[Important] Changes to the SUMO staff team

SUMO
#1

TL;DR

  • Social Community Manager changes: Konstantina and Kiki will be taking over Social Community Management. As of today, Rachel has left Mozilla as an employee.
  • L10n/KB Community Manager changes: Ruben will be taking over Community Management for KB translations. As of today, Michal has left Mozilla as an employee.
  • SUMO community call to introduce Konstantina, Kiki and Ruben on the 24th of January at 9 am PST.

Today we’d like to announce some changes to the SUMO staff team. Rachel McGuigan and Michał Dziewoński will be leaving Mozilla.

Rachel and Michal have been crucial to our efforts of creating and running SUMO for many years. Rachel first showed great talent with her work on FxOS support. Her drive with our social support team have been crucial to the support of Firefox releases. Michal’s drive and passion for languages have ensured SUMO KB has a fantastic coverage of languages and that support to use the free, open browser that is Firefox, is available for more people. We wish Rachel and Michal all the best on their next adventure and thank them for their contributions to Mozilla.

With these changes, we will be thinking about how best to organize the SUMO team. Rest assured, we will continue investing in community management and will be growing the overall size of the SUMO team throughout 2019.

In the meantime Konstantina, Kiki and Ruben will be stepping in temporarily while we seek to backfill these roles to help us ensure we still have full focus on our work and continue working on our projects with you all.

We are confident in the positive future of SUMO in Mozilla, and we remain excited about the many new products and platforms we will introduce support for. We have an incredible opportunity in front of us to continue delivering huge impact for Mozilla in 2019 and are looking forward to making this real with all of you.

Keep rocking the helpful web!

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Firefox 65 documents
#2

Hello everyone,

I’m Ruben and some of you might already know me. I’ve been around Mozilla since 2004 and more recently I’ve been working as staff helping to manage our global communities strategy (Reps, Mission-Driven Mozillians, Common Voice…)

Note that we are probably bringing a very different style in community management, but we are currently trying our best to fully understand the current challenges and workflows at the SUMO community. I’m sure you all will help to bring us up to speed :slight_smile:

Really looking forward to connect with you and keep rocking the free web!

Cheers.

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#3

Hello, I’m Fernando I collaborate in sumo I help in the translation of the new documentation, well come to the team and thank you very much for all your help

#4

Hello everyone,

my name is Konstantina and you might have seen me talking about the Playstore support experiment before. I’ve been with Mozilla since 2012 and I’ve been involved in community development projects ever since (resources distribution, Reps, campaigns and Mission Driven Mozillians).

Firstly, I would like to thank you all the the warm welcome. The news were unexpected to us as well, so bear with us as we try to understand your processes. We will try our best to help your community in this transition time.

If you need to reach out, ask questions, give feedback or just say hi you’re most than welcome. My nickname is couci, so feel free to ping on irc, telegram slack etc.

Looking forward to connect with you all and help you with your amazing community :wink:

Cheers,
~K

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#5

Hi everyone,

My name is Kiki (aka the second K). I’ve been working on the Reps program at least for the past 2 years, mostly managing resources, but also helping on the campaigns, including the SUMO Playstore experiment.

Fun fact, SUMO was actually the first Mozilla platform that I contribute to back then in 2013, before joining Mozilla as a contractor in late 2016. My main contribution was on translating KB articles to Bahasa Indonesia. I had so much pleasure back then so I’m excited to get to know this community even more.

I’m all over the internet. You can reach out to me via email (kelimutu[at]mozilla[dot]com), slack (rkelimutu), telegram (@kelimuttu), or even Twitter. I’ll be glad to help you as much as I can. :slight_smile:

Really looking forward to be involved more in this community! :raised_hands:

Cheers!

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#6

I’m not sure how good is that a person who already has some roles into others projects and communities be in charge another one.

I guess is not ethically correct even accept this new role when you already have other ones. Even If you really want to help, you probably will not have enough time to do it. SUMO and L10n are the biggest active communities in Mozilla and I think Michal and Rachel had been doing an amazing job, even when Madalina changed her role in SUMO.

Also one point of Mozilla Manifesto is decentralization and how we can ask others to be decentralized when we as a global community are centralized, and all the important decisions and critical roles into global community will be taken by a few group of people.

I’m afraid that SUMO could turns into another inactive community because lack of time of new team members who already have another roles.

I hope Mozilla reconsider this non-sense change and Michal and Rachel could come back.

Respectfully
Uriel

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#7

Hi Uriel,

I completely understand your concern. But as Patrick mentioned, this is gonna be a temporary role until we hire new people. We’ve also been adjusting our work load in order to have more time to focus on SUMO community.

I understand this is not an easy change. And as Ruben mentioned, we might bring a very different style in community management. But we’ll try our best in this transition period and I hope you could also see this as a turning point to make SUMO community even better. (:

#8

Uriel I’m sorry you feel this way. Please understand that Konstantina, Kiki and I are just steeping in to help cover the community support while the team finds a replacement.

I personally accepted to help because I understand finding a replacement takes time and I don’t want to see SUMO community without staff support, I really do care about this community and about all of you.

And yes, this also means I’ll have to prioritize my personal time to make sure I do my best to support SUMO, which you have my word I’ll do.

Cheers.

#9

And why don’t ask to the SUMO community for help? There are lots of experimented people who have been working the recent years hand in hand with the community and I could swear if they were asked for help, they would help to manage SUMO and L10n for some days, instead of this “temporary roles” which have no time limit. And I’m afraid that this could be as temporary as NDA was some years ago.

I’m not sure about this “different style in community management”, I don’t want a SUMO community like Reps program, where everything is about the money. And everyone wants to be in charge to make decisions. SUMO is more about help people, help users, find solutions. It’s the kindest and more friendly community in Mozilla. Please don’t ruin this.

I can’t understand why Mozilla employees think that community members can’t do the job for a month or two, even a little bit more. There was a time where Mozilla only had a small group of employees and everything was fine. Even better than nowadays.

Mozilla doesn’t need to put money in your pocket to be compromised about its goals.

And I’m so sorry but if you have to prioritize your personal time to be over worked and have enough time to help, you will probably find yourself in a snowball effect.

I hope you change your mind and realized that you are barking up the wrong tree.

Respectfully
Uriel

#10

While I disagree with your vision about Reps, we don’t plan to change how SUMO community is or its goals, we are not the decision makers for the project.

Although we were not the decision makers here, I personally think it not fair to ask volunteers to take the additional workload of 80h per week (two full time staff) during months. That’s why we are here, to cover that.

I’m a mozilla employee, and mozilla is not putting more money in my pocket to do this. And no, I’m not doing extra hours, I’ve simply changed the % of time I devote to other projects temporally to be able to help here.

@siclemx Reading your comments I can feel you might have a problem with the people who stepped in to help, please note this was also unexpected for us and we just really want to help. Let me know if you want to talk.

You can disagree with the decision of having staff covering this work, but its not fair to question our motives or professionalism to do the job, please don’t do that, it’s hurtful to us personally :frowning:

Cheers.

#11

I’m so sorry for the misunderstanding but what I tried to say is that volunteers and employees have the same passion and enthusiasm with Mozilla’s goals, you don’t have to received money from Mozilla to be compromised with its mission. This is something that I consider has been forgotten nowadays.

And that’s why I consider is so much better have some volunteers (like seburo, avelper, noah, feer, cynthia, etc, etc) in charge for 2-3 months (who might bring some totally new fresh ideas) than some employees for 6 m - 1 y. Not because of you. It’s because you already have some other roles and more work requires more time and the day only has 24 hrs in all over the world (I guess) and If you have to reduce your work in other projects and personal time to help in other project and then another one and so, you will bite off more than you can chew. And that’s not fair for the projects and for you guys. I’m not questioning your professionalism, I’m just saying that even say yes I can help when you don’t have enough time to help, could be worst that say no I can’t help.

Respectfully
Uriel

#12

Hi @pmcclard, @couci, @kelimuttu and @nukeador.

It’s been a time since the change has occurred. Are there any updates on this matter, open positions offer, new people hired, …?

Thanks.

#13

Hey @mstanke we are actually in the process of interviewing candidates, once we have a hire we will let you all know :slight_smile:

#14

Arrive a little late to this message, do not worry dear friend Uriel, it may be true that sometimes they do not have time, but remember that this is a voluntary work, otherwise it is full of young people and full of energy that will not allow that the community falls into the abandonment.

thank you for your honesty

regards

#15

Hello @couci @kelimuttu @nukeador

Do you have some news about the new team? It’s has been almost six months since the changed occurred.

B.R

#16

Hey @siclemx
we currently have 3 strong candidates for the community management position and we are going to have a decision soon.

I will announce once we have more news.

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