Group Registration Pilot: Launching!

[Mdayal]

Hello Everyone!

I’m very excited to announce the Group Registration Pilot will be launching in the next few weeks! For the past few months the Community Development Team has been working to understand the various ways in which groups and individuals organize around open source and Mozilla in India. Our survey and conversations with community members and staff have led us to the conclusion that one of the largest gaps that currently exists in Mozilla’s ability to effectively support your work is a process through which groups can register to be officially recognised Mozilla. Developing a process through which groups can register with Mozilla, will make it easier for groups to collaborate, share resources, and access opportunities.

What are the benefits of an official registration process?

Through our research and past experiences we have learnt that there are a multitude of identities and groups within the Mozilla India Communities. By creating an official registration process groups will benefit from:

1. Visibility: Recognized groups will have a central platform to share their activities, find collaborators and recruit new members.

2. Collaboration Opportunities: We will be introducing a regular newsletter through which staff, teams, and community groups can share contribution opportunities, news, and resources.

3. Knowledge sharing between groups: Find groups to collaborate with within or outside your region and share best practices between each other.

4. Common platform for new and existing community members to contribute: A community directory through which individuals can view all the active groups in mozilla join those that suit their interests or skills.

What is the Group Registration Pilot?

We are going to run a 2 month pilot in India with a small number of initial groups, who will help us test the effectiveness of the registration process and support program.

People can submit their groups for inclusion in the pilot through a formal registration process. If a group is accepted a “group profile” will be created through which members can register with their group. Groups and members who participate will have access to new support mechanisms and will be asked to give feedback throughout. This feedback will then be incorporated into the assessment and planning for the following phase.

Who should apply?

Recognized Mozilla Groups are groups who meet regularly and work collaboratively to advance mozilla’s mission.

Groups should apply if they:

• Already exist as a group (please do not form a new group for this pilot)

• Have at least 3 active members

• Hold regular, in-person or virtual meetings

• Make regular contributions to a project or projects that support and advance Mozilla’s mission

• Work to create a safe and positive community experience for all members

• Respect and adhere to Mozilla’s Community Participation Guidelines

We are searching for a variety of group types and sizes, and will cap participation in the pilot at 10 groups.

What is expected from groups who are selected for the pilot?

• Participate in 2x surveys (Pre and post)

• Must meet virtually or in person (depending on group type) at least once during the pilot. The data and location of this meeting must be posted at the start of the pilot.

• Group representatives must be able to participate in calls and give regular update their contributions/activities for the month

• Group representatives must participate in a retrospective at the end of the pilot

Registration Process:

• Dates:

  • Group Registration will be open from August 23rd - September 5th

  • Pilot begins on September 10th and ends on October 31st

• Process:

  • In order to Sign up have someone your group has to fill out this form by September 5th

  • 10 Groups will be invited to join the pilot and contacted via email.

Community Call for more information:

We will be hosting an open call on Thursday 23rd August from 9:00 pm - 9:30 pm IST to answer any questions and share important announcements relating to the Group Registration Pilot. The call will be recorded and uploaded (for those who can’t make it). If you have any questions please share them here and we will be answering them on the call. To join the call please use the link provided

Here is the Vidyo Link

Please find the notes from the Community Call here

Warm Regards!

[syam (Syamkumar A S)]

Is this pilot documented somewhere.
Don’t remember seeing a call for the pilot beeing done.
Great initiative. And good luck with this initiative.

[asdofindia (Akshay)]

one of the largest gaps that currently exists in Mozilla’s ability to effectively support your work is a process through which groups can register to be officially recognised Mozilla.

In a conversation about this topic, @debloper raised a few questions which I think are important. I have added them to the etherpad, but it also says “Etherpad is unsupported, see here for more info: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Etherpad” at the top. Plus, I’m not sure I’ll be able to attend the call. So I’m raising those questions here:

2. The term “officially recognized by Mozilla” is confusing to me for 2 reasons:
   a. How and why Reps project doesn’t serve for this purpose? That was supposed to be the sole goal of the reps project, given the 4 purposes stated.
   b. Like “if you don’t have Aadhaar, we don’t recognize you as Indian” - is it similarly, “if you’re not in a registered group, we don’t recognize you as (Indian) Mozillian”? Or, did I get that wrong?

3. Loosely placed (or non-existent) policies (which ideally results in huge number of case-by-case arbitration at prime-time).
   a. What’s the criteria to be selected? Is there even any?
   b. What’s the policy on multiple-inheritance (single person in multiple groups)?
   c. What are those “new support mechanisms”? Why can’t they be named/detailed?
   d. What’s the structure of NDA (if any) regarding this. If there is a need for NDA, shouldn’t people know about it before registering?

[VP7 (Viswaprasath)]

Hi @Mdayal

I have some doubts based on this post…

Visibility: Recognized groups will have a central platform to share their activities, find collaborators and recruit new members.

My first concern is, do we really require group for the sake of Visibility. MozillaIN as a group has very good visibility and we can have a central platform where we MozillaIN contributors (and all the the communities at UK, Germany and so on) can submit out activities which are related to Mozilla. Hope to some extent Mozilla Reps portal is one of it where we Mozilla Reps are submitting our activities related to Mozilla.

Collaboration Opportunities: We will be introducing a regular newsletter through which staff, teams, and community groups can share contribution opportunities, news, and resources.

Collaboration Opportunities, even for this Mozilla Reps newsletter can help. I know Mozilla Techspeakers team / dev rel team works with Developer Newsletter team and share upcoming events in the mailing list.

Knowledge sharing between groups: Find groups to collaborate with within or outside your region and share best practices between each other.

I am not sure whether you are aware of not, during 2014 or 2015 any event happening inside Mozilla India will be shared by all the contributors and we get to learn what is happening around the country and best practices. There were no boundaries.

Common platform for new and existing community members to contribute: A community directory through which individuals can view all the active groups in mozilla join those that suit their interests or skills.

I hope already community directory exist, there is no point in creating another one.

First the problem is number of Mozillians recruited by amazing mozillians who are there from past till date is high, and even now many of us are doing it, we bring in people who are passionate to share their knowledge, time to community.

I personally feel by this process again we will have a problem in future, lets take now are creating groups from one MozillaIN group named MozillaTN, Mozilla Karnataka , MCR (sorry for naming few i know) and so on. what is point of creating and then saying we can share our knowledge across the groups. Already there was a way to share which we are breaking and making it tougher.

Have at least 3 active members

Hold regular, in-person or virtual meetings

So how we are going to define active members, if you are going to say we should contribute at least 5-10 hours a week, its already debated during Mozilla India meetup 2016, no one will strictly follow this kind of thing. Contributors jump in when there is necessity, not on hourly basis.

Hold regular, in-person or virtual meetings

Can you help defining the word Regular, for example lets take Localization project. From my knowledge for each release there are few things to be localized, sometimes its required and sometimes its not.

Make regular contributions to a project or projects that support and advance Mozilla’s mission

Can we share the active list of projects which are focused for Mozilla in 2018. I know contributors who contribute to large number of projects which may have EOL at somepoint of time. I still remember contributors who contributed passionately contributed to Firefox OS which was later stopped.

Group representatives must be able to participate in calls and give regular update their contributions/activities for the month

Who will be chosen as Group Representative. whether its Rep or a contribute who contributes more seriously than rep from that region. For example I am from Tamilnadu and I am Rep, i know a contributor who is very passionate in bringing Rust contributors from India. Who will be now representative ???

[Mdayal]

Thanks for adding these into the Etherpad! We will make sure the address the questions in the call.

[Mdayal]

Hello,

Thanks for raising your questions here and sharing your thoughts. I will add the main points into the Etherpad and address it in the call tomorrow!

[VP7 (Viswaprasath)]

Hi @Mdayal

I would suggest to reply back in discourse for reach of wide audience. Its not always possible for most to attend call or check video.

And having everything documented in a single post will be helpful. I hope most of open source communities I follow (ILUGC, Python) make everything in mailinglist of discourse. Even in Mozilla we used more of mailinglist than having video calls.

Please reply back here or use docs and share us the link with answers.

[lucyeoh]

Hey! Konstantina, Mrinalini and I will be responding to all questions during the call (verbally and on the etherpad) and then after the call will copy and paste the responses here after as well. Keep your questions coming!

[lucyeoh]

Here’s some of the past posts:

Mission Driven Mozillian - Group Identities Pilot Launch

Earlier this week we launched the next project in the Mission Driven Mozillians project - the Group Identities Pilot. This project will focus on the first theme Group Identities and by working closely with communities in India, will seek to answer the question: “How do we create process for recognizing groups, that emphasizes inclusive while allowing people the freedom to create and manage structures that reflect their interests and identities?”. The pilot project is beginning now and will …

Mission Driven Mozillians 2018 Update

In November 2017 we announced the 11 themes that make up The Mission-Driven Mozillians Project. Since November we’ve met with staff and volunteers in person in Berlin and Austin and received huge amounts of feedback from interviews, emails, discourse posts, as well as from Mozilla leadership. As a result of these many discussions and interactions we’ve refined the vision for the project, the themes that make up the work and in 2018 will be moving towards stage 2: “Produce a strategy and roadmap…

[syam (Syamkumar A S)]

why don’t we move this post to #mozillians category . since this is a really big and awesome projects. The more people is involved the better the project can be fine tuned…
Just a suggestion.

[lucyeoh]

@syam Given that the pilot is only available to groups in India we’re focusing the announcement here but we’ll continue to share information on the pilot like in updates like this one, learnings and updates using the #mission-mozillians tag and regular update posts.

[Mdayal]

Hello, please find the notes from the call here. We have addressed these points, thanks!