People:removing roadblocks to productivity/project broken comms

Broken or Too Many Communication Channels

Project manager: Sean Rich

What we heard

Mozilla has grown up as a decentralized organization. That's the way we like it - innovation and contribution from the fringe. Welcome the best people in, no matter where they sit. As we grow, however, the number of communication pathways increases and communication becomes harder. This leads to trouble keeping up on messages. It becomes more difficult to find information.

Right now we are failing to make available and access the information people need to support the mission. We think that by centralizing information from various knowledge repositories and providing robust search capabilities across knowledge repositories we can improve the effectiveness of communication.

Therefore, we want to explore whether consolidating information between Mana and Intranet would be useful. We're also going to explore whether providing a centralized search function across Wiki, Mana/Intranet, etc might be useful. We want your input on these ideas and understand whether you feel there's something more important to tackle.

Work already in progress

Update 9/3 - So far we:

• Solicited involvement in the Monday project meeting (AirMo)
• Formed a working group
  • Sean Rich
  • Jason Crowe
  • Kadir Topal
  • Byron Jones
  • Corey Shields
  • Jennie Halperin
  • Matthew Noorenberghe
  • Cassandra Lee
• Have held 4 project meetings
• Created a Product Comparison sheet
• Invited Jo as Queeniebee to share her wikimo survey experience ad best practice with the team.
• Refined the DRAFT survey
• Pull user stats to understand how users are using Intranet and Mana. However, the results show that we have more active users and edits on Intranet than we previously assumed. So our migration direction from Intranet to Mana is less than a clear-cut choice at this time.

Next we will: consult with the greater RR2P working group on next steps.

Shorter term actions

These are things we expect to accomplish in 2014.

1. Work in progress: Evaluate solution options for multi-platform search
2. Conduct a listing exercise of key differences between Intranet and Mana so that we can address cultural preferences, develop education/training campaign, etc. See: Product Comparison
3. Develop usability stats of each (users, hits/day, trend of #page creations in each) to determine where the "gravity" is trending toward so that we can use that in communications [we know that ultimately people decide with emotions, but facts help justify our feelings]

Longer term changes / shifts

These are things we expect will take time, influence, and repetition to shift.

Responses in this category

• Excessive amount of communication channels. 133 votes
• Finding information on the multiple intranets and wikis. 104 votes
• A not anonymous survey about removing roadblocks to productivity. Something we would never speak out is really hindering us, but it needs basic anonymous protection to publish. 65 votes
• Far too many communication channels to keep up on, requiring an inordinate amount of time reading, responding, and chatting at any given moment. 32 votes
• Mailing lists and newsgroups are terrible. As a result, we turn to even worse forms of communication, such as CCing four employees on an email. 21 votes
• MediaWiki (wiki.m.o, intranet) vs MANA -- why 2? We should prefer internally the tools we use with the community. 10 votes
• Scanning 100s of bugmail, mailing lists and newsgroups to try and keep abreast of the projects I'm involved in. 10 votes
• Intranet vs Mana: why 2? 7 votes
• We often don't even believe on our own tech that we try to push. FirefoxFlicks requiring Flash and or non-free video. Not using webrtc even a little, etc. 7 votes
• No clear communication channels on a per-project basis. 4 voteS