New SOW

My contract with the Mozilla Foundation has an appendix called a Schedule of Work (SOW), which outlines at a high level my official job responsibilities, and which is renewed every so often. Although I have taken to saying, when asked, that my job is so eclectic that it defies description, “do whatever looks interesting and useful” is sadly not considered specific enough :-) Therefore, Mark Surman, the MoFo Executive Director, and I have just agreed a new SOW for me, and I’m posting an annotated version of it here so people can see the larger projects I’m going to be working on over the next few months.

Work with the whole Mozilla community to resolve outstanding module ownership, community renewal and other project governance issues. This will involve identifying topics (e.g. from the governance newsgroup), interacting with current opinions, building consensus and, where necessary, creating effective systems to implement decisions.

There are a number of open issues in this area – e.g. dormant account policies, the module owners list, the new Committer’s Agreement, the purpose of the Monday meeting, and Bugzilla workflow. (Further suggestions welcome.) I’m going to be enumerating them and (not all at once!) trying to get us to a better place.

Help the Mozilla community to move Bugzilla forward while at the same time assisting the Bugzilla project in achieving both its technical and community goals. Begin this effort with at least one small Bugzilla analysis, design, configuration and coding project. This project (or projects) should relieve major pain points for, and enable Bugzilla innovation by, the Mozilla development community. For this project, strong emphasis should be placed on community requirements gathering and sending changes upstream.

We want to help the Bugzilla community grow and develop. This also means I’ve got some time to fix Bugzilla in a b.m.o.-oriented way, which I suspect will excite some people :-) I will be starting the requirements-gathering process for this very soon. Please don’t be over-expectant about this; I’m not going to be able to solve all of the frustrations people have, and change isn’t going to happen in the next week. But the very process of finding out what most people find most annoying may help other Mozillians to step up and make fixes too.

Participate in the development of community/project metrics with the aim of providing useful data that helps the Mozilla community monitor its own health and vibrancy.

We’d like to be able to see where the community is going, and how it’s growing or shrinking, so we can identify potential problems. This is Asa‘s baby, but I’m authorised to give him a hand where he needs it.

Maintain a working overview knowledge of participants in and activities of all significant parts of the Mozilla project. Provide selective input and contributions to the Community CRM project to guide it in a direction which best helps achieve this aim. Bring items and events of interest to the attention of key Mozilla people.

This basically means keeping a general eye on everything. Community CRM is Jay‘s project to do something a bit like djangopeople for the Mozilla community.

Administer the Mozilla project’s participation in the Google Summer of Code. In some years, in consultation with the Executive Director, mentoring a student may be appropriate.

That’s fairly self-explanatory :-) This year’s SoC seems to be off to a good start, with ten projects getting going.

Support the Executive Director and other Mozilla team members in trademark, licensing and security/CA policy discussions on an as-needed basis.

These are areas of historical responsibility and/or interest. I continue to have a strong interest in the intersection of security and usability.

2 thoughts on “New SOW

  1. That’s a nice SOW. I think it captures your role pretty well… which isn’t that easy to do!

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