A few thoughts on this subject:
- All leaders should have clarity in their roles
This could include:
- Expectations towards the role (adhering to Community Participation Guidelines being the minimum)
- Skills and tools required for the role
- Resources available for the role
- Community parts (or people) affected by the role
- Mozilla mission parts affected by the role
- All leaders should agree to a standard by which they can be held
Again, Community Participation Guidelines come to mind as the “lowest common denominator” to agree to. As for further parts that would form a “leadership manifesto”, I would open this up for discussion to all Mozillians, with a few suggested points made beforehand.
- Staff & community should have a way to hold leaders accountable
Mozillians.org profiles could serve as a good starting point for that, with an added “leadership” tab for each profile, where members of communities could provide transparent and constructive feedback - perhaps with some additional interface for rating / voting on people holding important roles within the community?
Some external tools that could be inspirational in the way they handle feedback are Teammates or PeerGrade.
- Mozilla should enforce the Community Participation Guidelines consistently and strictly
This is on all of us, at all times, under the guidance and watchful eyes of the Diversity & Inclusion team.
- All leaders should be validated by the community members who are directly working in the same
area
Again, grouping using mozillians.org, perhaps? It serves as a source of “community truth” across Mozilla in many instances. It’s almost our internal Facebook (eeek)!
- All leaders should be aware that they represent the organization
Sounds like a matter of creating a “leadership manifesto” that includes statements like this one in more detail? The representation could also be connected to legal and/or marketing expectations, depending on the role, so the participation of those teams in defining what it means could be required.
- All leaders should follow a shared framework for decision making
We could learn from the best and adapt their ideas as experiments, to be evaluated by those who use them (the “leaders”) and then further adapted to community needs.
- All leaders should be active and stay active for the duration of their term
This could probably benefit from a semi-automated check-in system that’s watched over / maintained by staff community managers.
- What would implementation of this principle & practices look like in your community or area?
SUMO contributors are grouped mostly around activity types. We use a varied set of tools to support Mozilla’s mission, but for community values and building purposes we would definitely like to be as Mozillian about it as possible. Ideally, a Mozillian community anywhere on the planet would have people enagaged in SUMO activities on some level.
At the moment, we are finalizing a set of guidelines (consulted with our contributors) that build upon the Community Participation Guidelines within the context of providing support to Mozilla’s users.
We have dashboards that show us the basic metrics for the key tasks to be completed and we step in when necessary to guide and encourage contribution. At the same time, some communities are models of successful self-sufficiency (in various degrees) that would be great to experimentally and iteratively replicate across other communities. This is what the project is for us - an opportunity to share and collaborate on that path.
- Who should set the standards for accountability?
- Who should enforce leadership standards?
Maybe it’s up to those who can define how a given role has (in)direct impact on Mozilla’s mission. At the same time, those standards should be enforceable by all Mozillians (but always in a group and open setting), just like in the case of Community Participation Guidelines.
- What should the mechanism be for accountability?
Yet again mozillians.org, perhaps? I think a “leadership” tab on a mozillians.org profile, that is transparent (=available to all Mozillians) and presents options to provide quantitative and qualitative feedback that’s taken into account in regular (and clearly stated on the profile page - "e.g. "X, coordinator for Y - 33/50 days) intervals, could be the main way for community members to hold their chosen “leaders” accountable.
