Doing research for my Grow an Organization by Planting Volunteers at SCALE, I ran across Dirk Riehle’s article on the Five Stages of Open Source Volunteering. The whole article is worth a read but I thought I’d call out the open communication piece. He says to support a distributed community and to engage new volunteers, open communication is key.
Public communication ensures that all members of the community have the opportunity to participate, which creates buy-in and trust.
Dirk Riehle outlines 4 principles of open communication:
- Public. All communication should be public and not take place behind closed doors; any private side-communication is discouraged.
- Written. All communication should be in written form; if this is not possible, any relevant communication should be transcribed or summarized in writing.
- Complete. Communication should be comprehensive and to the extent possible, complete. Assumptions are made explicit and key conclusions are summarized.
- Archived. All communication should get archived for search and later public review. Thus, previous conversations are available for posterity.
The benefits he lists are some of the same reasons I gave in my Asynchronous vs Synchronous post. It enables distributed work, people whose first language is not English have more time to read and understand, it gives a common understanding and increases transparency around decision making.
Reading it, I was struck that this is not how I am starting projects at Mozilla these days. We have many ideas for things we can do in 2015 and usually we discuss them as a small group, decide whether or not they are viable, figure out if it needs a budget, whether it moves our 2015 goals ahead and then we bring the topic to a wider, more public audience. There are several reasons for that. One is that it takes time to figure out how to accurately describe an idea, what you mean and why you want to do it. It helps to get feedback from a few people to help make your initial communication clearer. Another is that we don’t want to be seen as announcing things before we are committed to them. I’m not sure if that’s a valid concern or not. Third is that it feels distracting. All of us are suffering from too much email, too much information and too much communication. Adding random ideas seems to create more churn. I wonder if this could be solved by having people focus more on smaller projects. Right now it feels like we all have to follow most of what Mozilla is doing because we are part of Mozilla. Everyone wants to know about Firefox OS and tiles and privacy. I do!