the Toronto list for fine-grained discussions of
events and goings on, and use the Canada list to collaborate and discuss on
a higher level what the local communities are up to and how we can support
each other.

[Irvin Chen]

I found that I get a little misunderstanding one this topics.

Are we propose to open a seperate list for each city with office, or a
general "officed-city" mailing list acrossing the world?

I thought it was last one, but it seems Majken is talking about the first
one?

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Regarding office city vs country, I did think about Auckland before
> specifically requesting city. The info on the list will revolve around the
> goings on that are interesting with the office as the hub. For the Auckland
> list, you might end up with info and discussions about goings on in other
> cities that are practical for people who live in Auckland to attend. Just
> like in Toronto I can see we might discuss getting a community going in
> nearby cities, or getting a group together to go to a nearby conference.
> Also for Toronto I see us making use of the local list as well as the
> country list. We would use the Toronto list for fine-grained discussions of
> events and goings on, and use the Canada list to collaborate and discuss on
> a higher level what the local communities are up to and how we can support
> each other.
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 2:30 PM, <irvi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

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

--
@ irvinfly: community liaison
moztw.org Mozilla Taiwan community

[Majken Connor]

One list per city.

Besides Auckland I was also thinking if MV and SF should have their own
lists, I think the offices at both locations are large enough for that,
though they are very close geographically. I would still suggest one list
each and people could sign up to both lists, but I would defer to the
opinions of those who work in those locations.

On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 1:41 AM, Irvin Chen <irvi...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I found that I get a little misunderstanding one this topics.
>
> Are we propose to open a seperate list for each city with office, or a
> general "officed-city" mailing list acrossing the world?
>
> I thought it was last one, but it seems Majken is talking about the first
> one?
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 1:34 PM, Majken Connor <maj...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Regarding office city vs country, I did think about Auckland before
>> specifically requesting city. The info on the list will revolve around the
>> goings on that are interesting with the office as the hub. For the Auckland
>> list, you might end up with info and discussions about goings on in other
>> cities that are practical for people who live in Auckland to attend. Just
>> like in Toronto I can see we might discuss getting a community going in
>> nearby cities, or getting a group together to go to a nearby conference.
>> Also for Toronto I see us making use of the local list as well as the
>> country list. We would use the Toronto list for fine-grained discussions of
>> events and goings on, and use the Canada list to collaborate and discuss on
>> a higher level what the local communities are up to and how we can support
>> each other.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 2:30 PM, <irvi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>

[Majken Connor]

Gerv,

What should be the next steps? should we get more buy in? Or should we just
file bugs to create the lists?

[Gervase Markham]

On 28/03/13 22:58, Majken Connor wrote:
> What should be the next steps? should we get more buy in? Or should we just
> file bugs to create the lists?

TBH, I think this is actively a mistake for many offices - certainly the
UK. Over here, I would _much_ rather people used the UK mailing list
rather than setting up another London-specific one.

In fact, why are we thinking about this in terms of offices at all? If
there's a need for a community list for Tucson, Arizona, why would it
make a difference whether we have an office there or not? Similarly, we
should decide whether we need one united Bay Area list, or one SF and
one Valley list, independent of the number of offices we have.

The general mechanism we use for creating community lists is that people
need to demonstrate some sort of demand. Making lists to try and drive
community creation or formation almost always fails, in my experience.

But to answer your question, the way lists get created is that someone
files a bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/form.mozlist

Gerv

[Brian King]

FYI list of current regional community forums/lists:

http://www.mozilla.org/about/forums/#regional

- Brian

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



--

Brian King | European Community Builder - Mozilla
Join Us | https://www.mozilla.org/contribute/<https://reps.mozilla.org/u/brianking/>

[Gervase Markham]

On 31/03/13 22:47, Brian King wrote:
> FYI list of current regional community forums/lists:
>
> http://www.mozilla.org/about/forums/#regional

So, to summarize:

* Anyone can file a bug to request a new mozilla.community.* mailing
list for a region or community.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/form.mozlist

* If someone in a particular city or region with an office wants to do
this, the fact that there's an office doesn't make it any easier or
harder for them to do - it's a Bugzilla form.

* It would be good to have such a list in each office city or region, if
one does not already exist, as a step towards making a single community.

* However, the impetus for its creation needs to come from people in
that city or region who will use and promote the list. Creating lists
with no active users is a recipe for failure.

Gerv

[Majken Connor]

I agree, I was thinking about who should own a Toronto list. The thing we
want isn't just a list, but people willing to request and nurture the list.
Perhaps something for the community builders?