RepsNext Status Update – January 2017

In the past months we have worked to implement pieces of RepsNext. Now it’s time to share an update on where we stand and what has been done so far. Our work in this quarter will also be focused on aligning with other parts of the organization and make use of existing resources to further implement RepsNext. We also have published the Reps program goals for the current quarter.

Thanks to Yofie for creating this visualization! (minor last-minute changes made by Reps Council)

Resources

We have made significant progress in the last quarter on the Resources track. We now have a Review Team that has managed to bring the average review time down by 30% in the last quarter. We also have allocated our budget based on Participation’s priorities for the quarter and we have published it with a live update so Reps know exactly where we spend our resources. Last but not least, we now have a definition of what a Resources Rep is, as well as a dedicated wiki for the Resources track where we track all our processes.

But there is always room for more. This quarter we will focus on finishing the training and the application process so Reps can join the track. If you want to help on our work, please go ahead and read the draft training and provide your feedback. We truly value them!

Onboarding

During the past few months we’ve seen a problem on onboarding new Reps, mainly due to the lack of new mentors to take them as well as a huge amount of applications we had to screen through. After a mass screening phase we informed the accepted applicants and asked them to confirm their interest to join the program. These will onboarded as a test for our new onboarding webinar we’re creating.

This new webinar is currently being drafted and will be finished soon. We have a few tweaks to make in terms of the content itself, but the general content ideas stand. If the first test with this new webinar is successful, we can improve the Reps-specific onboarding time significantly. Additionally we will be working together with the Community Development team in this quarter to analyze current onboarding processes to identify common parts (including Reps and Campus Clubs).

Participation Alignment

Along with the Participation team we’ve worked a lot in order to align our goals with the team’s goals. The Council is working with the team in order to co-create the quarterly and yearly goals and OKRs for 2017. The program’s goals are also being created based the team’s goals and priorities.

Of course this is an ongoing work that will continue this year. In order for the program to be successful we need to be able to be aligned with the team’s goals as well as the broader Mozilla’s goals. The Reps Council will be highly involved in strategic and operational discussions as representatives for the broader community, this also means that at least one Council member will be attending regular Community Development/Open Innovation meetings.

Leadership

During the last quarter a team of volunteers lead by Emma Irwin built and tested the leadership toolkit. This toolkit will act as the guidance for the Reps that want to join the track.

The following months we will work on creating a solid roadmap for the track, on how people can join and how we can align our resources with the Leadership Network resources from MoFo.

Coaching

Last fall we have onboarded new coaches in the Reps program to strengthen our coaching possibilities for new Reps. All of these were already Reps. Guillermo lead the efforts of this training and has created training material we can use for further coaching trainings. We also ran the training with a few existing mentors to test the training material.

Additionally we have started with a Regional Coaches group. The Reps Regional coaches project aims to bring support to all Mozilla local communities around the world thanks to a group of excellent core contributors who will be talking with these communities and coordinating with the Reps program and the Participation team. These coaches are neither a power structure nor a decision maker, they are there to listen to the communities and establish a 2-way communication. We want communities to be better integrated with the rest of the org, not just to be aligned with the current organizational needs but also to allow them to be more involved in shaping the strategy and vision for Mozilla and work together with staff as a team, as One Mozilla.

In this quarter we will finalize our plan on how we will handle coaching in the future. We encountered a few challenges in the past few months which we will solve in this plan. Our goal is to further improve this coaching material so it can serve for training new coaches as well as training existing mentors. Our goal is to have all existing mentors to be trained with this material once we have a solid plan. We are also thinking about renewing existing mentor’s commitment. All of this will ensure that all Reps can grow and advance in personal skills and their volunteer goals with the help of their coaches in addition to the leadership track.

Functional areas

While the question about functional areas come up from time to time during our “Working Groups” phase of RepsNext, we never had a dedicated group for it. Therefore there is no solid proposal on how to move forward there. We know that this would involve a lot of time commitment from both the functional teams’ sides as well as ours. This is currently not realistic to implement or analyze. Reps are encouraged to build and development communities around functional areas with direct input from functional teams, but we will not focus on this part for at least the first half of this year. We need to have a strong base as a mobilizer program first.

You can follow all the Reps program’s goals in the Reps Issue Tracker.

Which thoughts cross your mind upon reading this? Where would you like to help out? Let’s keep the conversation going! Join the discussion on Discourse.