Participation/Lab
| Mozilla Participation Lab | |
| Team Lead: George Roter | Mailing List: Participation on Discourse |
| The Mozilla Participation Lab will build a strategy and outline new approaches to participation that will bring a step-change in the value that participation brings to Mozilla and Mozillians. | |
What is the Mozilla Participation Lab?
Simply: Mozilla is the laboratory, and participation is the topic.
More concretely, the Mozilla Participation Lab is a cross-organizational initiative led by the Participation Team made up of two reinforcing activities: learning and testing.
A small group of staff and volunteers, lead by George Roter, will coordinate the various experiments in the Lab, curate the learning, and make recommendations about series of strategic choices and opportunities for Mozilla leaders and community members to consider.
Learning
We will take a systematic approach to learning about new initiatives and existing participation efforts going on all around Mozilla. We’ll pay attention to all of the tests going on, add in some helpful frameworks and common language for experimentation, and then synthesize key lessons.
Focused experiments
Through conversations with Mozillians and Mozilla’s leadership, we will identify a series of focused experiments to which we will apply resources—time and money. These will be designed to test specific hypotheses about how participation gives Mozilla a strategic advantage, and will augment what’s already going on around Mozilla.
Support for existing initiatives
We will offer support—on a demand-driven basis—to teams around Mozilla (staff-led or volunteer-led teams) that want help in designing new approaches to participation.
Outside ideas
We will bring together experts and capture world-leading ideas about participation from outside of Mozilla.
Objectives
The bulk of the activities of the Mozilla Participation Lab will wrap up by the end of June 2015.
- A way forward. The primary output of the Lab is to articulate a way forward for participation at Mozilla. Likely this will be in the form of a series of strategic choices and opportunities for Mozilla leaders and community members to consider.
- Learning resources. By learning about participation, the Lab will also create a series of resources that teams across Mozilla will be able to use to strengthen our collective participation efforts.
- Impact in 2015. The aim is that the focused experiments themselves will have a measurable impact on Mozilla’s products and programs in 2015.
Focused experiments
Coming soon.
How you can participate
The Lab is designed to both add new energy and new approaches to participation at Mozilla, and also learn from all of the existing experiment that are being driven by Mozillians across the organization.
Here are the different ways you can participate:
- Initiate. We want you to try out new approaches to participation. We’ll help you get these off the ground and be systematic about what’s working and not.
- Learn with us. We want participation initiatives that you are already running or have planned to be part of the Lab. We’ll help you in making these successful and be systematic about the lessons they provide to Mozilla.
- Help out. In the coming couple of weeks we'll be starting some focused experiments. You have the opportunity to shape these. If you are a coder, marketer, project manager, designer, educator, facilitator, evaluator, or have chops in any other areas, then you can help to make these a great success.
- Suggest. We're looking to learn about participation from outside of Mozilla. Can you think of someone we should be talking to, a book or article to read, a community to engage? Pass it along. Or better yet, help us to get in touch or summarize the key lessons for participation at Mozilla.
- Follow along. We'd like many Mozillians to share their feedback and ideas. We'll be sharing information on this wiki page and also at Participation on Discourse. You can also expect some community calls and workshops later in April and May.
Helpful context
- 2015 Participation Plan
- Mark Surman blog posts
Vision for 2017
By 2017, we need to make a leap forward: Mozilla again needs to have an approach to participation that is massive and diverse, local and global. By then we want:
- Many more people working on Mozilla activities in ways that make Mozilla more effective than we can imagine today.
- An updated approach to how people around the world are helping to build, improve and promote our products and programs.
- A steady flow of ideas and execution for programs, product whatever from around the world — new and diverse activities that move the mission forward in concrete ways.
- Ways for people to participate in our mission directly through our products -- there is integration of participation into the *use* and *value proposition*.
- Ultimately: more Mozilla activities than employees can track, let alone control.
If we can get to this point, we will be a different Mozilla -- an organization that is once again recognized as a leader in openness and participation and that is able to enrich lives and shape the web with a depth and scale that is bigger than ever. The Mozilla community will be having a massive positive impact on the web and on people’s lives.
The seeds of all this already exist. We have strong DNA and experienced people from the original Firefox era, where participation made a difference. We have people who have experience running campaigns and volunteering at scale outside of Mozilla. And we have our leadership aligned around the idea that participation with impact is key to our success.
But, if we’re frank, we don’t currently have a participation model that actually let's us punch above your weight (MozFactor). We need to be bolder and more radical in how we think about participation, both within and in support of our products.
Team
- Team Lead - George Roter
- Mozilla Leadership - Mark Surman and Mitchell Baker
- Program Manager - Lucy Harris
- Many members of the Community Development Team