As you know, the Grow program was initially designed to to align with the “Enable Communities that have Impact” goal. The events were intended to mentor and train core contributors to help us bring our products to market and bolster our efforts to recruit new contributors in region.
Since then, we’ve received a lot of extremely helpful and direct feedback from participants, community members who did not attend and from a number of leaders within the Project. The sentiment, echoed on the Project call yesterday, was that the new focus was too much about increasing the size of our community, and not enough about the quality and impact of contribution.
Based on input from our community, and a lot of discussion last week during the community building team’s work week, we’ve made the very difficult decision to cancel all upcoming Grow events this year, including Tunisia, which was scheduled for this September. The decision was made so that the team can focus on launching a redesigned program aimed at providing more interesting and meaningful opportunities to contribute and innovate. This is very late notice, particularly for Mozillians who have spent time and energy completing applications for Tunisia, creating content, and helping with logistics and planning for the event. Know that we would never have made such a decision if we did not feel in our hearts it was the right one.
What’s next – refocus on quality and impact
We are really looking forward to seeing what opportunities we will have to come together as Mozillians in the near future. We know doing that (bringing communities together) is essential for individual, community and Project growth so planning around this isn’t going to stop – it just may look a little different. We’ve been thinking about things like smaller group meet-ups, either organized by Mozilla or as part of other, larger events like an upcoming open-source conference, where communities work together to provide solutions to very specific problems.
Now that we’ve made the tough decision about Grow, we can shift our focus towards a new program — one that focuses on the quality and impact of contributions and our community has a real, strategic, concerted impact on our goals this year.
We have some ideas already are we’re guessing you have some too so let’s start brainstorming! Here is the challenge we leave you with…
How might we design a program that results in contributions that are more fulfilling to our contributors and have a meaningful impact on our goals this year.
Please share your ideas here: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/grow14
– The Community Building Team