2016-04-24 at 14:10:43
From April 15th through April 17th the Mozilla Reps Council met in Berlin together with the Participation Team to discuss the Working groups and overall strategy topics. Unfortunately I couldn't attend on Friday (working day 1) since I had to take my exams. Therefore I could only attend Saturday and Sunday. Nevertheless I think I could help out a lot and definitely learned a lot doing this :) This blog posts reflects my personal opinions, the others will write a blog post as well to give you a more concise view of this weekend.
The first session on Saturday was about the Alignment WG. Before the weekend we (more or less) finished the proposal. This allowed us to discuss the last few open questions, which are now all integrated in the proposal. This will only need review by Konstantina to make sure I haven't forgotten to add anything from the session and then we can start implementing it. We are sure that this will formalize the interaction between Mozilla goals and Reps goals, stay tuned for more information, we're currently working on a communication strategy for all the RepsNext changes to make it easier and more fun for you to get informed about the changes.
For the Meta Working Group we had more open questions and therefore decided to do brainstorming in three teams. The questions were:
We're currently documenting the findings in the Meta working group working proposal, but we probably will need some more time to figure out everything perfectly. Keep an eye out on the Discourse topic in case we'll need more feedback from you all!
A new working group? As you see, I didn't believe it at first and Rara was visibly shocked!
Fun aside, yes, we'll start a new Working group around the topics of outwards communication and the Rep program's image. During our discussions on Saturday, we came up with a few questions that we will need to answer. This Friday we had our first call, follow us in the Discourse topic and it's not too late to help out here! Please get involved as soon as possible to shape the future of Reps!
On Sunday we ran a joint session with the rest of the Participation team around the topic "How we work together". We came up with the questions above and let those be answered / brainstormed in groups. I started to document the findings yesterday, but this is not yet in a state where it will be useful for anybody. Stay tuned for more communication around this (communication about communication, isn't it fun? :)). The last question around "How might we improve the communication between the Participation-Team and the Council?" is already documented in the Alignment Working group proposal. Further the Identity working group will tackle and elaborate further the question around visibility.
Wait, there is a roadmap?
Yes!
At the end of our sessions we put up a timeline for Reps for all our different initiatives on a wall. Within the next days we'll work on this to have it digitally per months. For now, we have started to create GitHub issues in the Reps repo. Stay tuned for more information about this, the current information might confuse you since we haven't updated all issues yet! It basically includes everything from RepsNext proposal implementations to London Work Week preparations to Council elections.
This weekend showed that we currently have an amazing, hard-working Council. It also showed that we're on track with all the RepsNext work and that we can do a lot once we all work together and have Working Groups to involve all Reps as well.
Looking forward to the next months! If you haven't yet, have a look at the Reps Discourse category, to keep yourself updated on Reps related topics and the working groups!
The other Council members will write their blog post in the next few days as well, keep an eye out for link on our Reps issues. Once again, there are a lot of changes to be implemented and discussed, we are working on a strategy for that. We believe that just pointing to all proposals is not easy enough and will come up with fun ways to chime into these and fully understand them. Nevertheless, if you have questions about anything I wrote here, feel free to reach out to me!
Credit: all pictures were taken by our amazing photographer Christos!