Contribute/Creative
Steward
Matej Novak, Lee Tom, Barry Munsterteiger and Tobias Leingruber
Creative Contribute Group
Meetings every other Friday at 11 am pacific.
Action Plan
Goals
- Finding a few designers who can help with projects
- Spreading the word about the One Mozilla style guide initiative and getting people to use it as a primary source of direction for their own projects
Channels
- https://wiki.mozilla.org/Design (active)
- creative@mozilla email alias (active)
- Creative Collective (inactive)
- Design mailing list (inactive)
- @mozcreative Twitter account (active?)
- Creative Collective Facebook page (inactive?)
Tools
Potential Contributors
Auto-Response to Design Inquiries
Thanks for your interest in getting involved with Mozilla.
Visual design is handled by our Creative team and we work on projects ranging from logos to marketing campaigns to websites to... well, just about anything and everything visual around here. If that sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, here are some next steps you can take:
- Sign up for our Design mailing list: http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/design
We’ll post projects and briefs here for you to work on, so please be sure to sign up, as this will be our main point of communication. To get started, introduce yourself and include a link to your portfolio, if you have one.
- Follow us on Twitter: @mozcreative
We might post design work here as well, but we mostly use this as an information channel for topics related to Mozilla and design in general, including things we like and that inspire us.
- Learn more on the wiki: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Design
Find out about the kinds of projects you can contribute to as well as links to other resources. We’ll update it periodically, so please check back often.
If you have questions or comments about any of this, please feel free to write back.
— The Creative Team
Active Contributors
Core Contributors
Background Information
Identify Community
Q: Can you identify all of the contributors on your team (both paid-staff and volunteer-staff)?
A: Broadly, yes. Aside from the core group of paid staff, there's the Creative Collective (http://creative.mozilla.org/). Anyone who has built or worked on a community website has contributed to the creative efforts at Mozilla. Anyone who has helped develop one of the regional mascots (Foxkeh, etc.) could be considered part of our team. There is also some overlap between our group and l10n, especially as we encourage and empower localizers to be more free and creative with their efforts.
What we need to work on are specifics — identifying key contributors in those areas who are willing to continue working with us. In some cases they may not even know that we consider them a part of the Creative team, so informing them and getting them to add themselves to the Creative group on Mozillians.org is a big first step.
Suggestion: Use the mozillians.org contributor directory to help. Communicate through your team's channels and encourage people to sign up and group themselves with a common team tag. If you assign a group tag to all contributors on your project, the Mozillians dashboard will track the size of that group and will also allow you to easily export the contact information for group members. You can export these contacts to ensure all your contributors are signed up.
Define Contribution Opportunities
Q: Can you point someone interested in contributing to your project to a list of available contribution opportunities?
A: Yes, but again mostly broadly. Our efforts are pretty compartmentalized into three areas: design, Web and copy, though the three also cross over. But apart from the occasional Creative Collective design challenge and the open bugs in the above areas, there is no specific list of tasks that someone could look at.
There is a huge opportunity in the Creative Collective, though, as a first class contributor hub. It is already established and has a built-in list of people we can reach out to. We need to reinvigorate it by getting the word out and drumming up interest (this, in itself, could be a role for a volunteer contributor).
Suggestion: Look at what your team's needs are and what gaps you have in staffing to come up with a list of contribution opportunities. Capture those on a wiki page, in bugs, as role descriptions in Jobvite or whatever makes sense for your community.
Map Contribution Paths
Q: Are there clearly understood steps someone can follow to go from knowing nothing about your project to successfully contributing?
A: The Creative wiki (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Engagement/Creative) and the Creative Collective are good starting points here, but it might be nice to add creative, design and writing to the areas of interest on the /contribute page. From there the process needs to be fleshed out better with specific tasks, goals and projects.
A related challenge is making the Creative department more visible to the community and making the opportunities to contribute to our team more obvious and more well known. There may be people who want to contribute to Mozilla, but feel they don't have the technical skill. We want them to know there are other ways to help.
Suggestion: In addition to just documenting these steps, look for a simple 5-minute task that someone can take to get started (for example, signing up for Bugzilla if they are interested in coding) and also figure out where in the process you can add a mentor to help people.
Establish Goals and Metrics
Q: Can you measure participation or contributors today? If so, what metrics can you track? What goal or metric would you like to achieve for Q1? Alternatively, what metrics would you like to get in place for Q1?
A: Currently the Creative Collective is easiest to track, in number of people who have joined and/or contributed a design. Eventually it would be great to track contributors by area as well (design, copy, Web) and to figure out who is active vs. someone who has just submitted something only once.
Suggestion: Write down what you think would be helpful to track even if it isn't possible to get that data today. We'll work on implementing dashboards when we know what data we want.
