MozCampEU2012/Governance Workshop

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Overview of Session

Title of Session: Governance Workshop

Facilitator(s): Gervase Markham, Rubén Martín (nukeador), Mitchell Baker if available.

Are you paid or volunteer staff?: Gerv is paid, Rubén is a volunteer, Mitchell is paid.

Area of Contribution: Gerv: officially Legal and Business Affairs, but with a broad brief. Rubén: Mozilla Hispano. Mitchell: Chief Lizard Wrangler.

How are you currently involved with the community?: Gerv does legal, licensing, community, security and other stuff, and is responsible for dealing with governance issues day-to-day; Rubén is part of the Mozilla Hispano leadership team and is a shrewd observer of our community, most recently in the area of employee/volunteer relationships; Mitchell needs no introduction.

Location of Work: Gerv is in Sheffield, UK; Rubén is in Valladolid, Spain; Mitchell is in Mountain View, USA.

Talk Length: 60-90 minutes (depending on whether we split this into multiple sessions or not)

Summary: Workshop and discussion session on project governance issues, including but not limited to the Code of Conduct, and the relationship between employees/MoCo and volunteers. (This could be multiple sessions; this is an initial proposal to see what people think.) This will involve structured discussion and small group work.

How your session furthers the MozCamp Goals (https://wiki.mozilla.org/MozCampEU2012/Tracks): Grow Mozilla requires the existing community to be happy and healthy, and requires our governance arrangements to be conducive to attracting new community members from every background. Regular reviews of our governance arrangements and discussion with the community are are therefore very important, and MozCampEU is a very convenient opportunity to do that. Governance issues can involve strong feelings, and face-to-face interaction is often far more productive than online discussion.

Expected Outcome or Deliverable: increased community understanding of and happiness with the Code of Conduct; also possibly a set of proposed changes or clarifications to be considered. Greater understanding by Recruitment, Contributor Engagement and Mozilla management of volunteer feeling about the volunteer/employee relationship. Notes on other governance issues people are having problems with, for the governance team to investigate.

Desired Audience Type or Skill-set: Core volunteer and paid Mozillians from every part of the project. All welcome.

Equipment Needs: Nothing additional required at the moment; a flip chart and markers might well be useful.

Audience

(If you would like) Submit a Question for the Speaker(s) or indicate what information you hope to gain by attending this talk here:

  • Thunderbird has now been declared non-strategic by Mozilla, and yet as a product has a strong following. To me that means that perhaps the surviving community-based product team may need to propose various governance issues that differ from the strategic products on issues such as monetization, underlying cultural values, and definition of purpose. In what areas is Mozilla likely to be flexible, and where are the hard lines with a product that has in some ways not found a successful home within the existing Mozilla culture? :rkent
  • It may be interesting to see if Flash 11.3 issues are discussed. Apparently Adobe are able to influence information we publish in KB articles, and therfore proposed suggestions for workarounds to Firefox issues.(John99)

Place your name here if you would like to attend this talk:

  • Burak Yiğit Kaya
  • Mark Capella :capella
  • Gavin Sharp
  • Nils Maier
  • Julia Buchner
  • Kent James :rkent
  • John99
  • Blake Winton
  • Oskar Ivanić
  • Henrik Mitsch
  • Szabolcs Hubai
  • Alina Mierlus
  • <put your name here>