Join the Open Leadership Map Beta
Help us describe a framework adaptable for your community
What is open leadership? What makes it different from leadership, alone? How can we help make it a renewable resource that inspires virtuous loops of community participation and contribution to problem-solving worldwide? How can we help open leaders make their efforts to promote Internet health as inclusive, inviting, and empowering as possible?
Background
Throughout the last six months, we’ve been looking back and ahead, inward and outward, in pursuit of answers. Online and off, at work weeks and events like MozFest, we’ve been asking ourselves and allies how we might best describe open leadership as a framework for personal and professional growth.
To begin an even broader conversation about our questions, we launched the public alpha of our Open Leadership Map white paper in January, 2018. We wanted to know:
- What worked.
- What didn’t work.
- What was missing.
The aim of the white paper is to establish an adaptable framework of open leadership principles, practices, and skills that people can use for personal and professional development as part of an open community or project.
Right now, we are just working on the framework. More practical guides, curriculum, programming, and events built on this foundation will come later. Eventually, we would like the map to be a resource you can visit to
- Read about the principles, practices, and skills it encompasses.
- Link out to Mozilla curriculum, programming, projects, and events that are aligned with the map.
- Link out to allied organizations, partners, and projects offering aligned open leadership resources.
You can take part in existing open leadership offerings by visiting Mozilla Open Leaders and following events like the Global Sprint and MozFest.
The beta
We want to invite everyone with an interest in open and/or leadership to help us make this framework as useful as possible across open projects and communities before a more official or “gold” launch later in H1, 2018.
To that end, we’re running a second round of feedback collection throughout February, 2018. This is our public beta of the white paper.
Between drafts we’ve made several changes you can track on GitHub or read about in our new series of weeknote blog posts. We made these changes in response to public feedback offered by email and on our blog post, repo, and community calls.
How to contribute
To make it even easier to give feedback during the beta we have:
- Scheduled office hours throughout February.
- Scheduled another pair of community calls at the end of the month.
- Begun a series of weeknotes capturing work done on the project.
- Drafted a Google Doc for reader comments as another way to give feedback.
- Drafted a decision-log to help unpack how we arrived at some of our terms and concepts.
- Drafted a Theory of Change to describe the vision and scope of the Open Leadership Map project.
Our public beta will run from February 4th, through February 28th, 2018. During that time, the Open Leadership & Events Team at the Mozilla Foundation will meet weekly to discuss comments, prioritize pieces of feedback, and revise the document. We will prioritize feedback that helps us make this document as accessible as possible.
You can still file issues on GitHub, as well.
We’d love your help to improve this white paper. Your participation on any and all of those channels is warmly invited. We want this white paper to lead to the creation of a map and other resources you can use to describe, develop, and empower open leadership in your projects and communities.
If you would like to contribute and have questions about how, please contact curriculum manager Chad Sansing to get started.
