What are Mozilla Webmaker community calls for?

How can we improve them?

Teams are the building blocks of community structure; they are the Lego bricks that build an army of volunteers united by a mission.

But as building blocks, they fit together in many different ways, with countless variations and possibilitiesin how they are constructed.

--Jono Bacon, The Art of Community

MOZILLA ALL-HANDS

WEBMAKERCOMMUNITY

CALLS

We’ve grown and evolved.

PAST

MOZILLIA ALL-HANDS

OPEN NEWSCOMMUNITY

CALLS

MENTOR TEAM CALLS

PRODUCT CALLS

OPEN BADGES

COMMUNITY CALLS

WEB LIT STD CALLS

COMMUNICATIONS CALLS

MENTOR MOOC

PRESENTWe’ve grown and evolved. Lots of individual teams -- with regular calls of their own.

WEBMAKERCOMMUNITY

CALLS

+ more

MOZILLIA ALL-HANDS

OPEN NEWSCOMMUNITY

CALLS

MENTOR TEAM CALLS

PRODUCT CALLS

OPEN BADGES

COMMUNITY CALLS

WEB LIT STD CALLS

COMMUNICATIONS CALLS

MENTOR MOOCs

Do we still need “Webmaker-wide” calls?What’s their unique value in this new mix?

?

?

Feedback Summary• Highlight community members more

• Strike the right balance between community engagement and team co-ordination.

• “I still think we have two objectives in each call -- knowing what we're doing internally + meeting community -- maybe those are different calls?”

• “could feel less like a staff call, but it is the only time that we all meet together”

• More emphasis on calls to action

• “have specific action items that Community can do”

• “the  ‘How to Get Involved’ section for people's agenda items is often left blank.”

https://etherpad.mozilla.org/Webmaker-call

Feedback Summary• Risk of silos

• “if we dont have ‘staff calls’ very often, it feels like the only opportunity to hear what everyone is working on. e.g., I would have no exposure to Open News, if it weren't for this call.”

• More demos and visual sharing• “demoing & celebrating hacks and prototypes”

• Skill-sharing and best practises• ”it  should also be a place where

people teach each other how to do things”

• Better on-ramping and documentation

• “could provide a quick intro to new people about Mozilla Webmaker core beliefs and how the call works.”

team co-ordination

community celebration

key analysis from feedback: confused focus or mushy middle means you risk doing neither well

Key Design Questions:1. Who are these calls for?

2. What’s the goal?

Builders“Super Mentors”

+ New Community

who?

1) Community2) Co-ordination3) Calls to Action

what?

team co-ordination

community engagement

Let’s tweak the call design to experiment with doing both better.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Put community celebration up front each week. The first speaker each week is always community. (And it’s everyone’s job to invite community.)

2. On-boarding and path-finding. Use these calls as a low-bar way for new community to get their feet wet for the first time. Then guide them to the specific on-ramps and calls right for them.

3. Laser-focus on calls to action. Fewer read-outs and report-backs. Make CTAs the main point of these calls. Summarize your item fast -- then skip straight to questions + “how to get involved.” Workshop and get better at this. (We regularly fall short here.)

RECOMMENDATIONS

4. Non-verbal status updates from each team, each week. New standing item at the start of each call: in the length of a tweet, a) What are you doing this week, and b) How can others get involved?

5. Encourage more non-verbal, asynchronous sprinting together on the pad. Make the flow less linear. Encourage people to sprint together and hack on the parts of the agenda they care about most. Rather than being locked into the vocal track. (Matt + Gunner have ideas here)

6. More time for demos, slide presentations and visual sharing. Live demos, slides and visual artefacts rock. When you bring them, you earn more of everyone’s time and attention.

RECOMMENDATIONS

7. Provide better documentation and on-ramps for all calls. Ship new page: webmaker.org/calls. Front of the mullet. Better on-boarding, documentation and path-finding for our entire universe of community calls.

8. Cap at 45 minutes. Use this as a forcing function to be crisp and focus on CTAs.

9. See community and team co-ordination as everybody’s job. Both are crucial. We get out what we put in.

10. Test these out. Iterate. Rinse, repeat and re-evaluate.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• “Identify how we can divide our community into teams. 

• Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively. 

• Attract a diverse range of contributors to our community to get involved and contribute.

• Build an environment conducive to our wider goals.”

--Jono Bacon, The Art of Community