On 11/27/2013 5:33 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
On 21/11/13 18:02, [email protected] wrote:
The conversation has surfaced a need to be more inclusive with how
we're using 'Mozillian' to align with our goal of bringing in many
more community members.
I'm sure you are not suggesting simply redefining "Mozillian" so we can
more quickly get to the arbitrary target of 1 million. So you must be
arguing that widening the definition in itself means that people are
more likely to get involved, that is, that people want the label
"Mozillian" and are more likely to take a first step of involvement to
get it.
I frankly think this whole discussion is a bad idea. But so is saying
that our goal is to have a million mozillians, without being more clear
about why we want a million mozillians and what we want these people to do.
The mostly likely effects of defining what a Mozillian is are either 1)
to exclude people who don't fit the definition, or 2) to start including
people who didn't consider themself a Mozillian before, just by saying
"look you're now a mozillian". Neither of these seems to be a desirable
outcome.
I'm also worried that we're having this discussion at the same time as
we're having discussions about mozilla.org email addresses and the
mozillians.org website and vouching. The three discussions are all
getting mixed up together in ways that are very troubling to me.
For example, I am convinced that everyone who works on Mozilla projects,
whether or not they share our mission at all, should be in the project
phonebook (mozillians.org). We have plenty of partner employees who are
critical pieces of engineering and bringing Mozilla products to market
who may not self-identify as "a Mozillian" but are still part of our
community. We should make sure that we don't define away this sort of
interaction.
At the same time, saying to people "By the way, you didn't know it, but
you're actually a Mozillian" doesn't sound useful either. People get to
be part of a community by doing things with other people and gradually
identifying more and more with the group. Definitions aren't going to
actually change how people identify, but an over-broad definition seems
mainly like a trick to claim people who don't want to be claimed.
About the goal: we're approaching it the wrong way. It seems like we're
saying we want a million people, so we need to define how we measure
that goal, and go get some people and find work for them. This is
dangerously backwards. If we want a million people, it's because we
already know that we've got a million people's worth of work to do. It's
clear that we're never going to get anywhere close to a million people
writing code for all of our current projects and products put together:
Brook's law makes that basically impossible, even if we had a million
able volunteers. So we need to start out deciding why we think we need a
million Mozillians, what projects could actually use more help and what
kind of help they need, and only then set the measurable goals for each
project. Maybe that means radically growing the webmaker movement, which
can probably scale to that size quite well. Maybe that means we need
more projects, or we need to redesign the participation opportunities in
existing projects. But we absolutely be starting out with by figuring
out what we're trying to accomplish, how many people we need to
accomplish each thing, and then figuring out whether that means 10
thousand mozillians or 10 million.
I propose that we stop trying to define Mozillian, and return to the
project defining contribution pathways and commitment/responsibility
"levels" for each part of the project.
--BDS
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