Learning/Strategy/Minutes

Participants

• Working group accountable people includes: Mark Surman; David Ascher; Rebecca Davies; Allen Gunn; Chris Lawrence; Lynn Moore; Stormy Peters; George Roter, Dave Steer, Robin Miller; Alicia Spivak; Ben Moskowitz; Bhuvan Shrivastava; Phia Sanchez

May 8th

• Topics discussed:
  • Strategy group participants defining their role in the process
  • Participants discussing the biggest unanswered questions about where Mozilla is headed
  • Mark revisiting and defining the vision for the participants
  • Discussing SWOT analysis of existing Mozilla programs
• Insights / Questions:
  • More local, proactive participation may be necessary to make the outputs of various programs like Webmaker more relevant more widely
  • Concern about volunteer fatigue - few volunteers own many of our community led initiatives / programs
  • The programs are well placed to connect with each other to improve upon Mozilla’s current offering. We haven’t been doing that very well so far. There is a definite opportunity to connect our programs together more effectively in the future
• Reference Documents: Coming Soon

May 15th

• Topics Discussed:
  • Define a template / overview of strategy components that need to be defined

1. (a) What are our broad aspirations for our organization, and (b) the concrete goals against which we can measure our progress?
2. Across the potential field available to us, where will we choose to play and not play?
3. In our chosen place to play, how will we choose to win against the competitors there?
4. What capabilities are necessary to build and maintain to win in our chosen manner?
5. What management systems are necessary to operate to build and maintain the key capabilities?

• • Defining the role of the working group(s) participants, the decision making process, and timelines

"This group is advising on what goes into the overall plan / framework
 Members of this group are also responsible for specific pillars of the plan via working groups (e.g. Mozilla Fellows Working Group)
 Mark is final decision maker regarding what goes into the plan"

• • Participants looked at the existing Mozilla Learning plan, and discussed what patterns they saw
  • Discussed the various audience segments, which ones are served by our existing programs, which ones we would like to serve with Mozilla Academy (some or all?)
• Insights / Questions:
  • When in this planning process would we be looking at the feasibility of the plan with respect to funding?
  • How do you create a community of excellence that isn't exclusive?
  • Are we defining the movement or the “school” that trains the leaders of the movement?
  • We want to build a virtuous circle where one program coherently enables another
  • Open source may be our big differentiator when it comes to positioning our offerings to the users
  • The ability to hold on to both, the political movement, and the broad market users, has been a key strength and differentiator for Mozilla in the past
  • Our bias is to do as much as we can, and design machines that feed the virtuous circle
  • We have to simplify both in description and mechanics of getting this done
• Reference Documents: Coming Soon

May 21st

• Topics Discussed:
  • Who else is being, and should be involved during this planning going forward
  • How the thinking of the participants has evolved based on prior sessions
  • If we were to pick one audience or space to focus on, which one would you pick (asked all participants)
  • Some new frameworks and models of the world highlighted, both as it is now, and how it could be in the future
  • A look at where Mozilla is now (geographically)
  • What the participation team is working on
• Insights / Questions
  • We need to focus more on the audience going forward
  • Need to simplify the narrative and the communication further
  • Getting razor level of transparency going forward so people can follow along, and bringing in more people into the conversation
  • Sessions have been successful in evolving the thinking of the participants over the past weeks
  • There could be a tension between focusing on the various audience segments that needs to be identified, discussed and resolved, if possible
  • People with an affinity for us, with an affinity and interest to share and service others in the same user segment as them, with lower skills/capabilities than them
  • We haven’t been good at providing users that fall within this profile the tools and the structure to do this effectively
  • It's possible that we are so close to our stuff that we may not realize how transformative it is and miss the opportunity to put a structure around so others can build off it, use it and learn from it
  • Our open philosophy (providing agency to others) might be getting in the way of showing up with an opinion, a plan and thought leadership about how to enable our contributors be more effectively at teaching and learning
• Reference Documents: Coming Soon

May 28th

• Topics Discussed:
  • Each participant’s vision of how we achieve for the following
    • Mission: Keep the internet an open, public resource
    • What we do: Increase # people who know how to read, write, and participate
  • Discussed patterns, tensions and insights between the various options
  • What we should not do now, what should be done in the next year
  • David presented on the role of software in scaling
• Insights / Questions:
  • We need to reach a point that is concrete enough to provide a base off which the community can build on, through and beyond Whistler
  • We should use software to enable humans to create stuff, and help them learn in an empathetic manner
  • Tendency is to recognize and appoint leaders that look like “us”. However our world is not the same world that everyone else lives in, so the leaders from the different part of the world will likely not look the same as they do here
  • There is a risk of failing at identifying and cultivating leaders, we can use that as a learning experience
  • “Leaders of People” vs “Leader of Technologies”, we have historically focused on technology leaders
  • Do we provide our volunteers and community with an option (enable them) to do what we may not do on the ground, on their own?
  • We need to infuse technology creatively in everything we would do, people look to us to do this already

June 4th

• Topics Discussed:
  • Analysis of the landscape of other players w.r.t Mozilla Foundation
  • Future work for more detailed analysis
  • Board slides review - story so far and the narrative
• Insights / Questions:
  • We may be too inward-looking in our program communication
  • There seems to be ample opportunities for women available when it comes to “coding clubs”
  • Privacy, security, and safety seems to be a big theme in digital / web curriculum space
  • Looking ahead, important to do a regional analysis - local players