Employees and the community

[Rubén Martín]

Hello,

I've been noticing something about people from the community who gets
hired by mozilla, and I think that most of us are aware of it, and it's
that their time doing things with the community decrease enormously,
some of them don't have enough time to work with their community again.

How could we improve this?

One of the things I read is that other companies like Google enforce
their employees to expend the 20% of their time doing stuff for other
projects, and someone wrote that maybe we should do the same but in this
case expend this time working with the community.

This is something that is interesting for people coming from the
community and then getting hired but it's more interesting for employees
that have never worked with the community directly. In the US and
Canada, for example, this could be a way to empower the community, where
it's a bit different from other countries ;)

What do you think?

Regards.

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

[Ken Saunders]

> I've been noticing something about people from the community who gets
> hired by mozilla, and I think that most of us are aware of it, and it's
> that their time doing things with the community decrease enormously,

There's detailed information about this in the Contributor Lifecycle Audit findings and presentation.
Video
http://vid.ly/0m8t5k
Slides
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16435035/audit/Community%20Audit%20v1.9%20%28presentation%20show%29%20Vs.key.pdf

Perhaps it's best to discuss this in mozilla.mozillians?
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/mozilla.mozillians

Although, it could be that many employees aren't aware of this.


Ken Saunders

[Ken Saunders]

> I've been noticing something about people from the community who gets
> hired by mozilla, and I think that most of us are aware of it, and it's
> that their time doing things with the community decrease enormously,

[Kyle Huey]

2012/2/4 Rubén Martín <nuke...@mozilla-hispano.org>

> I've been noticing something about people from the community who gets
> hired by mozilla, and I think that most of us are aware of it, and it's
> that their time doing things with the community decrease enormously,

> some of them don't have enough time to work with their community again.
>

I don't understand what this means. Once I joined MoCo full time I
continued doing almost exactly what I was doing as a community member,
including interacting with volunteer developers. I just do it for 40 hours
a week (or more :-P) rather than 10. Perhaps this is different outside
engineering?

- Kyle

[Robert Accettura]

I think at least to a degree this depends on the individual and their position. Some are clearly maintain more of a "public profile" than others. I suspect that's partially job role as engineering QA have historically deeper community integration than say finance, or even IT. It may also be a personal choice in some cases. Some are very active via bugzilla and wiki, others take to blogs, twitter, etc.

One of the things I've been starting to chat with planet mozilla peers is how we can encourage more blogging and community building. Bringing planet back to "people" vs "projects" (we setup a new planet specific for projects to separate) is the first phase of this. Mozilla is a community of people working on amazing projects, not a set of projects people discretely work on. Like other open source communities (and popular request) we wanted to restore planet to that.

Next up I'd like to find ways to encourage people who either rarely blog, or don't in various places including engineering, QA, marketing etc. to start doing so and sharing what they are working on. Some do this already. We had more, at least percentage wise "back in the day". At the risk of ignoring some others, some of my favorites over the years include roc and nnethercote who will get into the weeds for those who want to understand why/how things work. It's captivating for those with an interest in these topics. It encourages community and participation, slashdot discussion, etc. etc.

Lots of people who got involved in the early days didn't do so with an anonymous entity, they did so by interacting directly with the people who made awesome things a reality. My goal as MO of planet is to try and encourage that again as much as I can.

[Gervase Markham]

On 04/02/12 20:38, Rubén Martín wrote:
> I've been noticing something about people from the community who gets
> hired by mozilla, and I think that most of us are aware of it, and it's
> that their time doing things with the community decrease enormously,
> some of them don't have enough time to work with their community again.
>
> How could we improve this?

It would be very helpful if you defined more carefully what you mean by
saying that "their time doing things with the community decreases
enormously", ideally by giving examples. E.g you might say:

"I know someone who was hired as a coder, and now he spends all his
reviewing time doing reviews for other MoCo people, and none for
non-employees"

or

"I know someone who was hired in QA, and he used to run these cool
community meet-ups in my city, but now he says he hasn't got time"

Gerv

[Rubén Martín]

El 04/02/12 22:07, Ken Saunders escribió:

> Perhaps it's best to discuss this in mozilla.mozillians?
> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/mozilla.mozillians
> Although, it could be that many employees aren't aware of this.

I don’t know, maybe we are creating too many mailing lists for similar
purposes. What's the goal of the mozillians list? It seems a mix between
marketing, reps-general, web-10n and governance lists :P

El 06/02/12 10:49, Gervase Markham escribió:

> It would be very helpful if you defined more carefully what you mean
> by saying that "their time doing things with the community decreases
> enormously", ideally by giving examples.

OK, so without saying any names I could give two examples:

* Someone who was hired as coder, and now he doesn't have time helping
his community with localization.
* Someone who was hired in engagement and now he doesn't have enough
time to contribute to his community in other areas.

The examples could be a bit vague but in most cases the story is the
same: Key community contributor hired by mozilla to do a specific task
in a specific area, doesn't have time to help his local community in
other areas we was helping before.

[Gervase Markham]

On 06/02/12 23:02, Rubén Martín wrote:
> I don’t know, maybe we are creating too many mailing lists for similar
> purposes. What's the goal of the mozillians list? It seems a mix between
> marketing, reps-general, web-10n and governance lists :P

My understanding is that it's about the Mozillians directory project,
and so this discussion is fine in this group.

> The examples could be a bit vague but in most cases the story is the
> same: Key community contributor hired by mozilla to do a specific task
> in a specific area, doesn't have time to help his local community in
> other areas we was helping before.

OK. That's helpful, thank you. Could you now articulate why these
changes in each case are a bad thing?

If, for example, a contributor has a new baby, they might not have time
to help with l10n or do tasks they were doing before. But no-one would
say that this was "bad" - a shame in one sense, of course, but he or she
has gone to do something else with their time which is also important.

On first sight, that seems to be the case here too - but there is even
less "bad", because they are still working with Mozilla on things
Mozilla feels are important. It provides a good opportunity for other
community members to step up and take responsibility.

Tell me why this is not the right way to look at it :-)

Gerv

[Robert Kaiser]

Rubén Martín schrieb:

> I've been noticing something about people from the community who gets
> hired by mozilla, and I think that most of us are aware of it, and it's
> that their time doing things with the community decrease enormously,
> some of them don't have enough time to work with their community again.

I have seen the same trend with a couple of people - e.g. a localization
lead who has been hired to work on coding projects and now rarely has
time to update his localization and it often ends up being finished only
after some intense pinging just before the last beta is being produced.
Or even with myself, as I rarely find time to do L10n work myself or
blog about my thoughts on some Mozilla stuff since I'm paid full-time by
Mozilla.

> One of the things I read is that other companies like Google enforce
> their employees to expend the 20% of their time doing stuff for other
> projects, and someone wrote that maybe we should do the same but in this
> case expend this time working with the community.

Heh, I thought about the same idea myself - though note that Google
doesn't _force_ their people to use 20% for other projects, they _allow_
them to do that during their work time. That's a slight difference.
Still, I've also wondered if that would be an approach that would help
us - allow people to use 20% of their paid Mozilla time for engagement
in the community that's outside their actual work area. Not sure though
if this is really the answer. It might be something that wouldn't change
anything at all, or there might be something else to help there.
We surely want to have people paid by Mozilla to be engaged with the
community even in areas outside the project they are paid to work on. We
just need to think how we can enable that in the best way.

Another point is though that we need to work on handing over things we
have done so far and enable others to become engaged more heavily in the
community and ourselves to make new things going - we don't want
everything to stay as it is, we want to grow the community as well as
ourselves and we should try hard to do that.

Cheers,
Robert

[Axel Hecht]

So, for l10n, we've have/had a rather strict policy about how people we
hire out of the l10n community shouldn't have l10n as part of their paid
time. That works out well for some of the folks we hire, as in they're
able to keep up with the things they used to do. Others are hired out of
strong teams that just cover for them, and yet others leave the
localization in more or less lengthy periods of starvation.

As Gerv says, for those that just want to take on a new challenge, we
need to allow that.

For those that would like to remain involved, we should be able to find
individual solutions that make that possible.

That's much more consistent with how we treat community members that
move on full-time mozilla jobs, I guess. It's also a challenge, as I
don't think that at this stage of mozilla, localizing is a full-time
job. Or if it was, that it'd be healthy to put all localization work on
one single shoulder.

We talked about this in Brussels last week, where part of l10n-drivers
met. It's far from black-and-white, and at best, we'll be able to find
good paths forward for the individual contributor, that person's day
job, and the l10n effort.

Axel

[davidwboswell]

> > I don’t know, maybe we are creating too many mailing lists for similar
> > purposes. What's the goal of the mozillians list? It seems a mix between
> > marketing, reps-general, web-10n and governance lists :P
>
> My understanding is that it's about the Mozillians directory project,
> and so this discussion is fine in this group.

The intention of the Mozillians list was to be a place to talk about
how to bring in new Mozillians to the project. The first major effort
related to bringing in new contributors that was talked about on the
Mozillians list was the mozillians.org phonebook.

That overlap between the name of the phonebook and the name of the
list clearly ended up causing some confusion, but the intent wasn't to
limit discussions specifically to just the phonebook. If plans for
renaming the phonebook move forward, that would hopefully clear up at
least some of the confusion.

We could discuss changing the name of the forum too, but I'm not sure
if moving things around would end up reducing the confusion :)

David

[Gen Kanai]

On 2/8/12 3:13 AM, Axel Hecht wrote:
> So, for l10n, we've have/had a rather strict policy about how people we
> hire out of the l10n community shouldn't have l10n as part of their paid
> time. That works out well for some of the folks we hire, as in they're
> able to keep up with the things they used to do. Others are hired out of
> strong teams that just cover for them, and yet others leave the
> localization in more or less lengthy periods of starvation.

I've known about this policy for quite some time but is it documented
anywhere? If not, let's get that documented in an obvious place.

Gen


--
Gen Kanai

[Axel Hecht]

I'd rather fix it than document and set it in stone.

Also, I wouldn't know about an obvious place to document things about
hiring contributors. Debbie?

Axel

[Gijs Kruitbosch]

On 07/02/2012 19:13 PM, Axel Hecht wrote:
><snip>

> So, for l10n, we've have/had a rather strict policy about how people we hire out
> of the l10n community shouldn't have l10n as part of their paid time. That works
> out well for some of the folks we hire, as in they're able to keep up with the
> things they used to do. Others are hired out of strong teams that just cover for
> them, and yet others leave the localization in more or less lengthy periods of
> starvation.
>

> <snip>

So, perhaps this is my ignorance, but I cannot think of a rationale for this.
I'm happy to hear you're considering changes, but what puzzles me most is: why
is this the policy in the first place? What is the reason for this restriction?
I'm sure it's probably blatantly obvious to many, just not to me. :-)

Cheers,
Gijs

[Gervase Markham]

On 08/02/12 09:04, Axel Hecht wrote:
> On 08.02.12 05:39, Gen Kanai wrote:
>> On 2/8/12 3:13 AM, Axel Hecht wrote:
>>> So, for l10n, we've have/had a rather strict policy about how people we
>>> hire out of the l10n community shouldn't have l10n as part of their paid
>>> time. That works out well for some of the folks we hire, as in they're
>>> able to keep up with the things they used to do. Others are hired out of
>>> strong teams that just cover for them, and yet others leave the
>>> localization in more or less lengthy periods of starvation.
>> I've known about this policy for quite some time but is it documented
>> anywhere? If not, let's get that documented in an obvious place.
>
> I'd rather fix it than document and set it in stone.

Are you saying that you disagree with it?

Also, documenting a policy does not set it in stone. Often, quite the
reverse - once a policy is documented, everyone can see what it is, and
make concrete proposals for change.

Gerv

[Justin Wood (Callek)]

I'm just an outsider, but my *theory* is that Mozilla does [did] not
want to pay people to spend their time on translating, and instead
wanted that paid time elsewhere.

On a personal level not sure that is good as a global rule though.

--
~Justin Wood (Callek)

[Axel Hecht]

That rationale is that we're having about a 100 localization teams, and
we're asking all to do the same thing. We can't pay all of them, so the
policy is/was that we don't pay any. "Can't" is covering all the
aspects, from the total budget that'd be to many of those people just
not being available to a full-time mozilla job, to legalese between US
and local countries.

Axel

[Asa Dotzler]

With volunteer coders, Mozilla often hires them into engineering. Not so
with most localization folks Mozilla hires. Mozilla doesn't pay a
full-time staff of localizers (and probably shouldn't, less we start
treating some locales as more equal than others -- IMO) but there are
amazing people in Mozilla local communities who have skills that match
up with other things Mozilla is doing. That means Mozilla sometimes
hires a locale volunteer into a role like engineering or some other
not-localizing role and that can leave a hole in that Firefox
localization team.

In an ideal world, the hole would be filled by another volunteer, but
sometimes it isn't well filled.

I believe that Mozilla hiring managers and those localization volunteers
considering full-time Mozilla employment are considerate of this when
making employment decisions. No one, neither Mozilla hiring managers nor
volunteers interested in becoming full-time Mozilla contributors, wants
to hurt the Mozilla project and so I'm hopeful that in most of these
situations the benefit to the Mozilla project of having another
full-time contributor outweighs the loss of their part-time contribution
to a localization.

- A

[Axel Hecht]

I don't think we should be satisfied with that. I hope we can do better
than just either or.

Axel

[Daniel Cater]

On Friday, 10 February 2012 17:20:10 UTC, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> I believe that Mozilla hiring managers and those localization volunteers
> considering full-time Mozilla employment are considerate of this when
> making employment decisions. No one, neither Mozilla hiring managers nor
> volunteers interested in becoming full-time Mozilla contributors, wants
> to hurt the Mozilla project and so I'm hopeful that in most of these
> situations the benefit to the Mozilla project of having another
> full-time contributor outweighs the loss of their part-time contribution
> to a localization.
>
> - A

If I were a volunteer engineer I wouldn't like the idea that Mozilla would be less likely to hire me if I also volunteered on localisation than if I didn't.

[Daniel Cater]

On Friday, 10 February 2012 17:20:10 UTC, Asa Dotzler wrote:

> I believe that Mozilla hiring managers and those localization volunteers
> considering full-time Mozilla employment are considerate of this when
> making employment decisions. No one, neither Mozilla hiring managers nor
> volunteers interested in becoming full-time Mozilla contributors, wants
> to hurt the Mozilla project and so I'm hopeful that in most of these
> situations the benefit to the Mozilla project of having another
> full-time contributor outweighs the loss of their part-time contribution
> to a localization.
>
> - A

[Rubén Martín]

El 11/02/12 18:47, Daniel Cater escribió:

> If I were a volunteer engineer I wouldn't like the idea that Mozilla would be less likely to hire me if I also volunteered on localisation than if I didn't.

I think we are focusing too much in localization, community work!=l10n,
that is just a part of community work, most people work on engagement,
support and other areas.

[Asa Dotzler]

That is not what is being said. If you are a volunteer, you are more
likely to be hired to work on engineering than on localization. That's
what's being said.

- A

[Asa Dotzler]

I don't understand what it is you think we should do better. If a
volunteer, any volunteer working on anything, wants to move from being a
part-time unpaid contributor to a full-time paid contributor, how is
that not an obvious win for the project. Mozilla has used a piece of its
financial resources to help someone move from a smaller amount of
contribution to a larger amount of contribution, even if in a different
area.

- A

[Axel Hecht]

I'll follow up on this in a private email, can't express this without
expressing my perception of concrete examples. That's not really for
public consumption, but if you think you should know, poke me.

Axel

[Gervase Markham]

On 11/02/12 14:11, Axel Hecht wrote:
> I don't think we should be satisfied with that. I hope we can do better
> than just either or.

If you don't think we should be paying people to do l10n, then I'm not
sure how you can move past either/or. Either they are volunteers and do
l10n, or they are paid and don't do l10n (in paid time).

If you want to give concrete examples, why not ask particular people's
permission to use them as an example? They might well agree, if they can
see it helping the discussion. Taking this to private email is going to
be significantly less productive.

Gerv

[fantasai]

On 02/14/2012 03:53 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> On 11/02/12 14:11, Axel Hecht wrote:
>> I don't think we should be satisfied with that. I hope we can do better
>> than just either or.
>
> If you don't think we should be paying people to do l10n, then I'm not sure how you can move past either/or. Either they are
> volunteers and do l10n, or they are paid and don't do l10n (in paid time).

So, the problem is that the l10n contributor has no more time for
volunteering after getting hired. But before they had time for
volunteering. There are two subcases here:
A. the volunteer did not have a full-time job, and thus had
more free time
B. the volunteer had a full-time job, but somehow had more
free time in the previous full-time job

Are the people we're talking about falling under A or B?

~fantasai

[Ehsan Akhgari]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:54 AM, fantasai <fantasa...@inkedblade.net>wrote:

> On 02/14/2012 03:53 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>

>> On 11/02/12 14:11, Axel Hecht wrote:
>>
>>> I don't think we should be satisfied with that. I hope we can do better
>>> than just either or.
>>>
>>
>> If you don't think we should be paying people to do l10n, then I'm not
>> sure how you can move past either/or. Either they are
>> volunteers and do l10n, or they are paid and don't do l10n (in paid time).
>>
>

> So, the problem is that the l10n contributor has no more time for
> volunteering after getting hired. But before they had time for
> volunteering. There are two subcases here:
> A. the volunteer did not have a full-time job, and thus had
> more free time
> B. the volunteer had a full-time job, but somehow had more
> free time in the previous full-time job
>

As a concrete example myself, I fall under B above.

--
Ehsan
<http://ehsanakhgari.org/>

[Janet Swisher]

I think we can further subdivide case B:
i) The new job takes more hours than the old job did, leaving less
time for volunteer activities.
ii) Now that the person is paid to work for Mozilla, their Mozilla
volunteer activities feel more like "work" and less like fun, than
they did when the person was paid by someone else. So the Mozilla
volunteer activities now come out of the emotional "work" budget,
which is mostly consumed by paid work. In other words, the person no
longer feels like doing as much volunteer work for Mozilla.

Probably no one likes to admit that they fall into Case B(ii), but I
think it is a reality of human nature and our wage-based labor system,
neither of which we can easily change.

--Janet

[Axel Hecht]

Taking the opportunity, as Ehsan was one of the X guys I would talk about:

Ehsan is still the lead on our Persian localization, but hasn't managed
to devote time to it for a while. We have one volunteer on the website,
I think, but she/he doesn't contribute to Firefox.

My personal perspective is that Ehsan is full-fledged out there in our
community, and he's taking on all kinds of tasks that moco hasn't hired
him for. The Persian localization just doesn't happen to be one of them
anymore. Also, we can't just go in and have Ehsan give a talk on the
next open-source conference in Teheran to recruit contributors on how to
help the open web and user sovereignty.

This particular case is just really hard to solve, and I'm dead on
confident if it was legally easier, we'd do better at it.

Also, just one of the cases.

Axel

[Axel Hecht]

Sadly, there's a third option, and we took that one:

C. Strongly discourage that new hire to work on l10n even just a small
fraction of their paid time, and similarly, don't use any of that time
to find a replacement.

Axel

[Asa Dotzler]

I was happy to admit falling into B(ii).

After volunteering for more than a year, probably putting 20 or more
hours a week into Mozilla, I got hired. Soon after, I found an entirely
unrelated volunteer opportunity because I got more than enough Mozilla
in my 50+ hour work week. I don't think there's anything wrong with
this. I went from contributing about 20 hours a week to Mozilla to
contributing more than twice that and the project was better off for it.
I don't see why the same doesn't hold true today.

(And yes, once I got hired, I started working on lots of things
unrelated to what I'd been volunteering on -- and the project was better
off for it.)

- A

[Ehsan Akhgari]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 1:46 PM, Axel Hecht <l1...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On 14.02.12 18:42, Janet Swisher wrote:
>

>> On Feb 14, 9:54 am, fantasai<fantasai.li...@**inkedblade.net<fantasai.li...@inkedblade.net>>

> Sadly, there's a third option, and we took that one:
>
> C. Strongly discourage that new hire to work on l10n even just a small
> fraction of their paid time, and similarly, don't use any of that time to
> find a replacement.

FWIW, I've never been explicitly told that I am not supposed to work on
l10n activities on my paid time. It just has never been on the list of
things I'm responsible for.

I always have a list of things that I want to do in the Mozilla project,
and as a paid contributor I get paid to work on a bunch of those items.
But there are other items on that list that I do in my spare time for
Mozilla. L10n activities has been on that list, but my free time has
always been filled with other Mozilla related activities and I've just not
found enough time to focus on l10n, unfortunately. And l10n is not the
only item on that list that I have not been able to keep up with...

Cheers,
--
Ehsan
<http://ehsanakhgari.org/>

[Axel Hecht]

On 14.02.12 15:53, Gervase Markham wrote:
> On 11/02/12 14:11, Axel Hecht wrote:
>> I don't think we should be satisfied with that. I hope we can do
>> better than just either or.
>
> If you don't think we should be paying people to do l10n, then I'm
> not sure how you can move past either/or. Either they are volunteers
> and do l10n, or they are paid and don't do l10n (in paid time).

To quote what I said earlier in the thread:

> For those that would like to remain involved, we should be able to
> find individual solutions that make that possible.
>
> That's much more consistent with how we treat community members that
> move on full-time mozilla jobs, I guess. It's also a challenge, as I
> don't think that at this stage of mozilla, localizing is a full-time
> job. Or if it was, that it'd be healthy to put all localization work
> on one single shoulder.

I'd read that as not either/or. What I don't think we should do is hire
people for l10n and nothing but that.

> If you want to give concrete examples, why not ask particular
> people's permission to use them as an example? They might well
> agree, if they can see it helping the discussion. Taking this to
> private email is going to be significantly less productive.

That'll take a bit more time. Haven't sent out that other mail yet,
though, still in my drafts folder.

Axel

[da...@illsley.org]

At the individual level, that sounds great. At the project level, if you're
turning a substantial proportion of your most valuable external
contributors into Bii people, then I suspect it's bad for the long term.
It's likely to be harder to grow contributors as the role model external
contributors are gone. Secondly, if Bii people leave Mozilla after a couple
of years, are they likely to be external contributors... If not, then the
overall benefit may be less clear.

[Gervase Markham]

On 14/02/12 17:42, Janet Swisher wrote:
> ii) Now that the person is paid to work for Mozilla, their Mozilla
> volunteer activities feel more like "work" and less like fun, than
> they did when the person was paid by someone else. So the Mozilla
> volunteer activities now come out of the emotional "work" budget,
> which is mostly consumed by paid work. In other words, the person no
> longer feels like doing as much volunteer work for Mozilla.
>
> Probably no one likes to admit that they fall into Case B(ii), but I
> think it is a reality of human nature and our wage-based labor system,
> neither of which we can easily change.

I'd say I certainly fall into case B, although I'd say the emotion is
not "I no longer feel like doing much volunteer work for Mozilla", it's
"Wow, I get to spend work time working on Mozilla, so I can now spend
other time doing different things".

Gerv

[Gervase Markham]

On 14/02/12 18:46, Axel Hecht wrote:
> C. Strongly discourage that new hire to work on l10n even just a small
> fraction of their paid time, and similarly, don't use any of that time
> to find a replacement.

If you wanted to say that new employees hired out of the community
should, as part of their onboarding, write and execute a transition plan
for any community responsibilities that they feel they no longer have
time for, I'd say that is an awesome idea.

Gerv

[Gervase Markham]

On 14/02/12 18:28, Axel Hecht wrote:
> Ehsan is still the lead on our Persian localization, but hasn't managed
> to devote time to it for a while. We have one volunteer on the website,
> I think, but she/he doesn't contribute to Firefox.

Ehsan: with your "Mozilla community member" hat on, do you acknowledge
that Persian l10n now has a problem since you got hired? Have you come
up with a plan for fixing that, and/or has anyone at MoCo such as your
manager encouraged you to make such a plan?

> This particular case is just really hard to solve, and I'm dead on
> confident if it was legally easier, we'd do better at it.

What do you mean by "legally"? Is this partly the issue with the US's
relationship with Iran?

Gerv

[Jay Garcia]

On 15.02.2012 05:48, Gervase Markham wrote:

Lost some of the thread so I'm posting under Gerv's reply ...

I feel that I am more than qualified to tender a reply here based on the
fact that I have been with the "program" since the beginnings of
Netscape in 1994 as a volunteer AND as a paid 1099 contractor during the
days of Netscape 8 and 9 as well as a paid contractor for AOL managing
their AOL/Compuserve Forums.

When AOL lost funding dollars to continue my 1099 contract I stayed on
as a volunteer and to this day I still manage their forums as an unpaid
volunteer. Why? Because I enjoy what I am doing, have never lost
interest in helping others in need. Paid or unpaid doesn't enter into
the equation whatsoever. The "emotion" hasn't diminshed and in fact I
condidered it such an honor and a privilege to actually be PAID that it
was even more of an incentive to volunteer my services in other areas.

To summarize, I enjoy what I am doing for The Foundation, paid or
unpaid, doesn't matter.

Cheers to all - Jay Garcia


--
Jay Garcia - www.ufaq.org - Netscape - Firefox - SeaMonkey - Thunderbird
Mozilla Contribute Coordinator Team - www.mozilla.org/contribute/
Mozilla Mozillian Member - www.mozillians.org
Mozilla Contributor Member - www.mozilla.org/credits/

[Jay Garcia]

On 15.02.2012 05:48, Gervase Markham wrote:

--- Original Message ---

[Daniel Cater]

I don't think you can simplify it down to the number of man hours put into the project. To take it to the extreme, if you hired all of the current localisers who volunteer part-time to work full-time elsewhere on the project then Mozilla would almost certainly be worse off.

[Daniel Cater]

[Asa Dotzler]

Taking the extreme case is silly. Mozilla isn't going to hire all of the
localization contributors.

And what is your solution? Mozilla should exclude interested candidates
from full-time and paid Mozilla work because they're volunteering their
time localizing?

"Sorry, dude. We would love to hire you and you're the perfect
candidate, super qualified and experienced to be a sysadmin for one of
our critical Mozilla services -- but you made the mistake of
volunteering on one of our localizations so you can't apply for the job
and we won't hire you."

Or should volunteers who want to localize for Mozilla sign an agreement
saying they will never seek employment with Mozilla (or anyone else)
that would have them working on non-localization issues?

"You want to contribute to a localization? Great! Just sign here saying
you won't ever decided to do something else even if it's the perfect job
for you."

If someone wants to come work for Mozilla and they're a good fit for a
Mozilla job, there's just no justifiable reason why they shouldn't do
that. It's a win for the Mozilla project to have devoted contributors
working full-time on a things they care about and it's a win for the
employee to have a job that fulfills them.

And I'm not just spouting off here. I was a volunteer for two years on
the Mozilla project and when I got hired it was a great thing for me and
a great thing for the project. I got to contribute 50 or 60 hours a week
to Mozilla rather than the 20 or 30 I could afford as a volunteer. Not
only that, but I'm still contributing 14 years later -- something that
absolutely would not have happened if I'd continued as a volunteer.

- A

[Gijs Kruitbosch]

On 17/02/2012 06:08 AM, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> I was a volunteer for two years on the
> Mozilla project and when I got hired it was a great thing for me and a great
> thing for the project. I got to contribute 50 or 60 hours a week to Mozilla
> rather than the 20 or 30 I could afford as a volunteer. Not only that, but I'm
> still contributing 14 years later -- something that absolutely would not have
> happened if I'd continued as a volunteer.
>
> - A

Why wouldn't that have happened? Sounds like that is relevant to this
discussion, too: why do people stop contributing? How can we keep them
(ourselves, in my case :-) ) motivated?

Gijs

[Gervase Markham]

On 17/02/12 05:08, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> And what is your solution? Mozilla should exclude interested candidates
> from full-time and paid Mozilla work because they're volunteering their
> time localizing?

I don't think anyone's suggesting that.

The idea which is emerged of making it a part of the MoCo onboarding
process to write a transition plan for any community responsibilities
you won't be continuing with, and for time to be made available to
execute that plan and bring new people up to speed over your first few
months, seems like an excellent one to me. What do you think?

Gerv

[Asa Dotzler]

I think that's an unnecessary burden. We don't ask people who go back to
school or have children, or any other life-changing circumstances to
make sure a transition happens -- unless the person is an official
module owner. Where the person isn't a module owner -- far too many
areas, IMO, we leave it up to them to decide how much of a transition
they want to participate in. Some people just walk away with a "I'm busy
with other things now" note while others continue working on that
activity in their evenings or weekends or what ever time they have
outside of their otherwise full lives.

For module owners, we ask for more. When someone becomes a module owner
we give them a certain amount of authority in exchange for their taking
on certain responsibilities. The relationship is much more obvious. A
proposed module owner can decide that's too much responsibility and
decline the role. But if they accept, they should understand what
they're accepting. People who aren't module owners have made no such
commitment and I think asking all volunteers to commit to a transition
plan should they find themselves too busy with other things (including
their "day jobs", or family commitments) is onerous.

Had you told me when I started volunteering that if I got too busy with
other things in my life to continue volunteering that I was responsible
for transitioning what ever activities I was involved in, I'd have told
you to get stuffed.

- A

[Axel Hecht]

I hope to get more replies to this thread, but l10n leads are module
owners by all practical means. At least it doesn't make sense to me to
treat them as anything else.

Axel

[fantasai]

On 02/19/2012 01:43 AM, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> On 2/17/2012 2:07 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>> On 17/02/12 05:08, Asa Dotzler wrote:
>>> And what is your solution? Mozilla should exclude interested candidates
>>> from full-time and paid Mozilla work because they're volunteering their
>>> time localizing?
>>
>> I don't think anyone's suggesting that.
>>
>> The idea which is emerged of making it a part of the MoCo onboarding
>> process to write a transition plan for any community responsibilities
>> you won't be continuing with, and for time to be made available to
>> execute that plan and bring new people up to speed over your first few
>> months, seems like an excellent one to me. What do you think?
>

> I think asking all volunteers to commit to a transition plan should they
> find themselves too busy with other things (including their "day jobs",
> or family commitments) is onerous.

I think you need to reread what Gerv wrote--carefully enough to understand
that what he wrote and what you were responding two are two *very* different
things.

~fantasai

[Asa Dotzler]

On 2/19/2012 3:03 PM, Axel Hecht wrote:
> I hope to get more replies to this thread, but l10n leads are module
> owners by all practical means. At least it doesn't make sense to me to
> treat them as anything else.

They are most definitely not module owners -- any more than I am a
module owner. We have a list of module owners here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/All

If they're not on that list, they're not module owners and they have no
project authority commensurate with module owners.

I think that's broken and should be fixed, but that is the case today.

- A

[Asa Dotzler]

I don't believe they're different. If I'm a volunteer working on CSS
code and I get a job with the NBC network as a television host I should
not be treated differently than if I am a volunteer working on CSS code
and I get a job with Mozilla working as a user support specialist.

Gerv is suggesting that contributors who decide to take a full-time job
with Mozilla should have a higher burden than contributors deciding to
take a job in an un-related field and I think that's wrong.

- A

[Mike Connor]

On 2012-02-19, at 8:04 PM, Asa Dotzler <a...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> Gerv is suggesting that contributors who decide to take a full-time job with Mozilla should have a higher burden than contributors deciding to take a job in an un-related field and I think that's wrong.

I don't know why you consider this a higher burden, when it was clearly intended to be part of "normal" workload, by explicitly accounting for this time during the employee onboarding process. I don't think anyone was suggesting "on top of a full workload, you must also do this."

It does mean we're accepting a (probably minor) short-term hit on productivity in the new role, but this is IMO a worthwhile investment of that new employee's time if it means their responsibilities elsewhere continue to be fulfilled. To me this is no different from how we transition employees between teams, in that we strive to make the transition as clean and painless as possible. It's not always possible, and judgement must always be used, but in the general case we should make the effort.

- Mike

[davidwboswell]

> The idea which is emerged of making it a part of the MoCo onboarding
> process to write a transition plan for any community responsibilities
> you won't be continuing with, and for time to be made available to
> execute that plan and bring new people up to speed over your first few
> months, seems like an excellent one to me. What do you think?

IMO, making sure that we carve out enough time for full-time employed
contributors to have some space for community building is certainly a
good idea.

Asking someone to mentor and bring on a new volunteer to do what
you've done in the past also sounds like a good idea. It's what all
of us (previous volunteer or not) should be doing, as far as I can
tell :)

David

[Brett Gaylor]

Hello, all. For folks I haven't met, I'm Brett Gaylor, the Director of the Mozilla Popcorn project. Please excuse a long email!

Following conversations with Mitchell and members of the Popcorn community, I'd like to propose the creation of a set of modules around the Popcorn project.

For those unfamiliar with Popcorn, our project grew out of the Foundation's drumbeat initiative (drumbeat is now being retired as a brand). After some experiments synchronizing web content to the timecode of <video> files, we created the popcorn.js library [1]. Using Popcorn, developers create multimedia experiences in which media files pull content from APIs, execute JS code, or otherwise animate a web page.

Largely the result of efforts of David Humphrey's group at the Centre for Development of Open Technology, the library has grown to host a dedicated community of developers. Starting in January of 2011, we shipped a release a month, and had our 1.0 launch at the Mozilla festival in London last November.

In addition to popcorn.js, the project also encompasses Popcorn Maker, a GUI for creating Popcorn pages. Shipping a 1.0 release of Popcorn Maker is a major goal for the Foundation in 2012 [2].

Finally, the Popcorn team has been hosting events, largely for documentary filmmakers. Collaborating with groups like the Independent Television Service (ITVS), The Tribeca Film Institute, the Bay Area Video Coalition and the Hot Docs film festival, we host inter-disciplintary gatherings of developers and artists. [3]

These focus areas are all present on the project site page at http://mozillapopcorn.org

We are also proposing the creation of 3 modules based on these focus areas:

-A popcorn.js code module
-A Popcorn Maker code module
-A Popcorn events activity module

We have a set of peers for each of these modules selected. These focus areas all overlap, and in our working day, I'm sometimes called upon to act as a final word (which is actually rare). After much discussion we decided I should be owner of the three modules.

It's our hope that creating these modules will help attract contributors not only from within Mozilla, but also provide a governance framework for folks new to Mozilla who'd like to contribute their time and code.

Are next steps to edit a wiki with formatting similar to here? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/Firefox?

Thanks for your attention,
Brett

[1] http://www.popcornjs.org
[2] http://mozillapopcorn.org/roadmapping-popcorn-maker-1-0/
[3] http://mozillapopcorn.org/learn-popcorn/

[Gen Kanai]

On 2/20/12 9:59 AM, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> I think that's broken and should be fixed, but that is the case today.

Taking a closer look at the Modules/All list, I see a number of modules
that don't have owners, modules that have an owner but no peers, a
number of peers who are no longer with Mozilla, etc.

Is there value in having a regular (annual?) review of the Modules/All
list to see if the list is still accurate? I feel like right now the
list is only semi-helpful because there's quite a bit of it that is out
of date.

Gen

--
Gen Kanai

[Gervase Markham]

On 20/02/12 08:00, Gen Kanai wrote:
> Taking a closer look at the Modules/All list, I see a number of modules
> that don't have owners, modules that have an owner but no peers, a
> number of peers who are no longer with Mozilla, etc.
>
> Is there value in having a regular (annual?) review of the Modules/All
> list to see if the list is still accurate? I feel like right now the
> list is only semi-helpful because there's quite a bit of it that is out
> of date.

The outdatedness of this data, and the larger issues it represents, are
already the subject of a different thread in this group ("How can we
help people better understand community processes") :-)

Gerv

[Gervase Markham]

On 20/02/12 01:04, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> I don't believe they're different. If I'm a volunteer working on CSS
> code and I get a job with the NBC network as a television host I should
> not be treated differently than if I am a volunteer working on CSS code
> and I get a job with Mozilla working as a user support specialist.

You don't think the fact that in case B) Mozilla gets to direct what you
do with 40 hours a week of your time makes it different from case A),
where Mozilla gets to direct what you do with 0 hours a week of your time?

> Gerv is suggesting that contributors who decide to take a full-time job
> with Mozilla should have a higher burden than contributors deciding to
> take a job in an un-related field and I think that's wrong.

Not at all. I am saying precisely the opposite - that space should be
made in their first few weeks, as part of their job responsibilities, to
transition other people into roles they feel they will no longer have
the time to fill.

If I were arguing that they shouldn't be given time to do this, but
should have to do it on top of a full workload (which is the case
today!), then I would be arguing that they should have a higher burden.
But that's precisely what I'm not saying. It seems to me that your
argument means that the status quo is "wrong", and that my proposal is
better. :-)

Gerv

[Gervase Markham]

On 20/02/12 00:59, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> They are most definitely not module owners -- any more than I am a
> module owner. We have a list of module owners here:
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/All
>
> If they're not on that list, they're not module owners and they have no
> project authority commensurate with module owners.
>
> I think that's broken and should be fixed, but that is the case today.

Then I think you and Axel are saying the same thing from different
angles. He is saying that the responsibilities these people take on mean
they should be treated as having the responsibility of module owners -
and, if I read the above correctly about the current system being
broken, so do you.

Gerv

[Gervase Markham]

On 19/02/12 00:43, Asa Dotzler wrote:
> I think that's an unnecessary burden. We don't ask people who go back to
> school or have children, or any other life-changing circumstances to
> make sure a transition happens -- unless the person is an official
> module owner.

The enormous difference, though, is that when people go back to school,
they aren't being paid for 40 hours a week by Mozilla to do whatever
Mozilla thinks they should be doing.

My suggestion is that it would be good for the project if the definition
of "what Mozilla thinks they should be doing" were to include "making
sure not to blow up the community by dropping roles without a transition
plan".

> Had you told me when I started volunteering that if I got too busy with
> other things in my life to continue volunteering that I was responsible
> for transitioning what ever activities I was involved in, I'd have told
> you to get stuffed.

As fantasai points out, that is not what I'm arguing for at all.

Gerv

[Asa Dotzler]

On 2/20/2012 4:23 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> On 20/02/12 01:04, Asa Dotzler wrote:
>> I don't believe they're different. If I'm a volunteer working on CSS
>> code and I get a job with the NBC network as a television host I should
>> not be treated differently than if I am a volunteer working on CSS code
>> and I get a job with Mozilla working as a user support specialist.
>
> You don't think the fact that in case B) Mozilla gets to direct what you
> do with 40 hours a week of your time makes it different from case A),
> where Mozilla gets to direct what you do with 0 hours a week of your time?
>
>> Gerv is suggesting that contributors who decide to take a full-time job
>> with Mozilla should have a higher burden than contributors deciding to
>> take a job in an un-related field and I think that's wrong.
>
> Not at all. I am saying precisely the opposite - that space should be
> made in their first few weeks, as part of their job responsibilities, to
> transition other people into roles they feel they will no longer have
> the time to fill.

Assuming the contributor actually wants to do this, I have no problem. I
do think it's wrong to require that.

- A

[Ehsan Akhgari]

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you!

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 6:52 AM, Gervase Markham <ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:

> On 14/02/12 18:28, Axel Hecht wrote:
>
>> Ehsan is still the lead on our Persian localization, but hasn't managed
>> to devote time to it for a while. We have one volunteer on the website,
>> I think, but she/he doesn't contribute to Firefox.
>>
>
> Ehsan: with your "Mozilla community member" hat on, do you acknowledge
> that Persian l10n now has a problem since you got hired? Have you come up
> with a plan for fixing that, and/or has anyone at MoCo such as your manager
> encouraged you to make such a plan?
>

Yes, I agree that the Persian l10n has a problem now. I have not come up
with a plan to fix it. While I have chatted to a bunch of people at
Mozilla about this, I have not had a conversation with my manager where
they told me that I should come up with a plan to fix this.

>
> This particular case is just really hard to solve, and I'm dead on
>> confident if it was legally easier, we'd do better at it.
>>
>
> What do you mean by "legally"? Is this partly the issue with the US's
> relationship with Iran?
>

To the best of my understanding, yes.

Cheers,
--
Ehsan
<http://ehsanakhgari.org/>

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 2/19/2012 7:59 PM, Asa Dotzler wrote:
>
> They are most definitely not module owners -- any more than I am a
> module owner. We have a list of module owners here:
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/All
>
> If they're not on that list, they're not module owners and they have
> no project authority commensurate with module owners.
>
> I think that's broken and should be fixed, but that is the case today.

I think you are assigning too much authority to that web page.
Historically we considered the l10n leads module owners but we couldn't
put them into despot for technical reasons, so Axel maintained the list
of per-localization owners. When we switched from despot to the new wiki
system, we never re-added the l10n leads to the new system. I don't
think that this means that they aren't owners: just that we haven't
documented it properly.

Axel, do you have the list of owners/peers per locale in a way that
somebody can put into the new wiki system?

--BDS

[Scott Johnson]

It seems as though the miscommunication here is the _requirement_ that
(previously volunteer) contributors who are hired by Mozilla take on
_additional_ responsibility to verify that transitions from their
current (volunteer) role to a new (again, likely volunteer role, as the
person who will be fill their shoes probably isn't paid by Mozilla)
contributor happen smoothly.

It seems like we have two situations here:

1) The contributor leaves what he/she was working voluntarily on to work
for Mozilla on something else, in which case this volunteer project is
abandoned or suffers from severe starvation.
2) The contributor continues to work on the volunteer portion, even as
they gain more responsibility in their paid position at Mozilla, which
will eventually lead to situation 1).
3) The contributor assists Mozilla, as part of their paid time, to
transition to a new contributor, or at least write a transition wiki
page, so that the module/component/whatever doesn't suffer from starvation.

Assuming there is someone who wants to take over the responsibilities of
the volunteer position (yep, I know this is a very big assumption), what
contributor wouldn't want to take route 3, if some time was allotted
during their normal work schedule. I think Asa's argument that we
shouldn't require it as a condition of them taking a job is legitimate,
but also I think that if we _offer_ it - "Hey, here's an opportunity for
you to transition what you were working on, since we think you _might_
not have time to do both" - that the contributors would appreciate that.

~Scott


On 02/20/2012 01:45 PM, thus spoke Asa Dotzler:

> On 2/20/2012 4:23 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:

>> On 20/02/12 01:04, Asa Dotzler wrote:
>>> I don't believe they're different. If I'm a volunteer working on CSS
>>> code and I get a job with the NBC network as a television host I should
>>> not be treated differently than if I am a volunteer working on CSS code
>>> and I get a job with Mozilla working as a user support specialist.
>>
>> You don't think the fact that in case B) Mozilla gets to direct what you
>> do with 40 hours a week of your time makes it different from case A),
>> where Mozilla gets to direct what you do with 0 hours a week of your
>> time?
>>
>>> Gerv is suggesting that contributors who decide to take a full-time job
>>> with Mozilla should have a higher burden than contributors deciding to
>>> take a job in an un-related field and I think that's wrong.
>>
>> Not at all. I am saying precisely the opposite - that space should be
>> made in their first few weeks, as part of their job responsibilities, to
>> transition other people into roles they feel they will no longer have
>> the time to fill.
>

> Assuming the contributor actually wants to do this, I have no problem.
> I do think it's wrong to require that.
>
> - A

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

[Gen Kanai]

Benjamin- thank you for that history. I think many of us were not aware
of that important detail.

We have this list:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Category:L10n_Teams

--
Gen Kanai

[Justin Dolske]

On 2/21/12 9:14 AM, Scott Johnson wrote:

> Assuming there is someone who wants to take over the responsibilities of
> the volunteer position (yep, I know this is a very big assumption), what
> contributor wouldn't want to take route 3, if some time was allotted
> during their normal work schedule. I think Asa's argument that we
> shouldn't require it as a condition of them taking a job is legitimate,
> but also I think that if we _offer_ it - "Hey, here's an opportunity for
> you to transition what you were working on, since we think you _might_
> not have time to do both" - that the contributors would appreciate that.

That sounds pretty reasonable to me.

And echos a point I've been pondering which I don't think has been said...

A big part of the problem here started well before Mozilla hired this
(hypothetical) person. If a community project is so ill that the loss of
1 contributor is grievous loss, then _that_ is a problem.

Healthy projects should be looking for ways to distribute workload /
responsibility and grow new contributors. (Just as any healthy
organization or business should minimize reliance on critical people.)
We (Mozilla) should be helping to ensure our constituent communities are
healthy as a general practice -- that avoids all kinds of problems,
hiring-away a critical contributor included.

This is obviously more challenging for small communities, but then the
cost is also different. The Elfin Tongue locale (ISO art-JRR) is, no
doubt, an important investment to the people that created it (and the
font it uses is _so beautiful_). But if, despite fair effort, the Middle
Earth community fails to thrive and fades away, one has to ask what the
end impact ends up being. And if that failure is actually the needed
spark to ignite the growth of a replacement community.

Justin

[Axel Hecht]

That list is a good starting point, but it's more extensive than the
list of localizations we have. That's because that list is also a
dumping ground for new volunteers to start communities, without having
actually done anything yet that they could take ownership on.

Axel

[Robert Kaiser]

Justin Dolske schrieb:

> A big part of the problem here started well before Mozilla hired this
> (hypothetical) person. If a community project is so ill that the loss of
> 1 contributor is grievous loss, then _that_ is a problem.

That's in theory nice to say but often, a localization or an add-on or
something like that are being brought up and held alive by a single person.
Also, when that person is being hired (by Mozilla), (s)he thinks it will
be no problem to continue to keep it up in their free time, just as
previously.
Then, due to all the interesting other things that open up when working
at Mozilla, and their work often consuming more than just the nominal
work time, that project they had built up before is getting starved -
usually not completely abandoned, as every now and then, that person
will afford just enough time to keep it alive somehow.
At this stage, there's of course no time left to actively look for
someone who could take over or getting that other person acquainted
enough with everything, as that would require more time than one wants
to put into that at the moment (and many people at Mozilla put so much
concentrated effort into their work - because they like the work and
what we can achieve so much - that they are happy to spend some time
away from a computer, and not on that old project they still drag along).
And there we end up with another project in this interesting state of
being "not really dead" but also "not really alive".

I have no idea how to properly solve this problem, but it's real.

Robert Kaiser

[Daniel Cater]

"ii) Now that the person is paid to work for Mozilla, their Mozilla
volunteer activities feel more like "work" and less like fun, than
they did when the person was paid by someone else. So the Mozilla
volunteer activities now come out of the emotional "work" budget,
which is mostly consumed by paid work. In other words, the person no
longer feels like doing as much volunteer work for Mozilla."

(Janet)

I think this is highly likely to be true. It's certainly how I would feel if I got hired onto one of the projects that I contribute to. I also think that:

"Also, when that person is being hired (by Mozilla), (s)he thinks it will
be no problem to continue to keep it up in their free time, just as
previously."

(Robert)

I also think that this is probably true in a lot of cases.

With both of thoughts in mind, has a "Mozilla 20% Time" idea been discussed? I imagine it has but I don't think I've ever seen it in public. It's a big change, but I think that it would solve these 2 core issues, and be good for Mozilla as a whole.

Employees would be able to do project work that is outside of their remit during work time keeping their down-time strictly for non-work activities and volunteers wouldn't have to worry about how they will keep up their volunteer commitments if they got hired.

Perhaps a new thread?

[Daniel Cater]

[Justin Dolske]

On 2/22/12 10:45 AM, Robert Kaiser wrote:
> That's in theory nice to say but often, a localization or an add-on or
> something like that are being brought up and held alive by a single person.

Did you read the rest of my post?

That's exactly what I'm saying is a problem, and we should work to fix.
It's not healthy.

Justin

[Axel Hecht]

.... and we're doing that. Yet here we are with about 100 different
localization teams, all with different problems.

The discussion so far in this thread has focused around how to not make
those problems worse when we hire a contributor.

Speculating on how cool the world would be if there wasn't any task
that's suffering from resource constraints isn't all that helpful.

Axel

[Axel Hecht]

On 15.02.12 12:49, Gervase Markham wrote:
> On 14/02/12 18:46, Axel Hecht wrote:
>> C. Strongly discourage that new hire to work on l10n even just a small
>> fraction of their paid time, and similarly, don't use any of that time
>> to find a replacement.
>
> If you wanted to say that new employees hired out of the community
> should, as part of their onboarding, write and execute a transition plan
> for any community responsibilities that they feel they no longer have
> time for, I'd say that is an awesome idea.

I don't think that fits in general. We hire some of our local
contributors because of their experience, and keeping them involved in
l10n as a small part of their job might benefit their new main
responsibility at mozilla.

Axel

[Robert Kaiser]

Justin Dolske schrieb:

I read the rest and it sounded like you'd imply like a project that dies
off when one person leaves is probably worth to die, which is something
I don't really agree with.

Robert Kaiser

[Ben Bucksch]

You're touching an interesting point.

For me, one of the biggest value of an open-source project vs.
commercial projects is that it has input from a big variety of
perspectives, so open-source projects tend to work better in a wide
variety of use cases and environments (technical, cultural, linguistic
etc.). Open-source software tends to "work" better for that reason.

These perspectives come in, because private people represent their own
viewpoints and what is important for them personally. For me, it may be
security and privacy, for others it's their language, for others it's a
beautiful Mac app etc.. Private persons tend to have a different agenda
than companies, and it's that what makes the characteristic of open-source.

Now, if one company hires the best and brightest members of the
community, and then sets them on the company's agenda, and the
contributor then ends up not contributing anymore towards his original
goals, but the company's goals, that is a structural problem and
directly weakening the community. Yes, they're still working on Mozilla,
but on different things.

You could argue that the Mozilla Corporation knows better where the
resources are spent, but I don't believe that for the above stated reasons.

I do think that it's a good thing that the Mozilla Corporation hires the
best contributors, a very good thing indeed, BUT as Ruben said, MoCo
should ensure that their previous level and goals (!) of participation
in the community doesn't fall below the levels of when they worked for
another employer.
One reason might be that they already feel satisfied to work on
*something* at Mozilla that their inner drive to contribute towards
their own goals decreases. The other might be strong (but positive)
pressure in their work.
One way to counter is that is to a) actively encourage them to
contribute their original contributions b) give them 20% of their work
time *on top* of that to work on things they themselves consider
important (which must not be work-related), so that the effect of MoCo
hiring somebody is that they increase their self-motivated participation
in the community rather than decreasing it.

[Mitchell Baker]

Hello Brett

The 3 modules make sense to me. i still think 3 is a lot with the same
owner, but I can't figure out how to combine any of them in a logical
sense, esp if they have different peers and contributors. so i think we
should create the 3.

Can you make a proposal, complete with owner, peers, and other relevant
info? The template differs depending on if its a code or an activities
module. you can use the firefox template for the code modules; to to
the activities modules page to see the template there.

mitchell

[Brett Gaylor]

Thanks, Mitchell.

Here are the proposed modules:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/Popcorn_js
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/Popcornmaker
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/Activities/popcorneventsproposal

Please let me know if you have questions
Brett

On 2012-03-13, at 12:32 PM, Mitchell Baker wrote:

> Hello Brett
>
> The 3 modules make sense to me. i still think 3 is a lot with the same owner, but I can't figure out how to combine any of them in a logical sense, esp if they have different peers and contributors. so i think we should create the 3.
>
> Can you make a proposal, complete with owner, peers, and other relevant info? The template differs depending on if its a code or an activities module. you can use the firefox template for the code modules; to to the activities modules page to see the template there.
>
> mitchell
>
> On 2/19/12 10:56 PM, Brett Gaylor wrote:
>
>>

>> We are also proposing the creation of 3 modules based on these focus areas:
>>
>> -A popcorn.js code module
>> -A Popcorn Maker code module
>> -A Popcorn events activity module
>>
>> We have a set of peers for each of these modules selected. These focus areas all overlap, and in our working day, I'm sometimes called upon to act as a final word (which is actually rare). After much discussion we decided I should be owner of the three modules.
>>
>> It's our hope that creating these modules will help attract contributors not only from within Mozilla, but also provide a governance framework for folks new to Mozilla who'd like to contribute their time and code.
>>
>> Are next steps to edit a wiki with formatting similar to here? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules/Firefox?
>>
>> Thanks for your attention,
>> Brett
>>
>> [1] http://www.popcornjs.org
>> [2] http://mozillapopcorn.org/roadmapping-popcorn-maker-1-0/
>> [3] http://mozillapopcorn.org/learn-popcorn/
>

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

---
Brett Gaylor
Director, Mozilla Popcorn
@remixmanifesto

[Mitchell Baker]

Brett

These 3 look fine to me. Given no comments, we'll call this closed.

Gerv, any chance you can add these to the Modules list?

mitchell

[Gervase Markham]

On 12/04/12 00:03, Mitchell Baker wrote:
> Brett
>
> These 3 look fine to me. Given no comments, we'll call this closed.
>
> Gerv, any chance you can add these to the Modules list?

Done :-)

Gerv

[Mitchell Baker]

Thanks.

Brett, you're set.

ml

[Brett Gaylor]

Super, thanks everyone.

Looking forward to onboarding many new Mozillians via popcorn!

Best,
Brett



> Mitchell Baker
> View profile
> More options Apr 12, 9:19 am

> Thanks.
> Brett, you're set.
> ml
> On 4/12/12 5:37 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>

> - Hide quoted text -

>
> > On 12/04/12 00:03, Mitchell Baker wrote:
> >> Brett
> >> These 3 look fine to me. Given no comments, we'll call this closed.
> >> Gerv, any chance you can add these to the Modules list?
> > Done :-)
> > Gerv
>