My next 100 days at Mozilla

Last May when I was just about to start working at Mozilla, Nick Dennis gave me some great advice. He said that I should thrash out with my line manager what I should focus on during my first 100 days, defining what ‘success’ looked like at the end of that period.

For whatever reason, I didn’t take Nick’s advice and, indeed, felt a bit lost at sea by Christmas. That’s not anyone’s fault, particularly, it’s just that I was used to working in an institutional environment (schools/universities) and Mozilla’s, well… different.

So I thought I’d take the opportunity when changing teams within Mozilla to belatedly take Nick’s advice and discuss with my new line manager Chris Lawrence what I should be doing from now until Christmas. Admittedly, that’s a little over 100 days, but it’s close enough. Here’s what we came up with – and what that includes, in no particular order:

1. Release the Web Literacy Standard v1.0 at MozFest

• Work with Michelle Thorne to encourage session leaders to tag their sessions with skills and competencies from the Standard.
• Work with Laura Hilliger on relevant session proposals relating to the Standard
• Propose a facilitated version of the community work from calls.

2. Transfer the Web Literacy Standard to webmaker.org

• Work with the Webmaker team to integrate the Standard across webmaker.org.
• Liaise with Chris Appleton on the design work around the Standard.

3. Prepare for a Web Literacy Standard alignment contest

• Aim for January 2014 and announce at MozFest.
• Work with organisations who are interested in aligning before then.
• Find people to judge competition.
• Work with MozLegal and other people who will be able to help (like Chloe Varelidi)

4. Dive into Mentor Team-related stuff

• Focus on breaking silos and making links with other teams.
• Be a thought leaders post-Mozilla Summit for ‘One Mozilla’.
• Work with the Mentor Team to bring Open Badges into their projects.

5. Set up a cross-Mozilla Foundation community working group

• Focus on sharing good practices.
• Systematise internal and external-facing processes.
• Potentially take over running of the weekly Webmaker call.

Obviously, there’s other things that are assumed (like building up a collection of animated GIFs and deploying them appropriately) and other things that will emerge but, for now, I think that’s a great starting point!

Main image CC BY quapan