Mapping the Open Leadership Journey

Modeling openness to empower communities of contributors

At the Mozilla Foundation, we’ve been asking ourselves:

• What’s the best way to support leaders in the movement for Internet health?
• What does Open Leadership look like and how does it connect to the principles of openness and working open?
• What might happen if we help ourselves and others become more open by design than open by default?

In pursuit of answers, the foundation’s Open Leadership Team has begun developing an Open Leadership Map not unlike our Web Literacy Map.

We think of Open Leadership as a set of principles, practices, and skills people can use to mobilize their communities to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals. For example, Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox, was developed with an open code base with community contribution and support.

The goal of the Open Leadership Map is to illustrate how those principles, practices, and skills relate to one another.

These are the principle of openness that drive development of the map:

• Understanding: open projects are accessible and clear.
• Extensibility: open projects are easy to adapt, reproduce, and share.
• Participation & inclusion: open projects empower contributors; they own the work through accountability, transparency, and shared decision-making.

And these are the practices of Open Leadership that enact those principles. Open leaders:

• Design projects for contributors and users’ needs and capacities.
• Build systems and solutions that maximize a project’s clarity, usability, participation, and inclusiveness.
• Empower contributors to own the work through transparency, accountability, and shared decision-making.

Combining those principles and practices, our map might look something like this:

Click here for a larger version of this map.

We’ve included skills drawn from Mozilla’s own experience with working open, our Open Leadership Training Series and ongoing mentorship cohorts and Working Open Workshops, literature about organizational evolution and psychology, and research done by Mozilla’s Open Innovation Strategy Team.

We would love to know what you think. This white paper establishes the conceptual framework for the project and defines the principles, practices, and skills of Open Leadership. This document is meant to serve as the foundation for whatever form the Open Leadership Map takes and for future curriculum and trainings developed from it.

Specifically, we’d like to know:

1. What works for you? What makes the most sense or seems most clear?
2. What doesn’t work for you? What seems confusing or in conflict with your understanding of openness?
3. What’s missing?

If you have the time and passion to contribute to this project, you can offer feedback on GitHub or by email. We estimate that it takes 1–2 hours to review the white paper.

Our public alpha will run from January 3rd, through January 31st, 2018. During that time, the Open Leadership 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 to people wondering how they might begin an open project or begin the process of moving a project or organization from closed to open.

We know that open leaders work to empower others to become open leaders, as well, and we supremely appreciate your leadership in moving this work ahead. If you’re curious about other open leadership offerings at Mozilla, please visit our Open Leaders site and consider participating in the Global Sprint or MozFest.

Please help us spread this call to action by sharing this post on social media with the hashtag #WOLO, for “work open, lead open.” You can also learn more about Internet health here and learn more about the Open Innovation Strategy Team’s research here.