At the 2015 Reps Leadership Meeting in Paris it became clear that the program was ready for “a version 2”. As the Reps Council had recently become a formal part of Mozilla Leadership, it was time to bring the program to the next level. Literally building on that idea, the RepsNext initiative was born.

Since then several working groups were formed to condense reflections on the past and visions for the future into new program proposals.

At our last Council meetup from 14-17 April 2016 in Berlin we recorded interviews with Council and Peers explaining RepsNext and summarizing our current status.

You can find a full transcript at the end of this blog post. Thanks to Yofie for editing the video!

Please share this video broadly, creating awareness for the exciting future of the Reps program.

Getting involved

We will focus our work at the London All Hands from June 12th to June 17th to work on open questions around the working groups. We will share our outcomes and open up for discussions after that. For now, there are several discussions to jump in and shape the future of the Reps program:

Additionally, you can help out and track our Council efforts on the Reps GitHub repository.

Moving beyond RepsNext

It took us a little more than a year to come up with this “new release” of the Reps program. For the future we plan to take smaller steps improving the program beyond RepsNext. So expect experiments and tweaks arriving in smaller bits and with a higher clockspeed (think Firefox Rapid Release Model).

Video transcript

Question: What is RepsNext?

[Arturo] I think we have reached a point of maturity in the program that we need to reinvent ourselves to be adaptors of Mozilla’s will and to the modern times.

Question: How will the Reps program change?

[Pierros] What we’re really interested in and picking up as a highlight are the changes on the governance level. There are a couple of things that are coming. The Council has done really fanstastic work on bringing up and framing really interesting conversations around what RepsNext is, and PeersNext as a subset of that, and how do we change and adapt the leadership structure of Mozilla Reps to be more representative of the program that we would like to see.

[Brian] The program will still remain a grassroots program, run by volunteers for volunteers.

[Henrik] We’ve been working heavily on it in various working groups over the last year, developed a very clear understanding of the areas that need work and actually got a lot of stuff done.

[Konstantina] I think that the program has a great future ahead of it. We’re moving to a leadership body where our role is gonna be to empower the rest of the volunteer community and we’re gonna try to minimize the bureacracy that we already have. So the Reps are gonna have the same resources that they had but they are gonna have tracks where they can evolve their leadership skills and with that empower the volunteer communities. Reps is gonna be the leadership body for the volunteer community and I think that’s great. We’re not only about events but we’re something more and we’re something the rest of Mozilla is gonna rely on when we’re talking about volunteers.

Question: What’s important about this change?

[Michael] We will have the Participation team’s support to have meetings together, to figure out the strategy together.

[Konstantina] We are bringing the tracks where we specialize the Reps based on their interest.

Question: Why do we need changes?

[Christos] There is the need of that. There is the need to reconsider the mentoring process, reconsidering budgets, interest groups inside of Reps. There is a need to evolve Reps and be more impactful in our regions.

Question: Is this important for Mozilla?

[Arturo] We’re going to have mentors and Reps specialized in their different contribution areas.

Question: How is RepsNext helping local communities?

[Guillermo] Our idea, what we’re planning with the changes on RepsNext is to bring more people to the program. More people is more diversity, so we’re trying to find new people, more people with new interests.

Question: What excites you about RepsNext?

[Faisal] We have resources for different types of community, for example if somebody needs hardware or somebody training material, a variety of things not just what we used to have. So it will open up more ways on how we can support Reps for more impactful events and making events more productive.