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Education & Culture Working Group Page | ||
Owner: Education & Culture Working Group | Updated: 2014-08-19 | |
Vision: The Education and Culture working group seeks to help plan, develope and implement Mozilla-wide educational and cultural resources that support and grow our contributor community. |
Roadmap!
Education A 2014 Roadmap
Guiding Principles
The guiding principles of the Education & Culture working group are as follows:
- Support diversity among contributors
- Embrace openness as the default.
- Strive for simplicity, consistency and clarity.
- Foster mentorship and learning.
- Encourage distributed leadership.
Support diversity among contributors
We support diversity in everything that we do. This means designing materials and processes to meet the needs of potential contributors from a range of ethnicities, locations, abilities, socio-economic status, gender and sexual identity, etc.
Embrace openness as the default
We will embrace openness as the default by working and sharing publicly except when absolutely necessary. If we must share something in a restricted forum, we will provide an explicity justification for doing so. We welcome feedback from volunteer contributors about their experience working with us and will make improvements based on that feedback.
Strive for simplicity, consistency and clarity
Whenever possible, we'll strive to use an existing solution rather than create a new one. Our solutions will be as simple as possible, but not simpler than that.
Foster mentorship and learning
We'll support both those looking for mentorship and those mentoring others. We will honor that Mozilla is a place where learning is an on-going and central activity. We will not shy away from learning how we can do better.
Encourage distributed leadership
We will support and empower the global community of Mozillians to contribute to the best of their ability by supporting individuals to make decisions and drive projects and lead their communities.
Group Process
- There are seven proposed subgroups in the Education & Culture working group.
- Each subgroup has a driver.
- We meet every other week.
- Drivers will communicate throughout the two weeks and share out to the group at every meeting. Meetings will be used for collaborative sharing and input.
- Each driver will set a series of goals from Q1-Q4 and drive the work to accomplish them.
- Drivers will delegate tasks to members of their subgroup.
- Drivers could possibly change or rotate every quarter to involve main participants in every aspect of our work.
Education Subgroups and Goals Q1-Q4
Main goals for 2014:
- increase 'default open' across the project
- increase community building capacity
The following subgroups were identified. Each has a specific goal for 2014 and will soon have a defined roadmap to meet that goal.
Improve Communication
What issue are we trying to solve?
Communication is consistently an issue with virtual teams. Almost all projects within the broader Mozilla Framework consist of virtual teams. Communication issues appear on several levels:
- Multitude and lack of clarity about communication channels used
- Lack of participation in communication channels affecting critical mass
- Openness or the lack thereof in communication channels
- Mode/Task fitness for communication
These issues keep people from participating in projects, but even in cases where people are participating the issues are limiting peoples efficiency and waste valuable time and energy that could be better spent on moving the project forward.
What's the proposal?
We are going to document ways of participation and communication for each team within Mozilla in the first step. We are going to suggest improvements in the second step. We are going to implement and evaluate those improvements in the third step.
Participants
- Kadir (lead)
- Jennie jhalperin@mozilla.com
- Srikar Ananthula - ananthulasrikar@gmail.com
Deliverables
- Q2
- A list of all teams we want to include in this
- Categories we want to document
- Categories filled in for categories and teams
- Potential improvements to modes of communication
- Q3
- Piloting improvements with interested teams
- Evaluation of implemented improvements
- Q4
- Broader rollout to the rest of the organisation as it makes sense
Roadmap
- Q1
- Establishing the group. Assignments of tasks
- Q2
- Creating a list of all teams we want to include in this
- Coming up with the categories we want to document
- Reaching out to team leads to fill in the matrix
- Review of final matrix and initial suggestions
- Q3
- Reaching out to teams and pilot suggested improvements
- Evaluation of implemented improvements
- Q4
- Broader rollout to the rest of the organisation
- Continued evaluation of improvement
Next step
- Kadir: Inform interested parties about this group
- Yammer
- Community Building Group. Done.
- Monday Community Meeting
Resource Index
Goal
Create an index of all educational resources across Mozilla.
Purpose
Mozilla has many, many resources for learning about and interacting with the project. Contributors spend an inordinate amount of time discovering needed resources and quite often don't find the resources they are looking for. Creating a single index of all resources will make important resources more discoverable.
Index should include an indication of 'openness' on the resource.
Participants
tbd
Roadmap
- Q2:
- Start gathering a list of resources
- Create and validate proof of concept index on wiki using semantic wiki and forms
- Q3:
- Record as many resources as possible into index
- Continue to socialize index across mozilla
- collect feedback on how index is working for Mozillians
- Q4:
- iterate and improve index based on feedback gathered in q3
- if index is working well, define and implement maintenance lifecycle
Related Projects
Wiki Working Group
Issue Statement
WikiMo is an important and widely used tool for documenting a wide range of topics across the Mozilla project. As with most knowledge repositories, wikis require cultivation to prosper. The WWG will address issues that affect the usability/adoption of the wiki such as spam, outdated theme, etc.
Proposed Solution
Drive improvements to and participation on wiki.mozilla.org.
Participants
- Christie (lead)
- many others
Roadmap
In progress
Related Projects
TBD
Publish and expand the on-boarding content
Issue Statement
The current on-boarding material has a wealth of useful information. Unfortunately, it is available only to staff for a limited time after their initial hiring and completely unavailable to volunteer contributors.
Proposed Solution
Make available the on-boarding content to all Mozillians. Identify where there are gaps in the material and create a plan for closing those gaps.
Participants
- Christie
- HRBP (Amie?)
Roadmap
TBD
Related Projects
TBD
Communication with local communities
Issue Statement
Local communities are the lifeblood of Mozilla. However, their accomplishments as well as struggles are quite often not obvious to the community at large. Not knowing how local communities are flourishing and where they need help means that we are loosing an opportunity to both share knowledge about what works and to help communities.
Proposed Solution
Track and share what local communities are working on and where their pain points are.
Participants
- Christie
- TBD
Roadmap
- TBD
Related Projects
- Mozilla quilt?
Community Building Curriculum
Issue Statement
There is a great need among local communities and paid contributors alike to have a better understanding of the community building process and how it can be applied to a given team/situation. We seek to create a curriculum that is relevant and distributable to our global audience of contributors and that will help them build strong communities of practice.
Proposed Solution
Create a curriculum for community building focused on local communities and volunteers.
Participants
- Christie (lead)
Roadmap
- Q2:
- propose a list of learning modules
- create a basic outline for each of those modules
- pilot at least one module on-site and collect feedback
- Q3:
- improve module(s) tested in q2 and re-workshop
- pilot at least one additional module and collect feedback
- Q4:
- improve modules tested in q3 and re-workshop
- start training others to give modules in their local areas
Planned modules (draft):
- consensus decision-making
- creating friendly collaboration environments
- conflict resolution
- community building life-cycle and community stewardship
- Mozilla manifesto / Mozilla story
- event planning (tentative, in conjunction with community engagement and events working group)
- essential communication tools (irc, wiki, bugzilla)
Related Projects
TBD
Next steps on this document
- review with rest of working group
- add subgroup goals by quarter