Mozilla Community-Building Readings

The following guides and documentation have information and tips for how to build community around your project. There is a mix of Mozilla-specific and general open source community building material. Feel free to add links to other relevant information.

Mozilla-specific

• Hosting community events at Mozilla Spaces

• Who is in the Mozilla community infographic

• Lexicon of Mozilla community terms

• Having productive community discussions

• Community Building Best Practices by various Mozillians

• How To Be A Mozillian; How To Work In Community (video) by Gerv Markham

• 'Winning For Mozilla' closing keynote at MozCamp Europe 2011 (video) by Mitchell Baker

• Engaging the Mozilla Community (video) by Mike Beltzner

• Mozilla Governance pages

• Community Management Presentation by Dave Eaves

• Community building posts from Mozilla Hispano community by Ruben Martin

General

• Community Event Planning by Christie Koehler, Sherri Montgomery and Audrey Eschright
• The Art of Community by Jono Bacon
• Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel
• Effective mentoring programs by Dave Neary
• Diversity in practice: How the Boston Python User Group grew to 1700 people and over 15% women by Asheesh Laroia and Jessica McKellar
• Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design by Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick; available online as PDF draft chapters
• Volunteer Management Resource Center from idealist.org
• Collective Action Toolkit from frog
• How To Put Free Software Experience On Your Resumé
• Buzzing Communities: How to build bigger, better, more active online communities by Richard Millington.
• Building Web Reputation Systems by Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass.
• Cultivating Communities of Practice: A guide to managing knowledge by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William Snyder.
• The Online Community Guide, blog by Richard Millington.
• A Preliminary Study of the Effects of Barnstars on Wikipedia Editing; found that number of edits goes down after an editor gets a barnstar, but eventually recovers to the level before the barnstar.
• Understanding and Supporting the Choice of an Appropriate Task to Start With In Open Source Software Communities by Igor Steinmacher, Tayana Uchoa Conte, and Marco Aurelio Gerosa.

The Top Myths of Community Building

as created by the CBT team and to be expanded upon

• Myth: working with contributors will take my time and energy away from meeting my personal goals or our team goals.

Working with volunteers does not compete with other goals. If the work is organized right, it helps you meet those goals by expanding your team.

• Myth: We will have to work with whomever shows up and they are not likely to have the right skillset for us or enough time to do the project.

There is no obligation to work with everyone who shows up. You can be clear about skills, time and other requirements needed.

• Myth: volunteers are unreliable.

Volunteers can be depended on. There are community practices for establishing trust and accountability.

• Myth: Volunteers will try to change decisions we already made.

Volunteers should not alter the decision making process. Indeed, volunteers generally want clear, meaningful tasks. Engaging volunteers should not eat up more time, it should create systems that will enable both volunteers and staff to be more productive

• Myth: establishing systems and tasks for managing volunteers will take more time than it is worth.

Engaging volunteers should not eat up more time, it should create systems that will enable both volunteers and staff to be more productive