What is radical participation? I asked this question early last month. Since then I’ve collected comments from my blog and from dozens of conversations. The result was more — and better – questions. Like:
- Do we need radical new approaches, or a return to our roots? (Axel, Greg)
- Can we use ‘the promise of impact’ to draw in the best contributors? (Ian)
- How do people do *new* things under the Mozilla banner? (Ian + others)
- Can we make participation in core product work easier? (Lawrence, Gregory)
- Does staff vs. volunteer binary limit us? Other models to consider? (Mark)
- What’s the best way to get new contributors aligned and effective? (Elio)
- Is there ow hanging fruit we can fix (e.g. contribute.mozilla.org)? (Martin)
Responses have been positive: the consensus is that Mozilla needs to double down on participation. However, the meatier part of my interactions with people have been around more specific questions like the ones above.
These questions feel like a good place to dig in. I’m going to tackle a few of them in follow up posts over the next couple of weeks. If there is a question that interests you, I encourage you to dig in on your own blog.
I think the “Can we make participation in core product work easier?” question is a big one for staff and contributors alike. There are some unintentional barriers that exist within the corporation that makes it harder for contributors to participate and get resources and hard for staff to enable and support contributors.
Some of those barriers:
Contributors cannot access all the same tools paid contributors can
Contributors cannot host events in a MozSpace without a paid contributor host (sometimes this is hard to arrange since paid contributors work all day and obviously need to balance work/life)
Contributors cannot get the same financial support and resources if they have an awesome idea for a project that paid staff can. There just is not a process for it.
There are many others some of which CBT was working on before is was disbanded. No idea if that good work will continue or if its now dropped.