Hi, my name is Lucy and I'm from Canada.
Hello everyone, I'm Ruben and I'm in Spain,
and we both work for the Innovation team at Mozilla.
Today we're going to be giving you a hopefully quick guide
into the mission-driven Mozillians project,
which you might have heard about, maybe you read our wiki page,
or maybe you've seen our updates on Discourse,
our many, many updates.
And maybe you're feeling a bit overwhelmed
by all this information, and you just want to know
"what is this all about?"
So that's what we're going to be talking about today.
Our vision, why we're running this project,
is because we believe that Mozilla should have
a healthy global community of people who want Mozilla to win,
of mission-driven Mozillians.
And at creating this community, we can build our mission in a way
that none of our competitors can match,
and create a big foundation for the movement for the open web.
That sounds good, hopefully.
-But... -Yeah...
Why now?
Basically, last year, what we did at the Open Innovation team
is that we run a big research,
deeper than anything that we have done at Mozilla in the past.
And basically what we were analyzing through internal interviews,
with more than a thousand surveys.
And then into more than 16 years of data, it was, like, great,
but it allows us to validate some of the assumptions
that we have around community.
Examples of this can be where people are contributing right now,
where are active contributors contributing.
We saw Firefox on localization and support really high there,
but, also, there were some surprises in terms on how young our community is.
Most of the people are really young and we didn't know about that.
Also, the reasons for people to leave the community,
most of them is because of professional or personal time,
and that was also, more or less, a surprise for us.
But the the biggest thing, I think, for this research,
was to see how people organize themselves contributing to different areas,
and what is the relationship between [inaudible]
So, we saw a lot of people contributing to a lot of non-technical areas,
that were contributing to some of them, or all of them at the same time.
And there were a lot of people doing this.
There was more distance, for example,
to people who were just contributing to coding
or more technical areas.
Absolutely
-So, I know what you're wondering... -Yeah, I'm wondering.
-What is it? -These are the Power Rangers.
Hopefully you're familiar with them. I know that doesn't answer your question.
Why are you putting these Power Rangers up?
What do they have to do with Mozilla contributors?
Well, this is another way of kind of visualizing
what Ruben was just talking about.
These assumptions that we used to have about how our communities were structured.
We used to think that people who did localization
were different than people who did support,
were different than reps,
were different than people who were really involved in their regional communities,
or who did web literacy.
But this research, Power Rangers noise here,
showed us that, actually, loads of people in our community
are doing all of these things at the same time.
And when we looked at the research and understood why,
what was their motivation? It was the mission.
Here, these are people who are really motivated by Mozilla,
and by what Mozilla was doing
to contribute to a whole bunch of different ways,
and primarily we see evangelism, regional, L10N, testing, SUMO,
and dealing with literacy, all the same person,
these Mighty Morphin, mission-driven resilience, if you will.
So, we created this kind of persona,
this definition to understand this group of people,
called the mission their resilience, and they're volunteers who,
probably like many of you watching,
contribute to a number of different activities,
are super invested in Mozilla as a mission and organization,
and contribute in different areas.
And those main ones that Ruben already showed:
evangelism, teaching, advocating, localizing, documenting,
community building, and testing.
They definitely do this, a lot of them.
Absolutely. So, Mehul, many of you may know him.
Just a random example of someone who's really a mission-driven Mozillian.
He's a rep, he contributes to support,
he's part of India's Policy and Advocacy task force
and a localization reviewer.
So, like many of you watching,
Mehul is somebody who's really involved in lots of different areas.
And we also found some more stuff about that.
Yeah, and I think it's also time to have some real talk around what we found.
Because this research, together with a diversity and inclusion research,
shows that we are not making it easy
for these mission-driven mozillians to succeed.
Because [inaudible] highly difficult.
And we saw this in three streams of missed opportunities and bad experiences.
The first one is around inconsistency.
How, we were talking about this,
like, how different experiences in different areas,
but who are contributing to all of them at the same time.
Criteria, recognition, opportunity.
It's confusing for people.
Missed opportunities in terms of having to do things from scratch,
in terms of recruitment, inefficiency, duplicating efforts,
burnout for some people asking so many things.
And unfortunately we saw toxicity in our communities.
In some cases, power accumulation gatekeeping, very reduced diversity,
low retention, and this is really problematic.
And these are the things that we really need to fix
on the foundation of our communities.
Absolutely. I remember when we were first giving this presentation in Berlin,
right after the launch of Firefox Quantum,
and a contributor was talking about how she was localizing for Quantum,
she was doing social media marketing for Quantum,
and she was doing QA,
and all of the different teams were asking things from her at the same time,
-How crazy... -in a 1 week span,
and how difficult that was to manage,
and how none of the teams were talking and how it made it really hard,
to contribute in such an important way.
So, this is a quick snapshot of our org structure,
which shouldn't matter at all to any volunteer,
but unfortunately we realized that we're shipping the structure out,
and asking volunteers to try and find the right people for the right projects.
Each of these teams has its own website, its own registration system,
and we were just forcing this complexity out
rather than folding internally, like we should be.
And this is not the way it should be.
This period should be rewarding, it should be fun,
but also should be impactful, right?
And with these three things
we are trying to find a modern way for contributor dispute.
And how we are trying to do that?
Basically, with this project, we want to have two ways to solve that:
through guidelines and unified systems, one.
And second, with clear direction to find high value engagement.
Because, at the end of the day,
we need to have this unified way to attract and engage people,
if we want Mozilla to win, as we were talking.
How we are going to be doing this?
Let's talk first about high value engagements.
We have two things here: first, what we are calling enduring areas.
These are the areas where we know for sure
that are providing in impact for Mozilla, value for Mozilla,
and we can direct people to these areas at any moment in time:
localization, support, things that we are doing at community development team,
these are getting always value for Mozilla.
We want to have a unified way, and guidelines, and cohesive experience,
on all this areas.
But we also want to give people the opportunity
to engage into high value engagement in other areas through the years,
so we want also, for each quarter, to have
at least a couple of campaigns going on, that are very time bound,
and can be staff managed or staff supported.
The difference here is, for example, staff managed can be the Firefox Sprint,
the India Privacy Campaign, Privacy Day,
so these are things that are organized by staff, or managed by staff.
But we want to also give the space and the opportunity
for grassroot efforts, local ideas to surface,
and to have all the impact they can have through staff-supported campaigns.
Examples of this can be the Rain of Rust,
Privacy Month, Excellence Campaign coming from Rust root local knowledge,
that we empower a staff, we are not managing it,
but we are empowering it. So, this is about high value.
But what about the guidelines and unified systems?
The research that we did at the end of last year identified
seven areas of action, which are the ones you have here on screen right now.
I'm going to quickly describe what they are:
Group Identities. We know people self-organized into groups and communities
and we want to have a unified way to guide,
for guidelines, tracking, recognition etc.
The existing groups [inaudible]
for how we recognize them.
Diversity and Inclusion.
All the research that we did together.
So, Emma, Larissa, and other people were doing great research last year.
We worked processes, standards, workflows, importing the CG,
community participation guidelines,
how we apply this in a unified metrics.
That's the third one. Metrics are going to be fundamental.
We don't want to have to be doing a research,
a super deep research is dear, to know what's going on.
We want to know what's going on at any given moment,
so we will have better opportunities for recognition,
for checking the health of our communities,
and metrics are going to be fundamental here.
Volunteer Leadership. We've been advancing this
at the end of last year, if you have been checking Discourse,
and basically what are the structures, and the standards,
and the definition for leadership and responsibility of roles,
and how we bring a unified experience across these areas.
The same for Recognition.
How we apply this in a balanced way across all areas
is a conversation that we will be starting really soon.
And this the sixth one is Research distribution.
We have been doing a great job at the reps program
in terms of distributing resources, but we want you to see
how we can provide these to more people in our community,
not just the reps community.
And the last one, Contributor Journey and Opportunity Matching.
This is really fundamental. How people find opportunities?
How do we know these opportunities are really impactful?
How do we prioritize the ones that are really providing value to Mozilla?
Because, as volunteers,
people want to find impactful things to contribute their time.
And, also, like an [inaudible] Mozilla,
to the end of your journey at Mozilla when you decide it has to end.
So it's also bringing a unified way across all areas.
There's a lot there.
Yeah.
And in each of those areas we're in a different stage, advancing them,
so they're not all going to happen overnight.
As you're watching on Discourse and everything,
you'll see that these move forward in different increments.
So, Group Structures. There's a pilot starting,
that you'll be able to read about on Discourse.
And Diversity Inclusion,
all the community participation guideline works
that Emma Irwin has already been working on.
The big part of that and more coming.
Volunteer Leadership. Check out the shared agreements
on Discourse and see what's happening there.
There's also a pilot that's starting to look about implementation.
Metrics. Definitely happening with lots of other teams,
starting to look at what are all the systems that we have.
In all the places that you're asked to register,
how to make this a better experience to provide valuable metrics?
Recognition. It's going to be starting soon,
but is on the back bench right now,
and is going to advance throughout the year.
Resource Distribution. Starting internally,
as to look at what are all the teams to distribute funds,
and how can we make that a more unified system.
And then, at last, number 7 is really contingent
on getting these other things lined up,
so we'll see that a little bit later.
So, what's next? What's right now?
So, there are things you can do to get engaged.
So, firstly, go on Discourse. We'll share the links with you.
But look for the Leadership by Design Shared Agreements.
Read through them, and start hosting discussions in your community
about what these shared agreements might look like.
And as you think about these categories, all of them,
please, write things on Discourse, use the tag leadership-learnings,
so that everyone can read them.
We will read things tagged with leadership-learnings,
and we'll help boost what's happening, so that, as each community starts to advance,
all these things, we can be sharing and learning from each other.
You can also subscribe to [inaudible] there,
so you can follow up with everything that we are publishing.
Exactly.
So that is it for us.
We hope that this is helpful, and you feel less overwhelmed.
And stay tuned. We'll be doing more. Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks for watching. Bye.