🌍 Project Information

📎 Summary

We want to make it possible for anyone regardless of employment status to be able to contribute to the work of Mozilla. Sometimes that is accomplished by doing work in the public sphere, but sometimes that can also mean welcoming trusted volunteers into collaboration and communication spaces where we discuss or prototype things before they're ready for the harsh light of day.

In order to do this, we need to both understand the collaboration and communication tools that we think Mozillians should use, and then build an architecture and approach to this work that is welcoming of non-staff Mozillians.

This is a complicated topic that touches on very thorny issues, from security and identity infrastructure to tooling choices and process and cultural norms.

A this point, there are two different timelines of work being done:

1. understanding our long term vision and roadmap, especially to inform the roadmap of Mozilla's Identity and Access Management approach
2. understanding the near term opportunities to alleviate day-to-day pain.

A few things have become clear:

1. It is problematic from an architectural and implementation point of view that we don't have a consistent way of logging into websites (ours and others) which integrates with our systems to understand permissions.
2. It is problematic that our volunteer management databases (mozillians.org, reps portal) are so disconnected from our staff management databases (workday) and LDAP infrastructure
3. We have a lot of disconnected pieces of technology and data that need closer coupling

Furthermore, it has become clear that short term fixes for day-to-day pain has the likelihood of causing long term challenges.

The current status is that the team is fleshing out some scenarios which can let us understand what rational options are with respect to near term and longer term plans. There is emerging consensus that one of the near term wins would be to bring the Mozillians database in closer coordination w/ the LDAP system for example.

This project is part of the larger Participation Systems initiative.

👥 Get Involved

This is a joint effort between MoFo, the Participation team and the IT team. Please get in touch with David Ascher if you're interested or have suggestions.

Additionally, you can connect with us through Participation Systems communications channels:

• IRC channel: #participationsystems (Mibbit)
• Forum: Participation Systems Discourse Category

📝 Project Management