Participation/Lab

Mozilla Participation Lab
Team Lead: George Roter	Mailing List: Participation on Discourse
The Mozilla Participation Lab will build a strategy and outline new approaches to participation that will bring a step-change in the value that participation brings to Mozilla and Mozillians.

What is the Mozilla Participation Lab?

The Mozilla Participation Lab is an initiative across Mozilla to architect a strategy and new approaches to participation.

Simply: Mozilla is the laboratory, and participation is the topic.

The Participation Lab will explore three broad areas: First, strengthening the efforts of those who devote the most energy to Mozilla. Second, connecting people more closely to Mozilla’s mission and to each other. And third, thinking about organizational structure and practices that support participation.

The Participation Lab will have three related sets of activities:

1. Focused experiments

Virtuous Circle

We will initiate experiments around a particular hypothesis about where we believe participation can bring value and impact. All of these experiments will be designed to move a top-line goal of Mozilla (the product side of the virtuous circle), and give volunteers/participants a chance to learn something, have impact or get some other benefit (the people side of the virtuous circle). If the experiments work, we’ll start to see an impact on our product goals and increased volunteer engagement.

We will build these experiments in a way that will assess whether our hypotheses are true, what’s required for participation to have impact, and what the return on investment is for our key products and programs, and for Mozillians.

We expect to announce and launch a first set of focused experiments over the next couple of weeks.

2. Systematic Learning and Support for Participation

We will take a systematic approach to learning about new initiatives and existing participation efforts going on all around Mozilla. Buddy Up, TechSpeakers, Mozilla Hispano, Clubs, Marketpulse are just a few of many many examples.

How does an initiative fit?

If it meets two simple criteria: (1) it is testing out a set of hypotheses about how participation can bring value and impact to our mission and to Mozillians, and (2) we can work together to apply a systematic methodology for learning and evaluation.

Of course, it’s the leaders of these initiatives who can choose to be part of the Lab—we hope you do! To be upfront, this could mean a bit of extra work, but you can also access some resources and have an influence on our participation strategy. We think it’s worthwhile:

• We will work together to apply a systematic learning and experimenting methodology.

• You can unlock support from the Participation Team. This could be in the form of strategic or design advice; specific expertise (for example, volunteer engagement, building metrics or web development); helping you gather best practices from other organizations; or small amounts of money.
• Your initiative will make a significant contribution to Mozilla’s overall participation strategy moving forward.

3. Outside ideas

We will bring together experts and capture world-leading ideas about participation from outside of Mozilla. This is a preliminary list of people we are aiming to reach out to.

Who’s involved?

In short, a broad set of Mozillians will be supported by a smaller team of staff and volunteers from the Participation Team. This team will coordinate various experiments in the Lab, curate the learning and make recommendations to Mozilla leaders and community members.

What’s The Result, And By When?

The primary outputs of the Lab are:

1. Produce and support a series of participation initiatives that result in more impactful and fulfilling participation toward reaching Mozilla’s goals. (Read more below about how what you’re working on right now can fit into this.)
2. An evidence-based analysis of the effectiveness of specific participatory activities.
3. Recommendations on how we might expand or generalize the activities that provided the most value to Mozilla and Mozillians.
4. A preliminary assessment of the organizational changes we might consider in order to gain an even greater strategic advantage from participation.
5. A set of learning resources and best practices packaged in a way that teams across Mozilla will be able to use to strengthen our collective participation efforts.
6. Possibly, a series of strategic choices and opportunities for Mozilla leaders and community members to consider.

The first set of activities will take place primarily in Q2, wrapping up by early July, at which point we will assess what’s next for the Lab.

Focused experiments

Coming soon.

How You Can Participate?

You have the opportunity to participate in the Lab and in shape the way forward for participation in Mozilla. Here’s how:

1. Be part of the team. Do you want to have a big hand in shaping how Mozilla moves ahead on participation? In the coming couple of weeks we'll be starting some focused experiments. If these are problems you’re also excited about (or are already tackling), please get in touch. We’re certain that coders, marketers, project managers, designers, educators, facilitators, writers, evaluators, and more can make a big difference. Also, if you’re interested being part of the learning team that is tracking and synthesizing lessons from inside and outside Mozilla, please get in touch.
2. Are you already running or planning a new participation initiative, or have an idea you’d like to get off the ground? Could you use some help from the Lab (and hopefully volunteers or other resources)? I’d love to have a conversation about whether your initiative can be part of the Participation Lab and how we can help.
3. Can you think of someone we should be talking to, a book or article to read, or a community to engage? Pass it along. Or better yet, help us to get in touch with people outside of Mozilla or summarize the key lessons for participation.
4. Follow along. We'd like many Mozillians to share their feedback and ideas. We'll be working out in the open with a home base on this wiki page.

Helpful context

• 2015 Participation Plan
• Mark Surman blog posts
  • What is Radical Participation?
  • Mozilla Participation Plan
  • Participation Questions
  • Participation, Permission and Momentum

Vision for 2017

By 2017, we need to make a leap forward: Mozilla again needs to have an approach to participation that is massive and diverse, local and global. By then we want:

• Many more people working on Mozilla activities in ways that make Mozilla more effective than we can imagine today.
• An updated approach to how people around the world are helping to build, improve and promote our products and programs.
• A steady flow of ideas and execution for programs, product whatever from around the world — new and diverse activities that move the mission forward in concrete ways.
• Ways for people to participate in our mission directly through our products -- there is integration of participation into the *use* and *value proposition*.
• Ultimately: more Mozilla activities than employees can track, let alone control.

If we can get to this point, we will be a different Mozilla -- an organization that is once again recognized as a leader in openness and participation and that is able to enrich lives and shape the web with a depth and scale that is bigger than ever. The Mozilla community will be having a massive positive impact on the web and on people’s lives.

The seeds of all this already exist. We have strong DNA and experienced people from the original Firefox era, where participation made a difference. We have people who have experience running campaigns and volunteering at scale outside of Mozilla. And we have our leadership aligned around the idea that participation with impact is key to our success.

But, if we’re frank, we don’t currently have a participation model that actually let's us punch above your weight (MozFactor). We need to be bolder and more radical in how we think about participation, both within and in support of our products.

Team

• Team Lead - George Roter
• Mozilla Leadership - Mark Surman and Mitchell Baker
• Program Manager - Lucy Harris
• Many members of the Community Development Team