Is it necessary to have too many reps in a country? Of course it’s necessary to have millions of Mozillians in a country (or is it not?). Do you think we should set an ideal number of reps for each country?
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is it necessary to have too many reps in a country?
I think when you be rep, you file like you more involved and responsible than be just mozillans So having many rep in country is not problem and give rep program more power.
This is interesting. Do you feel that non-Reps don’t feel empowered right now?
I hope not. If this is true then we failed.
Back to the topic: No matter we need a hard limit or not, I do really think that we might need a number in mind about # of ReMos in a country / region based on… maybe the population. Once the number exceed, it would be better to look back and check if anyone inactive.
Setting limits like this doesn’t fit, I believe, with the new direction that Reps is going in, which is more all around leadership and not just around recruitment and events. If you are a community leader, you are a community leader. I have a feeling that growing out that structure will identify specific leadership opportunities and we may want to only promote having one type of leader in a region, or that may be up to the communities. A larger community will have more leaders, a general community leader, different functional area leaders within the community, or possibly a functional area leader that just happens to be in the same region as an existing community.
In terms of who can request current Reps resources - budget and swag, it might be simpler to have limits. That person, though would then be responsible for supporting and facilitating other community member’s events in the area, not just their own.
If we do limit it, then we also need to figure out how. It wouldn’t be fair to just make it first come first served. Do we let larger communities nominate their Rep, and rotate that person out? What happens if there is are Ok Reps in an area and someone comes along who would be better? Would they be locked out until someone steps down, or would we want to allow someone else to get pushed out?
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Hi,
I think it depends upon the size of the country and the number of communities, if we take an example like India where the population size is bigger in so many states and there may be many Mozilla communities scattered each states. What happens when Reps have to travel miles to reach event sites? Budget! , I agree with Kensie,
Interesting topic.
I agree with some comments here. I don’t think that limit the amount of reps per country will work. But, we need to review which Reps are active, and which aren’t.
Also, I think that we hit the idea of “if you are not a Rep, you are not committed, or you don’t feel empowered, etc”. I think that, from my perspective, a Rep is a person who helps its own community, and does not only events, but a lot of things. Is not a competition, is not a recognition (well, it is at some level).
I would like to discuss the idea of reviewing the amount of active Reps (specially you see this when voting occurs), and if we should “educate” the Reps to help other mozillians to do the same things as a Rep could do (request swags, budget, etc).
I’m not saying that we can’t have more people onboard, but we need to be sure about the reasons to get more people in countries where we have a lot of Reps already:
- Will these new Reps do something different to existing Reps??
- Does they need to be Reps because the existing Reps are not helping them to accomplish things??
- Does they request to be a Rep, because all the community has to be a Rep?? (and this is the more tricky point, if they see this as a reward, we are not explaining well the program).
Cheers,
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I am thinking that we should avoid people thinking that Reps is actually some kind of exclusive group in Mozilla Community. Instead we should blend in with other Mozillians. It’s not much different with Mozillians but with extra capacity to request budgets and swags. Sometimes, Reps might not realize that we are building this brick of wall to Mozillians, and people start to think that if you are not a Rep then you’re not a true Mozillian.
I think that the number of reps dependes of the number of local members of the community and the population/area.
If a community need many Reps means that the community is huge, so an ideal number is wrong for me.
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Wish add my thought here…I don’t think non-Reps should have such feeling since Mozilla is already empowering all of us…still Mozillians can join and contribute actively (for e.g. at present we have the FoxYeah campaign, FirefoxOS launching, FirefoxOS SUMO, Webmaker… etc) in so many areas of their interest and get recognition…a Rep is only a facilitator and everything goes through a chain - that is …Reps - Mentor - Council - MoCo/MoFo
Daniele, we need to find a way to propose this without sounding like we are limiting the amount. I like the idea, somehow, not all the big communities need so many Reps… I think that the first step (from the feedback in this thread) is that we need to empower Mozillians, and make them feel connected, or linked with the Reps in their communities.
I still think that at some point, some communities has some kind of “contest” for who’s Rep, and who’s not. So probably we can work there first, and then see what happens in the other communities.
And for “contest” I mean what is mentioned before: Mozillians feel like if they are not Rep they are less valuable than others.
Also, we need to help to improve the impact of existing Reps, as a community leaders, and as facilitators for their communities.
The main question for me here is:
How can we find out why Reps is considered as an achievable goal to proceed in the “volunteer Mozillian ladder”? I’ve heard this multiple times in the past few month and I’m sure we need to make sure to tell people that they can achieve a lot without being a Rep.
I think it’s quite hard to get feedback on this. Any ideas?
Because employees reach out to Reps, Reps have access to more info. We
don’t have any other formal pathway to identify a trusted volunteer. This
is why the changes to the program are proposed coming out of the March
leadership meet-up in Paris.
Rosana shared a doc with mentors asking for feedback. Subject is “Council
and Peers Paris meetup update” and date sent is April 1. Not sure if this
has been shared with Reps in general. If so it might have been during one
of the meetings.
I don’t think there should be a hard limit but I do think criteria for becoming a rep should be tightened.
Or lower level positions should be introduced. Maybe something like student ambassadors but beyond students. So that almost every community member can easily become an ambassador but reps stay as more competent/trusted entities.
Hi @hexboris, we are not proposing a hard limit, we are looking on ways to see if we can have an amount based on sizes. And we are not talking about put more restrictions to become a Rep, in any case, review who’s active and who’s not.
I think that in this case, we won’t get rid of the “contest” feeling that we are trying to avoid. Aside that I don’t think that FSA would work everywhere (and also, how would you engage with people that are older than students??). And this could be interpreted like Mozillians are not fully contributors.
Maybe we are talking about different things, but from my perspective, we should encourage Mozillians, and improve the way that Reps represent their community, and become a person that helps the community in that sense.
If we review the Reps base, and clean it from “inactive” ones, we probably can get more people onboard.
Cheers,
Hi Franc,
As I said we can make position that is similar to student ambassadors but beyond students. It can be called just ambassadors.
And I don’t think contest feeling is bad. I see it as motivation. But we need clear rules so people don’t feel cheated.
Create new roles/positions won’t help on motivate, I think it would add more bureaucracy. So I would keep Mozillians/Reps roles without adding any layer in the middle.
As you see in this thread, you see it as a motivation, others see it as if they are not a Rep, they don’t get all the “benefits” of being a contributor. We are trying to avoid that feeling, and according to what I read from your idea, that “contest” feeling will be reinforced, adding more issues to the things that we want to avoid in this thread, correct me if I’m wrong, but the idea behind this, was to empower contributors, no matter if they are Reps or not 
This is one part I want to talk about with the rest of the council in Whistler. There are a lot of times (IMHO) where Reps get an information (sometimes weeks) before Mozillians do. Of course there are times where having information under NDA is crucial, but I’m sure there is a lot of information around that wouldn’t need to be under NDA and could instantly be shared with Mozillians without NDA.
Further, sometimes projects have been worked on for month without any volunteer knowing about them. I’m sure, that having volunteers early in a project could benefit everyone.
Once we’ve had this brainstorming in Council, we’ll create a doc with ideas and get all your feedback.
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