Mozillian Access Levels and Affiliations on the Phonebook

[Aakash Desai]

Hi Everyone,

There has been a lot of talk about how a Mozillian forum or a closed place to chatter would look like. Gerv's written a post[1] about what he feels the project needs to have a safe place to talk about important items within the Mozillian community. These topics can range from strategic initiatives we're applying within the community[2], changes in our board[3] to opinions made from our community [4] about the current priorities and implementation strategies of what we decide upon. I'd like to put my two cents in here on implementation of access and trustedness as the Product Manager of the Mozillians Phonebook.

There's been a long sought out goal for the Phonebook to be an authorization service[5] for Mozillians to activate greater access to various sites, tools and platforms across the community. We wanted Mozillians to have access to communication forums like our Yammer instance, better forum software available only to Vouched Mozillians, previews to our early-stage product releases, greater account privileges on sites like SUMO/AMO/MDN, etc. We were hoping to have the Mozillians Phonebook API out already (hey, it was in our goals for Q2! [6]), but there were a number of issues found around technical implementation and privacy/legal concerns that halted it. We're re-focusing and create a better implementation as you read this. 

I've read about concerns and confusion around being vouched on the Mozillians Phonebook; we wanted to a way to identify and bring in our active/core contributors and in a way that matched our (at the time,  Gerv and David were helping guide the feature and roadmapping efforts) definitions for them [7]. That is, a Web of Trust approach rather than something hierarchical. Every Mozillian was empowered to vouch for another contributor and we approached Stewards, Mozilla Reps and key community members to identify and get their contributors into the Mozillians phonebook.

The first thing everyone can help do is head over to our mozilla-dev-community-tools forum where we have technical discussions of this nature [8]. I'd like to start a public discussion here of what site operators and project/product leads would like to have seen done with Mozillian access levels on the Phonebook as well as how we can get there. It's been less than a year that this project has been underway and we've gone so much farther than any other similar initiative in Mozilla's history. I urge everyone to help take it to the next level. 

Note: There should be a discussion about the social aspects of trustedness and would love to work with whoever wants to take the cue and push that discussion.

Thanks,

Aakash Desai

Product Manager, Community Tools

[1] http://blog.gerv.net/2012/07/more-evidence-for-trusted/

[2] http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/06/26/mozilla-launches-a-speedy-and-powerful-upgrade-to-mobile-browsing-with-firefox-for-android/

[3] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/25/cathy-davidson-joins-mozilla-foundation-board/

[4] http://www.evilbrainjono.net/blog?permalink=1094

[5] http://aakash.doesthings.com/2012/03/19/community-tools-platforms-roadmap-2012/

[6] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozillians/Milestones/Phase2

[7] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community

[8] https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-dev-community-tools