Tools for Co-Creation
Wrangler Space or Experience teams collaborate on a weekly basis throughout the process. The best teams are highly diverse, bringing people from different disciplines, cultures, lanuages, backgrounds, interests and skill sets together. This is where Mozilla’s expertise in developing open source communities and coordinating complex remote work comes in handy.
We use a collection of tools and practices to facilitate this work. These include:
- Weekly one hour meetings with MozFest staff and the entire cohort, which all Wranglers should attend. The weekly meetings convey key information, provide training, and provide a space for cross cohort collaborations and insights. We strongly encourage all Wranglers to attend all of these meetings. However, in the event of a conflict or missed session, these meetings are recorded.
- Space or Experience Team meetings, self-organized at a time of the team’s choice, on a regular weekly or bi-weekly cadence, adjusted as needed.
- A Monday email sent by MozFest staff, with reminders about deadlines, key tasks, and opportunities for support or engagement.
- Slack channels,one for all Wranglers, and individual private Space/Experience team channels, for ongoing discussion, Q&A, sharing and support
- A Google drive for collaborating and sharing documents and resources
- Mozillafestival.org gmail accounts for all wranglers, to use in communicating with community
- PreTalx, an event building tool, for reviewing and curating session proposals; PreTalx also has bulk email features and is used to build the Festival schedule.
- A repository of handy how-to resources and process documentation, in the form of a project plan spreadsheet, a wrangler “guide” including workflow documentation, linked and indexed weekly call notes, and an archive of all recorded calls, help sessions, training, and peer shares.
- Frequent check-ins and support from Mozilla staff and experienced mentors, in the form of visits to team meetings, open office hours and short surveys.
- A crowd-sourced list of collaboration best practices plus ongoing community support and conversations around everything from meeting scheduling tools to decision-making strategies.
Production team staff are there to facilitate and troubleshoot this process, and provide methods and structures for great collaboration, even for those working across time zones, on different schedules, and with varying access to tech.
We’re always learning and fine-tuning this process! Every new year, every new Wrangling cohort brings new insights, ideas, and practices. Read more about 2021 approaches and learnings.