A Quick Intro to Mission Driven Mozillians

The Mission Driven Mozillians project, driven by the Community Development Team (part of the Open Innovation Team), is driving forward the creation of a modern unified contributor experience for Mission-Driven Mozillians.

Watch this video to learn what, why now, and how!

wiki.mozilla.org/Innovation/Projects/Mission-Driven_Mozillians_Strategy

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.