Open and agile?

Chris Mills

31 responses

Facilitating openness and including volunteers in agile sprints

This post is based on a discussion at the Mozilla All-Hands event in December 2016. Participants in that discussion included Janet Swisher, Chris Mills, Noah Y, Alex Gibson, Jeremie Patonnier, Elio Qoshi, Sebastian Zartner, Eric Shepherd, Julien G, Xie Wensheng, and others.

For most of 2016, the Mozilla marketing organization has been moving towards working agile — much of our work now happens within “sprints” lasting around 2.5 weeks, resulting in better prioritization and flexibility, among other things. (For those familiar with agile software development, agile marketing applies similar principles and workflows to marketing. Read the Agile Marketing Manifesto for more background.)

However, one aspect of our work that has suffered in this new paradigm is openness and inclusion of our volunteer community in marketing activities. While the agile workflow encourages accountability for full-time team members, it leaves very little space for part-time or occasional participation by volunteers. We are Mozilla, and transparency, openness, and participation are part of our core values. This disconnect is a problem.

This post explores the issues we’ve found, and shares some potential solutions that we could work towards implementing.

The problem

Since moving to an agile, “durable team” model, the amount of interaction we have had with our volunteer community has decreased. This is written from the perspective of the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) team, but we are sure that other teams have experienced similar negative trends.

The main reasons for this decrease are:

  • The tools used to track work are not open, so volunteers cannot access them.
  • The agile process in general does not lend itself well to volunteer discovery or contribution. Their work is deprioritized, they feel ignored, they find it harder to participate.
  • There is very little information provided for volunteers who want to participate in a project managed in an agile fashion.

The challenge we face is how to make the agile process more transparent, so that volunteers can understand what is happening and how it happens; more open so that volunteers can contribute in meaningful ways; and more welcoming so that volunteers feel they are part of a team and are appreciated and recognized for their efforts.

Solutions

Let’s look at the solutions that were discussed. These details are fairly brief, but they act as good starting points for further investigation.

Openness of tools

We need to review the tools we are using, and make sure that they are open for volunteers to get information and updates. For example:

  • Slack is hard in terms of giving people the right permissions.
  • Some of the “agile tools” can appear closed off and difficult to access for those outside your organization (at least, in the ways we’ve been using them).

We need to work out better tools/workflows for volunteer contributions.

Information

An explainer doc to explain the agile process would be useful, including:

  • How the process works in general, and an explanation of key terms like durable team, “functional team”, “cross-functional”, etc.
  • What the different teams are and what they are responsible for.
  • How to find more information on what you can do for each team at the current time and in the future.
  • How you can contact each team and get updates on their work.

There is some information that already exists — an explanation of MDN’s agile process, and a glossary of agile terminology.

When questions are asked, it would be good to make sure that we not only answer them on a public list, but also document the answers to make them easy to find for others.

When decisions are made, they need to be clearly communicated on the public list for the agile team it relates to.

Including volunteers

To participate in an agile team, volunteers need:

  • Access to tools and information, so they can do work and communicate with agile teams.
  • Access to lists of “low hanging fruit” tasks related to the team’s work that they can pick up and work on.
  • A chance for inclusion in the conversation, whether synchronously or asynchronously.

To achieve this, we need to:

  1. Review our tools, and make sure they can be made open to volunteers.
  2. Make information available, as described in the previous section.
  3. Make lists of tasks that volunteers can do in each agile team easily available. To achieve this, one suggestion is to share Epics with volunteers (don’t overwhelm them upfront with too much detail), but make lists of tasks available on the epic pages, along with who to contact about each task.
  4. Make it clear how you can communicate with agile teams — a clear mailing list and IRC/slack channel would be the minimum.
  5. Keep an open dialog going with our community:
    • Open up planning meetings to allow volunteers to take part in the planning.
    • Say what we are working on next before the sprint starts and what work volunteers can do.
    • Say how things are going during the sprint, and what help we need at each stage.
    • Report on how things went at the end of the sprint.
  6. Make meetings (standups, mid-sprint review, post mortem, etc.) more useful.
    • Include an IRC channel running at the same time, for further communication and to provide notes that people can read afterwards.
    • Allow people to talk about other subjects in meetings, to make them more human.
    • Sometimes conversation can be monotonous (e.g. “I’m still working on the same task” for 5 days running). If this is the case, use the time more usefully.
    • Use the meetings as an opportunity to update volunteer asks; if we find we need more help than we initially thought, do a shout out to the community.
    • Consider office hours for agile teams (whether in Vidyo, IRC, etc.), so team members and volunteers alike can drop in and talk.
    • Record video meetings so others can benefit from them asynchronously.

We ought to fit communication with the community/volunteers into each agile meeting, as a recurring agenda item.

Further points

  1. Make sure there is always someone present to help volunteers with questions they have, all the way through a sprint. Keep communication public; don’t let conversations happen in private, then risk the team member going on holiday or something.
  2. We should relax a little on the agile principles/processes — use them where they are useful, but don’t stick to the letter of the law for the sake of it, when it isn’t helpful. As an example, the MDN durable team has gone from everyone having a standup every day, to two standups per week for the writers, and two standups per week for the developers. We found anything more to be too high-frequency, and a waste of time.
  3. One situation that might make using open tools difficult is if any of the work is sensitive, e.g., discusses security issues. We could get around this by dealing with such issues inside private bugs on Bugzilla.

Next steps

We want to get feedback on this, and hear about other people’s pain points and solutions or insights for working open inside agile teams. If you have any other thoughts about how the process could be improved, please do share!

After that, we want to distill this information down in a set of documentation to help everyone in marketing (Mozilla, or otherwise) to be open while working in an agile form.

Mozilla at FOSDEM 2017

Francisco Picolini

With over 17 talks hosted in our packed Mozilla Devroom, more than 550 attendees at our booth, and our #mozdem hashtag earning 1,8 million impressions, Mozilla’s presence at FOSDEM 2017 February 4-5 was a successful, volunteer-Mozillian driven initiative.

FOSDEM is one of the biggest events in the Open Source world and attracts more than 6,000 attendees from all over the world — Open Source advocates, Technical developers, and people interested in Copyright, new languages, and the open web. Through our booth we were able to hear from developers about what they expect from Mozilla — from our tools and technologies, our involvement in the open source community, how we can improve our contribution areas. We had a full day Devroom on Saturday with 17 talks (8 from volunteers) averaging nearly 200 attendees per talk that covered several topics like Dev Tools, Rust, A-Frame and others. There were also presentations about community motivation, Diversity & Inclusion, and Copyright in Europe. Together these allowed us to show what’s important for Mozilla right now, what ideas and issues we want to promote, and what technologies are we using.

In working with volunteer-Mozillians to coordinate our presence, the Open Innovation team took a slightly different path this year, being more rigorous in our approach. First, we identified goals and intended outcomes, having conversations with different teams (DevTools, DevRel, Open Source Experiments, etc). Those conversations helped us to define a set of expectations and success for these teams. For example, Developer Relations was interested in getting feedback from participants on Mozilla and web technologies, since the event has an audience very relevant for them (web developers, technical developers). Open Source Experiments was interested in create warm leads for project partners, to help boost the program. So we had a variety of goals, which were shared with volunteers, and that helped us to measure the success of our participation in a solid way.

DevTools talk Graphic

DevTools talk Graphic

FOSDEM is always a place to discuss and have interesting conversations. While we covered several topics at the Devroom and at our booth, Rust proved to be a common talking point on many occasions. Although it can be considered a new programming language, we were asked about how to participate, where to find more information and how to join the Rust community.

All in all, the Mozilla presence at FOSDEM proved to be very solid and it couldn’t had happened with the help of the volunteers that staffed the booth and worked hard. I would like to mention and thank (alphabetically): Alex Lakatos, Daniele Scasciafratte, Edoardo Viola, Eugenio Petullà, Gabriel Micko, Gloria Dwomoh, Ioana Chiorean, Kristi Progri, Merike Sell, Luna Jernberg and Redon Skikuli and a lot of other volunteers that went there to help or only participate at the event. Also big kudos to Ziggy Maes and Anthony Maton, who helped to coordinate Mozilla presence.

our volunteers at FOSDEM 2017

our volunteers at FOSDEM 2017

Some highlight numbers of our presence in this edition:

  • Nearly 200 people on average per talk in our devroom
  • Mozillians directly engaged with around 550 people during the weekend at our booth
  • More than 200 people checked our Code of Conduct for our devroom
  • Our hashtag #mozdem, had around 1,8 Million impressions
  • The Survey we ran at the event was filled out by 210 developers

There are a lot of pictures and blogposts from mozillians on medium, or in their blogs. If you want to see some tweets, impressions and photos, check this storify.

Community Spaces in 2016

Brian King

1 response

Reposted from: http://brian.kingsonline.net/talk/2017/01/community-spaces-in-2016/

As 2017 gets into full swing, the goal of this post is to reflect on the impact of the Mozilla volunteer-run community spaces we have in Asia. These are the spaces in Jakarta, Manila, and Taipei. I’ll be presenting data and some analysis based on that.

In summary, there was:

  • 351 events
  • 173 Developer focused events, vs 178 other types of events
  • 4832 event attendees
  • Taipei sees the most traffic, in terms of events and attendees

Yet data only tells some of the story. We’ll be also getting input from space stewards with insights on what worked and what didn’t ‘on the ground’ throughout the year.

What?

First, a reminder of what the community spaces program is all about. It is an initiative to open (or use existing) physical spaces for Mozillians around the world. It’s an experiment to create open spaces for people who are passionate about the open web, to collaborate with other communities, attract more talent into Mozilla, to strengthen local communities. The main hypothesis is that great things will happen. At Mozilla it was started by the WPR team in collaboration with the Community Building team in 2014, and in 2016 the Participation team took over the oversight of the project. Huge hat tip to William Quiviger who led the project until I took over in March.

Here are some hypotheses we wanted to work on in 2016:

  1. We can engage more with developers in the local communities that the spaces are in, to promote what’s new in Firefox and Web technologies in general
  2. We can work with more partners (organisations, companies, individuals, …) to amplify common goals
  3. The local spaces strengthen the local Mozilla communities

Events

While it can be used for other purposes such as co-working, the main function of the space that we encourage is events. These can be presentations, workshops, hackathons, and so on. The goal is to promote knowledge sharing, learning, building relationships, and of course raising awareness of what Mozilla does from new and exciting technologies for the web platform going into Firefox to the issues campaigns we run to advocate for users and a better Internet.

Focus

In Q2 we teamed up with the developer marketing team to make a targeted effort to have more events in the spaces for developers. The goal was not just to introduce that audience to the latest and greatest technologies coming out of Mozilla, but to talk about the best in Web tech in general. We provided general guidelines on topics to focus on, and tips on how to run effective events. Then we introduced mentors to space stewards, and then left enough room for the magic to happen.

Metrics

So let’s jump in and look at some numbers, with a reminder that these are not for the whole year but from April onwards. Another caveat is that Jakarta has a handicap of only starting events in mid-May, so 1.5 months less than other spaces.

For reference, the full report is here. Thank you to Rizki Kelimutu for putting together this great report based on event data we logged since April.

Events Overview

Events breakdown, in total and per event type

There were 351 events in total, which is almost 1.3 events a day in the collective. This averages out between the three spaces at 117 per space. That’s is a solid rhythm but as you can see the number is not evenly distributed. Taipei comes out on top, with 55.8% of all events.

There is almost an split between developer focused events and other events 173 vs 178. Looking at the breakdown of events between developer focused vs other types, per space they mirror the total however with Taipei a little stronger on developer events and Jakarta stronger on other events.

Events Over Time

Event over 3-week periods

The over time trends shown here for each space show consistency, with several peaks and troughs. They can for the most part be attributed to holidays. For example, in Manila the summer vacation saw a peak as people had time to attend events, and the start of college classes in May/June resulted in a drop. During some months Taipei was seeing close to 25-30 events per month, meaning almost one a day! The November to December rise was helped by a visit from Alex and Nina from wizardamigos.com who hosted seven events to help people code for the first time in JavaScript.

Attendees Overview

Attendees breakdown, both new and returning, and per-event type numbers

In general, the number of attendees reflects the number of events in each space. A couple of things jump out however:

  • The high number of returning attendees in Taipei. People coming back time after time to the pace shows high positive sentiment and engaging content for the local tech community
  • Manila attracts significantly more new attendees. This could be for a number of reasons, such as a large local community, compelling new content, a wide variety of different topics covered, or increased awareness in 2016 of the Manila space.

And here is the the space by space comparison of attendees:

Attendees Over Time

Attendees over 3-week periods

What is interesting here is the more frequent ups and downs in new attendees in all spaces, but take note that it is exaggerated by the smaller range (150) than returning (300). Attracting both new and returning visitors is a challenge. At its core however, it is about forming a strong sense of community, and ensuring strong and compelling content for people to learn and grow. In general for new vs returning, more detailed exit surveys would be needed to really find out the real story behind the data.

There is one other topic that warrants a look, and that is the size of events. Here is how we classified them, in terms of number of attendees:

  • >30 Large
  • 10-30 Medium
  • <10 Small

Let’s see how the spaces shape up. One thing to keep in mind is that the capacity when comfortably accommodating people is around 30 people, with only Taipei able to fit in more safely by removing tables. So large events would need to happen elsewhere, e.g. there is a cafe below the Jakarta space that they can rent out for bigger events.

Jakarta Event Sizes

Manila Event Sizes

Taipei Event Sizes

So I would say that the main barometer for success in general is that the majority of events lie at the mid-size level. And that seems to be mostly the case in Jakarta and Taipei, with Manila fairing worse with events most months having <10 attendees.

What trends do you see in the report, and what other conclusions would you make from the data? Leave comments on this post if you have anything.

Happenings and Highlights

For me the highlight was visiting the three spaces in 2016. In January I went to Taipei to explore the idea of merging the staff space with the community space. While that didn’t happen this time, I did see up close the prolific and crucial work that volunteers do in the city and more broadly in Taiwan.

In May I visited Jakarta and Manila. The purpose was to be present for the official Jakarta opening as well as: Check the status of the space in Manila, and visit other spaces in the city to see what the co-working/incubator/Maker Space scene is like; Talk to Mozillians in both communities to gauge community health; Monitor progress so far of, and provide guidance for, the developer engagement program; Get a feel for the wider tech scene in both cities to see where Mozilla sits and how we can spread our wings and make new relationships.

MozSpaceJKT - Opening Party

Listening and watching at the Jakarta space opening. Picture by Yofie Setiawan. More photos.

I came away with a fresh appreciation of the intense dedication that a core group of volunteers in the community have towards Mozilla, the impact they have, and more context on the vibrancy of the wider tech scene they are working in.

Here are some more insights and highlights on 2016 from some of the space stewards.

Jakarta

(by Yofie Setiawan)

The Jakarta Space has been and continues to take part in campaigns for Mozilla. We are reaching the local Rust community, Developer community, and Web of Things. We took part in the Inter-Connected Community session at Mozilla Festival 2016, and we also support Mozilla’s marketing campaigns throughout the year.

MozSpaceJKT

Our space is limited to maximum 25 people that can fit in the space. Already we have run many events that are really inspiring for many people. The Mozilla Community Space Jakarta Launch Party of course was the most crowded event, which happened on May 2016. We invited many inspiring speakers to share knowledge and do workshops at our space.

MozSpaceJKT

Our strengths include that we have a good location central in Jakarta, that is easy to access. We have strong relationships with many inspiring people and communities who love to share their knowledge and ideas through Mozilla Community Space.

Some groups or communities that we’ve been working with are:

  • WebVR Community
  • PHP Indonesia
  • Blogger
  • Framework (NodeJS, Rust, etc)
  • Rust Community
  • Python Indonesia
  • Open SUSE
  • Linux Community

MozSpaceJKT

Our main challenge is managing human resources, especially keyholders who help as volunteers to taking care the space when there are events running. We continually adjust for efficiency, so everything will stay well managed.

We would love to see more events, especially which also relate to the ideas, vision, and mission of Mozilla.

Some categories of events that we are looking forward to are:

  • Web of Things workshop
  • Mozilla Tech Speaker workshop
  • SuMo workshop
  • Teach the Web
  • WoMoz programming workshop
  • Engage more activity with Open Source Community
  • Rust Community
  • WebVR Community

Manila

(by Bob Reyes)

The year 2016 saw a couple of firsts for the Mozilla Community Space Manila (MozSpaceMNL). Launched in August of 2014, MozSpaceMNL in 2016 became the venue of choice for new or re-established developer communities around the metropolis.

Manila Space

As for Mozilla Philippines Community’s part, we began conducting Introduction to Rust Programming Language events on a monthly basis. This led to the creation of a RustPH Group and the subsequent formation of a RustPH Mentors Group. Said group is now in the process of formulating a Standard Training Module for people in our locale interested in learning Rust as a second programming language.

Rust in Manila

In Summer of 2016, MozSpaceMNL played as host for the 2nd run of Maker Party for Kids (several days in the month of May). Conceptualized in 2015, the Maker Party for Kids events were able to train more than ten (10) kids aged 6 to 12 years old on the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript the Webmaker’s Thimble as the primary teaching tool.

Also in 2016, a couple of events related to Privacy awareness were held at the Community Space in Manila. Noteworthy was the forum to discuss the Implementing Rules & Regulations (IRR) of the Philippine Data Privacy Act of 2012 with no less than the Deputy Commissioner of the Philippine Privacy Commission as our resource speaker. This event was followed by smaller weekend pocket sessions targeting on students to be aware of issues related with data and online privacy.

Data Privacy in Manila

Aside from MozillaPH-organized events, MozSpaceMNL also served as venue for meetups of other like-minded organizations:

  • Several Code Camps co-organized with Developers Connect Philippines (DevConPH)
  • Emacs Users Group Philippines Meetup
  • Manila WordPress Meetup (which eventually led to the resumption of Word Camp Manila)
  • Mechanical Keyboard Warriors Meetup
  • Philippine Web Designers Organization Meetup
  • Google Developer Group Philippines (GDGPH) Firebase Live Viewing Party
  • Virtual Reality Philippines (VRPH) Meetup

Manila Space Event

In October 2016, MozSpaceMNL participated in the very first Inter-Connected Community Spaces activity during the Maker Festival held in London, England.

Inter-Connected Community Spaces in Manila

For 2017, we plan to continue with at least one Rust-related event per month. Co-organizing developer-related events with like-minded organizations will also continue. MozSpaceMNL’s support to other organizations by means of providing venue for their meetups and the like will still be there. We also hope for more inter-connected community spaces activities soon.

Taipei

(by Irvin Chen)

2016 is the third year of Mozilla Community Space Taipei. MozTW and more than 30 local open (source/culture/data/gov) communities together, we had host 320+ various events for 3300 people, and introduced Mozilla and our Mission to more than 600 first time visitors.

Happy Birthday Firefox

A typical MozTW Lab in a special day

The best event in the space is “MozTW Lab” (as always), the local Mozillian’s weekly meetup. Volunteers gathering each Friday night to socialize, work, and give lightning talks on different topics including Mozilla’s latest update. This meetup had been running for 8 years, and in 2016 we had visitors from all over the world including Mark Surman, Brian King, Larissa Shapiro, William Quiviger, Max Ogden, Fa-ti Fan, 田爱娜 and many more.

Mozillians all around!

Mozillians all around! (click/touch and drag image to explore)

Another highlight of 2016 for the Taipei space is the diversity of the events, visitors and connected communities. There are growing types of the communities, dev-rel, open culture, open source and civil society community host events, workshops, meetups, talks, hackathons, and study groups. Different types of fun almost every night happened in Community Space Taipei.

Baking some Firefox cookies

Baking some Firefox cookies

For dev-rel topics, Rust and WebVR workshops are the newest. But people also shared knowledge on JS / NodeJS, Python, Swift, React, Spark, OpenStack, C#, Clojure, Java, D3, Functional Programming, Android App… You can learn and meet community for almost every programming languages, popular or not. We also help by providing the venue for new dev communities such as “WizardAmigos CodeCamp” (local one).

For open culture and non-dev technical events, Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap use Taipei Space for regular meetup, and there are workshops and meetups on Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, R, Arduino, InfoSec, students and many more. There are also many gender based technical communities and events such as WoFOSS, R Ladies, Swift Girls and PyLadies. Larissa Shapiro’s visit in January reminded us of the importance to keep the space a place of diversity and inclusion for all.

Taiwanduino 組裝工作坊

Have you ever build your own Arduino?

One of the most special part of the Taipei space is the events and meetups from local civil societies, open government and open culture communities. Gov. hackers and programmers played an important role in democracy development recent years in Taiwan, and Taipei Community Space had become a base for popular open communities such as Open Culture Foundation and G0V. Our keyholders also actively support events about digital human rights or internet governance from Taiwan Association for Human Rights and Citizen Congress Watch. People came to making, hacking and watching not only the technology, but also the human rights, democracy and civil society in the community space.

Happy Birthday Firefox

What do you want to share in Community Space Taipei?

Wrap-up

Let’s revisit our hypotheses and see how we fared.

We can engage more with developers in the local communities that the spaces are in, to promote what’s new in Firefox and Web technologies in general.

We teamed up with developer marketing, and had a total of 173 developer-focused events since April. This was everyone from beginners to experienced developers, on a host of technologies related to the Web.

We can work with more partners (organisations, companies, individuals, …) to amplify common goals

All three spaces have built up a network of all different technology companies and organisations. They engage at different levels, from working together on projects to sharing the space to have events.

The local spaces strengthen the local Mozilla communities

The Philippines community has in recent years been one of our largest and most dynamic, most notably in the area of student engagement. However, 2016 presented a number of challenges that decreased engagement. They have reached out for support from Mozilla and have a desire to bounce back. The communities in Taiwan and and Jakarta have a strong core, and while they have the classic growth challenges that all communities have, they have been trying new things and working in different ways to strengthen the broader open source movement.

On balance, 2016 was a strong year for our community spaces. It has been shown that with the right support, and with alignment with community development and Mozilla goals, spaces can make an impact and raise Mozilla’s profile locally. Other communities around the world have been paying attention, and have requested support for the own spaces leading to an open question is how can we scale this model.

Looking beyond, we can keep momentum going and identify areas for improvement. One thing I would like to see is teams at Mozilla working more directly with the spaces on programs that can help them achieve their goals. So far in conversations I’ve been having, Developer Relations, Developer Marketing, and Connected Devices are interested in doing this. And a broader question is how can the current spaces help with our broader Firefox product goals in Asia.

Many thanks the community space stewards and keyholders who devote their free time to this. It is a great pleasure working with you, and I salute you for what you do!

Firefox 51 new contributors

Josh Matthews

7 responses

With the release of Firefox 51, we are pleased to welcome the 47 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 42 of whom were brand new volunteers! Please join us in thanking each of these diligent and enthusiastic individuals, and take a look at their contributions:

  • c3.sazae3: 1296123
  • fiveNinePlusR: 1291830
  • habeebahma1: 1261313
  • ktakashi19980515: 1291061
  • longsleeper: 1293567
  • mgsudhanva: 1282910
  • p.panayiotou2: 1285745
  • rsurve: 1255843
  • skoji: 1295866, 1298571
  • Adam: 1288745, 1299143, 1299144
  • Akihiko Odaki: 1298565
  • Akshay CV: 1296182
  • Andrew Magdy: 1293000
  • Anthony Miyaguchi: 1277595
  • Arseny Malkov: 1295531
  • Bhuvnesh Maheshwari: 1299207
  • Calvin Lui: 1287594
  • Divyanshu Vishwakarma: 1292998
  • Dragoslav Mlakar: 1282289
  • Glenn Fernandes: 1022545, 1292542, 1296395, 1296945
  • Gregory Moore: 1298709
  • Hallvord R. M. Steen: 1291069
  • Hassan Ali: 1256929
  • Igor: 1197328, 1197331, 1289890, 1293384, 1296180
  • Jason Woofenden: 1008019
  • John Paul Adrian Glaubitz: 972945
  • Julian Chu: 1296748
  • Kacper Michajłow: 1297794
  • Kim Moir: 1277579, 1293730, 1296088
  • Ninad Bhat: 1301628
  • Paul Yang: 1286513
  • Pierre Bertet: 1224863
  • Piyush Sinha: 1274167
  • Prakhar Agrawal: 1298909
  • Pranaydeep Singh: 1293738
  • Saheda Reza: 1298016
  • Sumit Tiwari: 1290566, 1290698, 1292999, 1298512
  • Tanuja : 1285940
  • Udayan Baidya: 1297693
  • Wil Clouser: 1288178
  • Wladimir Palant: 918600, 1300735
  • Yuri Kazuna: 1291481
  • kashyap: 1290701
  • kevin: 1134307, 1140286, 1254867, 1273369, 1283704, 1301126
  • ou shinjo: 1266165, 1274484
  • sj: 1295080, 1295556
  • tuhina chatterjee: 1293002
  • yusukeTMJP: 1297000

    • Regional communities and Reps in 2016

    Ruben Martin [:Nukeador]

    Full static version is on the wiki and its conversation on discourse, feel free to point there anyone that might be interested.

    What got shipped

    from the Reps and Regional Communities Team

    Index

    • Executive summary
    • The Team
    • Release notes

    Executive summary

    Our two objectives for 2016 were:

    1. A focus set of relevant training and learning opportunities for mobilizers are systematized and they regularly access these opportunities to be more effective in their contributions and as a result providing more impact to Mozilla’s main initiatives.
    2. Reps is the program for most core volunteers where many communities feel their voice represented and influencing the organization, and where mozillians join to be more aligned, grow their skills and be more impactful in mobilizing others.

    During 2016, the Reps and Regional communities team delivered:

    • A coaching training material to systematize training and coaching support to core mobilizers and communities, starting to be completely volunteer-driven in 2017.
    • An initial Leadership toolkit tailored to invest on the main identified skills our core mobilizers need to support Mozilla’s focus initiatives and areas.
    • Five in-person community gatherings in our top focus regions (Brazil, India, Europe, Arabic and Mexico) to test, iterate and deliver these coaching and leadership opportunities to key core mobilizers, as well as document and systematize this effort to allow volunteer to run their own local ones by themselves in 2017.
    • Support the creation (and regular update) of Activate Mozilla, a site to summarize the main focus areas for Mozilla (Rust, Servo, Test Pilot, WebVR, Internet Issues…) and how to provide value through activities co-created with functional partners.
    • Clear alignment, re-activation and impact delivery from the five focus communities, re-energizing and providing value to organization goals with Activate Mozilla activities during 2016 and helping them to come up with aligned plans for 2017 to support focus projects, including future partnerships with local organizations.
    • Alignment and impact delivery from regional communities around the world, with our Reps mobilizing almost 150 activities and events in more than 23 countries in the last 4 months supporting Test Pilot, Webcompat, Rust, Addons and E10s 2016 team goals.
    • A big update to Mozilla Reps (RepsNext) to evolve the program by supporting all these learning opportunities and becoming the main alignment, leadership, mobilizing and backbone force at the volunteer community (improving internal processes, mentors, coaching and regional representation/support).
    • Expand the support to our core contributors communications by enabling a discussion channel for NDA volunteers and staff and keeping core mobilizers in the loop with the organization communications, direction and encouraging conversations.
    • 100% increase in the positive sentiment about Reps program and Participation from our core mobilizers, as well as a very positive re-activation, engagement and alignment with 35 local communities thanks to Reps Regional Coaches.

    The team

    Release notes

    December 30, 2016 (Q4HB4)

    • The Reps Review Team managed to reduce the budget approval time by 30%, this means that now it’s easier than ever for volunteers to request resources to support their activities.
    • Data from our last community survey shows that in the past 6 months we had a 100% increase in the positive sentiment about Reps program and Participation from our core mobilizers.
    • The coaching training material is available for anyone to use and will enable to systematize coaching training and be volunteer-driven thanks to the first cohort of new coaches we trained.
    • The Leadership Toolkit has now generated 13 new workshops and has a solid group of core contributors with a strong background developing and testing the material.

    December 2, 2016 (Q4HB3)

    November 11, 2016 (Q4HB2)

    • We held the Mexico Community Gathering in Mexico City, with a clear focus on reactivating the community, solving conflicts and aligning with the focus priorities.
    • 10 existing Reps Mentors began the new coaching training, expanding this way our coaching efforts to the existing mentor group in an effort to refresh and improve their skills.
    • At least 35 local communities showed a very positive sentiment about the re-activation, alignment and support from the Reps Regional Coaches.

    Mexico Community

    October 21, 2016 (Q4HB1)

    • There is now a wiki page where the budget allocation of the Reps program is explained each quarter, a transparency effort and also a way to signal Reps about the priority areas at Mozilla.
    • Reps Regional Coaches were provided with training on coaching and conflict resolution an identified need to better perform in their work with communities.
    • The Arabic Community Gathering took place in Casablanca, Morocco, reactivating, aligning and improving the community health.
    • The plan for systematizing coaching training was presented with the initial learnings from the work we have done so far.
    Arabic Community

    September 23, 2016 (Q3HB3)

    • The European Community Gathering took place, with special focus on reactivating communities and align with the Copyright campaign.
    • The first cohort of Reps Coaches started their work onboarding new Reps.
    • Reps Regional Coaches started their work meeting with all Mozilla local communities as a way to understand their current status, needs and align them.
    • The new Reps Review Team started to operate as an administrative body to review and approve the resource requests from the community and align the allocation with the current priorities. This body is accountable and overseen by the Reps Council.

    European gathering

    August 26, 2016 (Q3HB2)

    India gathering

    Mozilla Festival 2016 in Asia

    Brian King

    This post is written by by Noriatsu Kudo of Mozilla Japan with help from volunteer community space stewards.

    On October 29th/30th 2016, the Mozilla Festival was held in London. The Festival is an annual event on Education, Journalism, Science, Openness and many other areas we have been working on with people all over the world. This year, as a trial session, the Mozilla communities in Jakarta, Manila, Taipei, and Mozilla Japan took part. Supported by the Participation Team, the 3 volunteer-run physical community spaces and Mozilla Japan office all located in Asia were connected to London during the opening day of Mozilla Festival.

    The reasons why we came up with this idea are:

    1) Geolocation disadvantage of Mozillians in Asia for Mozfest
    2) Diversity of people/language and localization at Mozfest

    First of all, from Asia, London is very far and it costs a lot for us to travel to MozFest. Therefore participants from Asia are much less comparing to EU participants. However there are a large number of people interested in the festival and in Mozilla’s work in the above fields.

    Secondly, diversity in languages and localization were one of the focus topics this year. Therefore, I wanted to bring even more languages and people from different regions with their activities to MozFest.

    Connected Spaces at MozFest

    Connected Spaces at MozFest

    From Local to Global

    To make this happen, I discussed it with volunteers who run community spaces. From a technical point of view, it is quite easy to connect locations with video conference system and just broadcast talks from MozFest. However, remote participants are not same condition comparing to the local participants in the venue, and most of Asian participants are not English native speakers. Therefore, localization of the event was needed.

    We first agreed on that conversation and discussion with others in their native language is important. Therefore, we decided to host a small events at each community space, and inter-connect those events. In this way, participants can join discussion even if they are not fluent enough to discuss in English. Also, because of time difference between Europe and Asia, we choose to held this event on Saturday, morning in London, and afternoon to night in Asia.

    London Event

    (by Noriatsu Kudo and Brian King)

    There were two types of session in London. One was the broadcasting of “opening session and Speaker Series” using AirMozilla and Facebook Live. The other was a session to receive presentations from Asia using a video conferencing system.

    The Opening session and Speaker Series were viewed in each community space and participants had a conversation about the content. In total, over 50 participants in Asia joined this public view style session.

    The video conference part was held as a “Connecting remotely to global communities” session in the localization space. In this session Tokyo, Taipei, Jakarta, and Manila gave a short presentation about activities in each country. We have delivered four countries and four more languages to the festival to increase diversity of people and more participation. However, this was just a trial. Based on the satisfaction of remote participants, we would like to expand and improve on this type of participation all over the world.

    Taipei Event

    (by lrvin Chen)

    In Community Space in Taipei, 12 Mozillians gathered together to watch the opening and live speaker sessions from MozFest. The opening remarks from Mark Surman resonated with the participants who had never been to MozFest not only because of his recent visit of Taipei community space, but also the free and open atmosphere and the energy of partcipants at MozFest.

    MozFest 2016 遠端連線派對

    After the live opening, we invite Franklin and Eric Sun from “ezgo” project to introduce how we promote FLOSS in basic education. There are many good and open educational materials (For example, Stellarium for astronomy, GeoGebra in mathematics and Avogadro in chemicals), and ezgo is a Linux distrubition designed to gather all of those materials and apps in one place for teachers and students. MozTW (Mozilla Taiwan Community) had co-work with OSSACC, the organization behind ezgo for many years, and we’re happy to introducing our experience to Mozillians around the world.

    MozFest 2016 遠端連線派對

    The second half of the event in Taipei had board games, food and social time. We had played a new crowdfunding “programming board game” – 海霸 King of Pirates by 程式老爹 papacode. It’s designed to teach the logic behind programming to kids from k-12, and even better, it’s open to download free (under by-nc-sa license). And we also shared some tasty Japanese, Indonesian and Philippines food, and had a good time socialising with people from other spaces in front of connected camera.

    MozFest 2016 遠端連線派對 - 海霸桌遊

    See more photos and check the Taipei community space’s website.

    Jakarta Event

    (by Yofie Setiawan)

    In the Mozilla Community Space Jakarta, we have 11 attendees who join the Mozilla Festival 2016 Inter-connected Community Spaces session. We are really excited to see the live streaming of what happening in Mozilla Festival 2016 in London, UK. Beside, we also excited to the join the talks on other Mozilla Community Spaces, in Tokyo, Manila, Taipei, and London. From Jakarta, we share talks about WebVR which presented by Kiki, and Indonesian Food presentation by Rara. While for local talk, we share about the Mozilla Community and the Mozilla Community Space. We also play few games to have fun with everyone who came for the event.

    Manila Event

    (by Bob Reyes)

    In the Mozilla Community Space Manila, most of the attendees were students from outside of the metropolis, visiting MozSpaceMNL for the first time. The community space was packed with more than fifty Mozillians eager to watch the livestream. While waiting for the live feed from London, participants were treated to a film showing of “Code Rush” followed by a short talk about Mozilla in the Philippines. The talks were then followed by a live viewing of the opening session of Mozilla Festival direct from London, UK.

    Tokyo Event

    (by Dynamis [Tomoya Asai] and Gunmar)

    In Tokyo, there were 20 participants partcipated the event.  From Tokyo, Gecko embedded project and CHIRIMEN Open Hardware community gave their presentations. It was a great opportunity to share what Japanese community are doing and exchange information with other community groups in Japan.

     

    The Mozilla Community Spaces Project

    This project is supported by Brian King and the Community Development Team. The volunteer based community spaces in Asia opened their doors in 2014. It’s an experiment to create a free and open space for people who passionate about the open web, to attract more talent into Mozilla, to strengthen local communities, and to see what great things would happen.

    Acknowledgments

    This activity was successful because of the support of the following people…

    • Heather Bailey, space wrangler of localization space for coordination of the session at London.
    • Richard A Milewski and the Air Mozilla team for great live stream of sessions
    • Melissa Romaine of Mozilla Foundation for the advice to make the session better.
    • All of the Mozfest team for their support and great opportunity.
    • Partcipants who joined the session from Asia, without you, it was impossible!

    Firefox 50 new contributors

    Josh Matthews

    13 responses

    With the release of Firefox 50, we are pleased to welcome the 43 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 32 of whom were brand new volunteers! Please join us in thanking each of these diligent and enthusiastic individuals, and take a look at their contributions:

    Maker Party 2016: Stand Up for a Better Internet

    Lucy Harris

    Cross post from: The Mozilla Blog.

    Mozilla’s annual celebration of making online is challenging outdated copyright law in the EU. Here’s how you can participate.

    It’s that time of year: Maker Party.

    Each year, Mozilla hosts a global celebration to inspire learning and making online. Individuals from around the world are invited. It’s an opportunity for artists to connect with educators; for activists to trade ideas with coders; and for entrepreneurs to chat with makers.

    This year, we’re coming together with that same spirit, and also with a mission: To challenge outdated copyright laws in the European Union. EU copyright laws are at odds with learning and making online. Their restrictive nature undermines creativity, imagination, and free expression across the continent. Mozilla’s Denelle Dixon-Thayer wrote about the details in her recent blog post.

    By educating and inspiring more people to take action, we can update EU copyright law for the 21st century.

    Over the past few months, everyday internet users have signed our petition and watched our videos to push for copyright reform. Now, we’re sharing copyright reform activities for your very own Maker Party.

    Want to join in? Maker Party officially kicks-off today.

    Here are activities for your own Maker Party:

    Be a #cczero Hero

    In addition to all the amazing live events you can host or attend, we wanted to create a way for our global digital community to participate.

    We’re planning a global contribute-a-thon to unite Mozillians around the world and grow the number of images in the public domain. We want to showcase what the open internet movement is capable of. And we’re making a statement when we do it: Public domain content helps the open internet thrive.

    Check out our #cczero hero event page and instructions on contributing. You should be the owner of the copyright in the work. It can be fun, serious, artistic — whatever you’d like. Get started.

    For more information on how to submit your work to the public domain or to Creative Commons, click here.

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    Post Crimes

    Mozilla has created an app to highlight the outdated nature of some of the EU’s copyright laws, like the absurdity that photos of public landmarks can be unlawful. Try the Post Crimes web app: Take a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower’s night-time light display, or the Little Mermaid in Denmark.

    Then, send your selfie as a postcard to your Member of the European Parliament (MEP). Show European policymakers how outdated copyright laws are, and encourage them to forge reform. Get started.

    Meme School

    It’s absurd, but it’s true: Making memes may be technically illegal in some parts of the EU. Why? Exceptions for parody or quotation are not uniformly required by the present Copyright Directive.

    Help Mozilla stand up for creativity, wit, and whimsy through memes! In this Maker Party activity, you and your friends will learn and discuss how complicated copyright law can be. Get started.

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    We can’t wait to see what you create this Maker Party. When you participate, you’re standing up for copyright reform. You’re also standing up for innovation, creativity, and opportunity online.

    One Mozilla Clubs

    Lucy Harris

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    In 2015, The Mozilla Foundation launched the Mozilla Clubs program to bring people together locally to teach, protect and build the open web in an engaging and collaborative way. Within a year it grew to include 240+ Clubs in 100+ cities globally, and now is growing to reach new communities around the world.

    Today we are excited to share a new focus for Mozilla Clubs taking place on a University or College Campus (Campus Clubs). Mozilla Campus Clubs blend the passion and student focus of the former Firefox Student Ambassador program and Take Back The Web Campaign with the existing structure of  Mozilla Clubs to create a unified model for participation on campuses!

    Mozilla Campus Clubs take advantage of the unique learning environments of Universities and Colleges to bring groups of students together to teach, build and protect the open web. It builds upon the Mozilla Club framework to provide targeted support to those on campus through its:

    1. Structure:  Campus Clubs include an Executive Team in addition to the Club Captain position, who help develop programs and run activities specific to the 3 impact areas (teach, build, protect).
    2. Training & Support: Like all Mozilla Clubs, Regional Coordinators and Club Captains receive training and mentorship throughout their clubs journey. However the nature of the training and support for Campus Clubs is specific to helping students navigate the challenges of setting up and running a club in the campus context.
    3. Activities: Campus Club activities are structured around 3 impact areas (teach, build, protect). Club Captains in a University or College can find suggested activities (some specific to students) on the website here.

    These clubs will be connected to the larger Mozilla Club network to share resources, curriculum, mentorship and support with others around the world. In 2017 you’ll see additional unification in terms of a joint application process for all Regional Coordinators and a unified web presence.

    This is an exciting time for us to unite our network of passionate contributors and create new opportunities for collaboration, learning, and growth within our Mozillian communities. We also see the potential of this unification to allow for greater impact across Mozilla’s global programs, projects and initiatives.

    If you’re currently involved in Mozilla Clubs and/or the FSA program, here are some important things to know:

    • The Firefox Student Ambassador Program is now Mozilla Campus Clubs: After many months of hard work and careful planning the Firefox Ambassador Program (FSA) has officially transitioned to Mozilla Clubs as of Monday September 19th, 2016. For full details about the Firefox Student Ambassador transition check out this guide here.
    • Firefox Club Captains will now be Mozilla Club Captains: Firefox Club Captains who already have a club, a structure, and a community set up on a university/college should register your club here to be partnered with a Regional Coordinator and have access to new resources and opportunities, more details are here.
    • Current Mozilla Clubs will stay the same: Any Mozilla Club that already exists will stay the same. If they happen to be on a university or college campus Clubs may choose to register as a Campus Club, but are not required to do so.
    • There is a new application for Regional Coordinators (RC’s): Anyone interested in taking on more responsibility within the Clubs program can apply here.  Regional Coordinators mentor Club Captains that are geographically close to them. Regional Coordinators support all Club Captains in their region whether they are on campus or elsewhere.
    • University or College students who want to start a Club at their University and College may apply here. Students who primarily want to lead a club on a campus for/with other university/college students will apply to start a Campus Club.
    • People who want to start a club for any type of learner apply here. Anyone who wants to start a club that is open to all kinds of learners (not limited to specifically University students) may apply to start a Club here.

    Individuals who are leading Mozilla Clubs commit to running regular (at least monthly) gatherings, participate in community calls, and contribute resources and learning materials to the community. They are part of a network of leaders and doers who support and challenge each other. By increasing knowledge and skills in local communities Club leaders ensure that the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all.

    This is the beginning of a long term collaboration for the Mozilla Clubs Program. We are excited to continue to build momentum for Mozilla’s mission through new structures and supports that will help engage more people with a passion for the open web.

    Firefox 49 new contributors

    Josh Matthews

    10 responses

    With the release of Firefox 49, we are pleased to welcome the 48 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 39 of whom were brand new volunteers! Please join us in thanking each of these diligent and enthusiastic individuals, and take a look at their contributions: