ParticipationSystems

Overview

The purpose of the Participation Systems initiative is to force multiply Mozilla’s capacity to deliver our ambitious mission by aligning software and IT systems that enable staff, volunteers, and allied communities to work together in radically participatory ways.

🌍 Background

While our leadership is unified in wanting Mozilla to be truly open to volunteer participation, our current organizational “operating system” makes it difficult to work strategically across employee-volunteer-community boundaries. The legacy systems we use are messy and complicated encouraging collaborative workflows that lack engagement and creating barriers to volunteer participation. We have walls that need to be taken down, and new systems that need to be built.

🌅 Vision

By 2020, Mozillians and participants find it easy to access, understand and collaborate on Mozilla’s projects, allowing them to be effective and feel good about contributing to the mission.

1. Mozilla is a great participatory organization, welcoming to staff, volunteers, and allied community alike
2. Programs see the value participation brings to their efforts, and are able to build it into their processes and workflows
3. Mozilla is knowable and understandable leading people to see where and how they can make high value contributions
4. Our software tools continue to evolve in ways that encourage (responsible) openness and match our aspiration for being a great participatory organization

😠 Identified Pain Points

1. Protected resources within frequently used information and collaboration systems are not accessible to NDA’ed volunteers (specifically, google documents/slides/etc and some of the content that is currently in Mana)
2. We lack an identity system for volunteers that would unlock access and collaborative capacities. This is complex given the broader need for an identity strategy for staff that is happening in parallel.
3. It is difficult for volunteers to manage their contributions and touch-points with Mozilla, or even find/understand opportunities for participation that exist due to inconsistent systems and processes that don’t relate or speak to one another.
4. We have a set of useful components such as Mozillians.org, LDAP, etc, but they’re not yet integrated.
5. We lack understanding of volunteer involvement in different areas (advocacy, coding, SuMo, innovation), and are unable to manage our relationship with volunteers and help them be effective because of fragmented tools and limited systems.

🚩 Organizational Change Strategy

1. Generate Momentum/Create Demand
   • Close collaboration with groups that want to work together.
   • When: In progress w/ IT, MoFo, Participation, CD, identifying other key parties.
2. Scale to “new” areas
   • Build on infrastructure to facilitate new pan-Mozilla projects that leverage participation.
   • When: by EOY, ongoing
3. Replace legacy systems
   • Identifying legacy systems for participation and migrating them.
   • When: TBD

✅ Program Goals

1. Enable Mozilla identity (non-LDAP)
2. Design and implement volunteer management systems
3. Evolve collaboration and communication systems
4. Evolve participation infrastructure

Execution

👥 Who is the team?

As of SEPT 2016

Responsible	Accountable	Support	Consulted	Informed
Henrik Mitsch Sean Rich	George Roter Josh Howard	Product/Program Management Pierros Papadeas Arielle Kilroy	Simon Wex TBD	Katharina Borchert - CIO Sylvie Veilleux - VP IT

Phase 1 (until mid-AUG 2016)

Responsible	Accountable	Support	Consulted	Informed
George Roter Sean Rich	David Ascher	Product/Program Management Hermina Condei Lyre Calliope Arielle Kilroy	Simon Wex REPS Council	Katharina Borchert - CIO Sylvie Veilleux - VP IT Mark Surman - MoFo ED Mitchell Baker - Executive Chair
		Engineering - Participation Pierros Papadeas John Giannelos (Nemo) Tasos Katsoulas Nikos Roussos
		Engineering IT Corey Shields Team to TBC

🙌🏼 How to get involved

The Participation Systems initiative is a run by a cross-organization team working on discrete, finite-duration projects. Each project has its own goals and composition of engaged stakeholders. For more information on how to get involved, click on the wiki page for each project below.

For general questions and up to date information, join us via our #participationsystems (Mibbit) IRC channel and our Participation Systems category on Discourse.

🚀 Current Projects

Volunteer Management Systems

Project Wiki page

Reps Portal

Project Wiki page

Community Analytics

Project Wiki page

Discourse 💬 Evolution

Project Wiki page

Participation Infrastructure

Subproject: Community website migration

Project Wiki page

Access for non-staff Mozillians to documents and collaborative tools, Mozilla identity

Project Wiki page