I am writing as per Emma's advice to email someone I'm comfortable with about the problem I'm most focused on.
The activate.mozilla.community has been relatively successful. As per Ruben's previous email to the governance list, there are 40k+ people getting activated. Also there is a community portal that will come up where all these people will be able to create events and groups. These changes are all good. But I believe they have to be followed by a few more major changes to meaningfully empower all the people who come onboard mozilla's mission through campaigns like activate (also other means). *The problem * The problem is that the reps program as it is designed now is a bottleneck. In https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/feedback-regarding-the-reps-program-in-india/47657?u=asdofindia I've written about how that plays out in India. There are about 161 reps in India at the moment. Many of them are inactive and waiting to be removed in the routine/regular cleanup by the reps council. I don't see how such a large movement as we're envisioning can be successfully mobilized by so few reps. And I don't see that as a fault of the existing active reps. They're trying their best. But in widely diverse, large, and populous countries like India, there are hard limits on what a few individuals can do. *The bottleneck* The bottleneck arises at multiple places. One is in onboarding. There are very few people who are able to successfully onboard as new reps. The other is in remaining active. Many people by the time they gain enough experience to "qualify" for the reps program are in full time jobs where they have very little time remaining. Yet another bottleneck is created by not being able to remove inactive reps quickly. What happens is that many community members who want to organize events try to reach out to these (inactive) reps and get lukewarm/unhelpful responses. This is counterproductive. *The suggestion* I'm nobody to suggest solutions. So, my first suggestion would be that people who care about the mozilla mission and the reps program ask themselves whether I make sense and try to figure out ways to modify the reps program to address the bottlenecks that I mentioned above. Another thing that could be done is to build mechanisms that allow many more people to become reps. In the past reps were "official representatives" of mozilla. Now they are just community mobilizers. I don't see why there should be very strict criteria and "qualifications" for this role. An alternative to do could be to make budgeting available for non-reps as well. There are many mozillians who may be interested in doing a one-off event. (Let's say one of the events in activate campaign). With the current bottlenecks, they can neither find a rep to help them, nor ask for budget on their own. Imagine if a system can be built to hold these people accountable and allow them to use funds from Mozilla. You may ask me how they can be held accountable. But should that be a negative question or a positive question? Do you want to find solutions or use accountability as a stumbling block to not allow mozillians to use funds? These are questions to ask. Akshay -- https://mozillians.org/u/asdofindia _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
