Delays in onboarding reps and feedback

Reps
#1

Hello dear Reps and Mozillians,

I have had an application open (then closed, then re-opened) for about 7 months now. My experience of this process has been filled with confusion. I also understand there are other people in similar circumstances, hence this post.

As far as I understand, this is a problem of resources and available people to perform onboarding. I would like to help you by at least surfacing some existing problems, which are:

  1. The reps wiki can be improved with more details about the application process, particularly the requirements, responsibilities and expectations (both on the part of candidates and the Reps organization).

  2. Communication with candidates can be improved by more frequent status reports. Over-communicating is less of an error in this instance.

  3. Communication between reps and particularly recommenders and approvers can be improved.

All these steps will require some resources (especially time), so I have a few questions:

  1. How long does it take right now to process a request?

  2. Do you see ways to accelerate this process at this time? Both on the applicant’s side and the mentors/reviewers side.

  3. Do you have a target in the future for reducing onboarding time?

  4. Are Council or Reps managers satisfied with the quality of the applicant review process?

I would like to better understand Reps and interact more. The reported problems are not anyone’s fault and improved processes can make this a better experience for all involved.

Thanks!

Jobava

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#2

We are currently creating a Webinar, which will drastically change the process we apply. We will update the wiki once we have tested this webinar.

Agreed.

Not sure what you mean by that. Mind elaborating?

Too long, this is why we are doing the webinar.

Our hypothesis is that with the webinar we can bring down the time needed for the process. Of course this will still need some time to gather a few applicants to run the webinar with, but it will be a massive improvement compared to now.

No, there is no specific number here. However I don’t think we need one, if the communication piece is right.

No, that’s why we are creating the webinar.

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#3

Thanks for answering, Michael!

I would like to re-iterate that I believe this to be a problem of process and not of people, also in light of Mozilla’s volunteer nature. All these activities are done in people’s free time, which they donate to this cause.

Any solution that involves more work to a small number of people will burn out said people and not improve this community. So it would be nice to develop a better process which also does not use up people’s limited attention.

One thing possible right now is a mass-mail to people still on the waiting list, a reminder that they are still on the radar and what’s being done right now (i.e. what Michael mentioned).

Also maybe for the near future: regular reminders either by mail or in a bug (whichever is easiest to implement) should keep people engaged and make them understand the reasons for the delays.

If you need help managing the communication infrastructure, please also make a shout-out in that regard too!

Jobava

#4

These two things are something that Michael has been doing during the past months to everyone in the queue, including updating them on our plans for the webinar :slight_smile:

#5

Here’s the GitHub tracking issue for the webinar: https://github.com/mozilla/Reps/issues/101

Also I’ve created https://github.com/mozilla/Reps/issues/128 to clean up the wiki.

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