Participation/Community Spaces/Best Practices

Best Practices of Community Space Initiative

"Keyholder" system

Goal: To organized a group of core contributors to manage the space and keep it transparent.

In Taipei, new keyholder candidate need to go thought a voting process:

• The candidate needs to be a vouched Mozillian, and nominated by at least one of the current keyholders.
• The candidate needs to get votes from more then half of the Mozillians who had visited the space in the past 3 months.
• We vote for new keyholders on Hackpad, check https://moztw.hackpad.com/-Keyholder-FourDollars-QWVujvzPSVX for example. The candidate will also write what (s)he willing to do in the space.

Work with other local FLOSS communities

In Taipei, we share the space part-time with other open culture communities such as Wikipedia, the OSM community and other local open source communities.

• This fills all the available spots, optimises the usage of the space, and share the free time with other friendly communities
• It broadens our contributor base but also make it more cost-efficient.
• Once they share this space, they will share a sense of belonging.

Keyholders in Taipei have discussed about the events we do / don't want to have in the space , and we suggest that every space have similar discussions on a regular basis. A few conditions could be:

• Does it align with Mozilla's mission?
• Does it it have to be fully OpenSource-related?
  • Say you want to teach people about MS PowerPoint and your teaching materials will be release under CC-BY license.
• Can the event-facilitators benefit financially from the event?

Case Study: Someone was willing to host a event to teach kids programming. Though the event is free of charge, the teach materials was modified from CC:BY-SA resources. Since the teacher refuse to release her modified version under the same license after a long email discussion, we rejected her application.

Donation

• In Taipei we placed a donation box near the door of the space. At the beginning of events, we tell people about Mozilla, how to join for a better future, and also explain the cost of the space: The rent and equipments are mostly sponsored by Mozilla, and we (volunteer) paid the utility bills, and they are free to donate for the bills.
• We also have partnered with a local FLOSS community, TOSSUG, which provide many toy catfishes (their mascot) for the donators.
• The way we manage the donations is pretty decentralized, and everyone can check where the money goes. Bob Chao have wrote an article about it, basically:
  • It's not that easy to earn the trust from so many Mozillians to become a keyholder. So you got the key means we trust you.
  • Since we trust the keyholders, we count on the keyholders to collect donations before (s)he leave the space, and add a note on the online daybook to help others know how much we got today.
  • If a keyholder feels we need something for the space (say garbage bag,) just rise the issue on keyholders' Telegram channel, buy it and add another note on the online daybook.
• We are carefully clam that the donation in the space goes to the volunteer community, and people are encouraged to donate to Mozilla on Mozilla's website.

Tools

• Encourage member to donate their old gadget, things like monitor / speaker / mouse / keyboards will always useful.
• Get some soldering iron, screwdriver, wires, breadboards and Arduino, RPi into space, let people freely borrow and hack with the tools, and people will bring their own gadgets to share with other.
• Building a atmosphere which is comfortable to make.