What kinds of successes and challenges have you faced in working open?
Openness at Mozilla — Part 5
This post is part 5 of the Openness at Mozilla series. Read part 1, Building an Open Movement for Internet Health, part 2, What does Openness Mean To You?, part 3, What does Transparency mean to you? and part 4, What does working like a movement mean to you?
Throughout 2019, the Open Leadership & Events (OLE) team at Mozilla will strengthen our working open habits and develop our open leadership skills. Our goal is to help Mozilla work more like a movement in supporting people and projects that champion internet health and better machine decision-making. We’re beginning with an internal survey and a set of externally-facing blog posts to gather feedback that will help work more like a movement and better understand the state of openness across the foundation.
This week we’re asking ourselves: What kinds of successes and challenges have you faced in working open?
Why are we asking this question?
A massive part of being open is about being honest. Whether that’s honest in timelines, goals or the feedback loops you’re part of. While we are here to praise the advantages that come with working open, we should also talk about some unique challenges it can create as well.
Asking this question allows us the opportunity to be able to demonstrate to ourselves the gains from working open. At the same time, we can identify the challenges that we’ll face as an organisation by opening up our work, and by doing so, plan for when they appear so we can flip them into positives that help sustain and empower the movement.
Why is this question important to me?
This question reminds me of one of the first jobs I had when I graduated university. I was consulting for a company, trying to help them change their working practices to engage with a younger audience.
To this day, that was one of the most difficult tasks I have undertaken, mostly because when change is suggested, people often see negatives as blockers rather than challenges to plan for and overcome. I must admit, I had the same thought process at the time.
We worked through trying to find compromises in the changes that we wanted we were looking to introduce. Eventually we were able to find a route that worked for everyone, but that was only after an open and honest conversation about our concerns. This showed me that when radically changing how a working environment runs, it can reveal the worries that people have. Which is why this question this question is important to work through when we’re looking to open up our work and creating a transparent organisation. Stepping back, asking the tough questions around our concerns and then stepping back and analysing and how we can turn them into successes or challenges that we’ll overcome in the process.
Having the ability to proactively work towards the challenges ensures that we have plans and processes in place for when they arise and not losing the momentum we’ve built in the changes that are happening.
How would I answer this question?
Working at Mozilla has really helped me understand the ways that openness can have a positive impact on my work, namely the federated design of the events we put on as an organisation allows us to bring in a diverse range of voices from around the globe, ensuring that the topics we cover are relevant to our entire community.
I’ve worked for many companies managing dozens of events, but none have been planned in the way MozFest is. The festival is a seven day celebration for, by, and about people who love the internet is the only event I’ve worked on where the entire process of both curation and design is not only open and transparent but also encourages the public to join the conversation about the decisions we’re making. I work as the Senior Production Coordinator on the Open Leadership and Events team (the team responsible for producing MozFest), so the openness and transparency in the planning is part of my everyday work.
The Wins
The design process for MozFest is open to all to contribute: we use GitHub to document not only our process but the design. You can see this year’s design-in-progress on the MozFest 2019 Design Repo. I think this is an amazing example of how working open can not only help build better products but also help engage people from across the organisation and the wider community.
The volunteer t-shirts are a staple of the festival, worn by 100s over the weekend and are seen as a collector’s item. A GitHub issue was raised for the t-shirt design back in 2016 and is what always reminds me of why working open is important. Not only were we giving asynchronous feedback across teams, but also took into account feedback and suggestions from the community. Having community feedback not only means that we are able to build anything and everything with the input and views of our diverse community, but it makes us challenge our work to make sure what we’re building is right for everyone.
Another fantastic example of the successes of working open is the Community Translation that we use across our work. Being a relatively small organisation that is predominantly based in North America it can be difficult to allow everyone into our work when there are language barriers between us. The Pontoon platform that Mozilla uses for human translations for anything from FireFox to the EU Copyright Campaign we ran earlier this year.
We’ve all seen the errors made by machine translation in the past — they can be pretty spectacular. Being able to provide programme and projects we’re working on in languages other than our own means we’re able to continue to build the movement outside of the geographic areas we are directly working in.
“But you told me there are challenges”
There were, and still continues to be, challenges in the open design process. The main challenge we face is factoring in time to engage the community in what we do.
Normal approval processes take a couple of days of back and forth, but with the community, you must invite them in and give them time to understand what you’re building and then to share feedback.
This is also the same for human translation, but it means that the resources we release have been vetted and accurately translated, something that machines are currently not able to ensure, and we if do not speak the language, we’re unable to verify the accuracy of.
Timelines are a challenge that can be overcome. Whilst it’s always important to remember that the majority of community contributors are not paid for their time, so we should never hold them accountable for their work, it’s important to ensure that we have our timelines open for all to see, so not only can we tell the community what our priorities are but also allow them to see when our deadlines are and ask if they can make contributions before that time.
But what if…?
The final part of my answer is a response I’ve had and others have had when starting to open their work up. What if it’s not ready for the public to see, or what if it offends someone, or what if something get’s the wrong idea from what they read.
Context is another key element of transpareny and openness. As a team we try to inlcude a P.O.P. (Purpose, Outcomes and Process) when documenting our work. Having this allows us to communite to anyone who is contributing or just reading what we’re up to, the chance to see why we’re working on this, our goals and the process we’re taking. Sharing the process openly means not only are we able to easily invite others in, but also give the context of where our work is at.
There will be times where tough conversations will be had, where there’s confusion or differences of opinion on work we’re doing. This all loops back to honesty and ensuring that people feel safe to be able to talk openly and freely about their thoughts on the work we’re doing. By doing so, not only encouges more openess across the organisation but also makes giving and recieveing feedback more comfortable which improves our work for the better.
Please join the discussion!
How would you answer this question for Mozilla? For your community, organization, or project? For a healthier internet? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think. Have feedback, questions, or suggestions? Let us know at leadopen@mozillafoundation.org or @MozOpenLeaders. Learn more about the OLE team and our work here.
