Contribute/IT
Contents
Steward
Dumitru Gherman, mrz and Corey Shields
Action Plan
Community building planning is currently happening on the IT Community pages and related SIGs:
Background Information
Identify Community
Q: Can you identify all of the contributors on your team (both paid-staff and volunteer-staff)?
A:
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:
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:
- Join the public #it channel and say hi. (the first step to getting known and trusted)
- Volunteer for one of the IT roles (for instance, Air Mozilla Stage Hand)
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:
- Number of mirrors?
- Patches to Air Mozilla?
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.
Brainstorming for entry points
Challenge: There are sysadmin tasks for contributors to do but it requires establishing a certain level of trust first. What useful activities are there for new people that will help build up that trust?
- Subscribe to a mailing list or IRC channel and say hi
- Set up a mirror -- may only apply to institutions that have spare servers and bandwidth
- If setting up mirrors isn't a great fit for individuals is there a need for providing support to institutions that act as mirrors or testing the mirror network?
- Desktop support for Mozilla Spaces (maybe also at college computer labs, libraries, etc?)
- Hosting and server help for local sites as part of MCS effort.
- Combine entry points with Release Engineering if there's reasonable overlap?
- Help with Air Mozilla -- improving it and letting community members publish to it
- Look at what other open source projects are doing, eg Apache's Infrastructure team
