Unanimity Is Not a Requirement

People sometimes wonder how to best involve all of the affected/important/relevant parts of the Mozilla community in a decision. The prospect of doing this can lead to a certain amount of fear – of criticism, bike-shedding, etc.

At the last All Hands in October 2013, at a session in Brussels, we produced a Best Practices document called “Productive Discussion” to help with exactly this problem. Given Mitchell’s keynote at the recent All Hands, I thought it was worth reflagging its existence.

5 thoughts on “Unanimity Is Not a Requirement

  1. > Mitchell’s keynote at the recent All Hands

    Would that happen to be available for viewing somewhere? (I didn’t see it in the first couple pages of YouTube results, although maybe it’s there for someone who digs deeper.)

  2. My understanding is that as much of the content as possible will be up on air.mozilla.org, but I presume it takes a little processing. I certainly don’t think she said anything that needs to be a secret, and she said a lot which needs to be disseminated :-)

  3. I realized after I asked it might be an indelicate question, sorry for that. :) But yeah, it does sound important for anyone staying in touch with Mozilla culture. Thanks.

  4. Oooooh.. I’m glad this exists, and am especially loving that RACI is included. I’m wondering how we might make application of these best practices easier through additional documentation and tooling. For example, could we encourage broader adoption of RACI by creating a RACI tool within the wiki using the Semantic Mediawiki extension?

    Added the page to the new and evolving Learning Resources index: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Learning_Resources/Productive_Discussions_for_Decision_Makers

  5. I think RACI is a useful way to make sure you’ve not missed something or someone important, but I’d be worried about deploying it too formally – it fits well within an organization with very fixed job roles, but perhaps less so at Mozilla.

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