Contributor Focused Sites

There are many sites in the community that are focused on new and existing contributors. To date these sites have been handled separately and by different groups of people. It may make sense to look at these in a more coordinated way to make sure we are leveraging our resources as much as we can.

Contribute Engagement's Web Projects

• reps.mozilla.org
  • Purpose: Support volunteer Mozillians who want to become official representatives

• mozillians.org
  • Purpose: Create a phonebook of active community members

• www.mozilla.org/contribute
  • Purpose: Provide a starting place for new contributors

Other Community Wide Sites

There are sites that provide tools for contributors across Mozilla. These sites have generally received less attention in terms of plans and roadmaps and the stakeholders are less well defined.

For instance, the wiki isn't hooked into our web stats package so we can't track traffic to pages on the site. Whose responsibility is it to raise this as an issue and drive it to completion?

• air.mozilla.org
• metrics.mozilla.com
• wiki.mozilla.org
• irc.mozilla.org
• planet.mozilla.org
• etherpad.mozilla.org
• guides.mozilla.org

Note: Some of these may or may not actually belong in this category and we may be missing other sites. Feel free to edit the list to make it better.

Project Specific Sites

There are sites that provide tools for contributors interested in a specific project area. These sites generally have clear stakeholders, owners, plans, roadmaps, etc.

• quality.mozilla.org
• studentreps.mozilla.org
• mozilla-europe.org/en/about/contributors/
• creative.mozilla.org
• addons.mozilla.org
• support.mozilla.com
• drumbeat.org
• join.mozilla.org
• communitystore.mozilla.org
• donate.mozilla.org
• spreadfirefox.com

Integration Example

Onboarding new contributors and getting them through the process of contributing to Mozilla is currently split across many sites. Viewing the contributor focused sites more holistically and integrating a new contributor's experience could have significant benefits.

As an example, the following is a possible flow for how people go from being interested in contributing to Mozilla to becoming active contributors.

mozilla.org/contribute > reps.mozilla.org > mozillians.org > metrics.mozilla.com

Bringing In People Interested In Contributing

The Get Involved pages at www.mozilla.org/contribute invite people to fill in a form if they are interested in contributing to Mozilla. These emails are then answered by people familiar with Mozilla who can point people to the right place or answer any questions they have. Mozilla is big and confusing and a little hand-holding at first can definitely help.

Matching Potential and Existing Community Members

To deal with these inquiries at any scale, we'll need a system that can help us match the emails coming in with the right existing community member who can respond appropriately (right now this is done in a kludgy way with a mailing list). This is a task that will be included in a Mozilla Reps' activities and the reps will need a way to track, respond and get data on these interactions.

To better match emails coming in with the appropriate existing Mozilla Rep, it was suggested that a new "Country" field be added to the Contribute form, thereby forwarding an inquiriy to a geographically-relevant Mozilla Rep.

One example of a tool that could help bridge this gap is FuzzyFox's Affero school project.

Adding A New Active Community Member

Once the new person actually starts actively contributing, they can become part of the phonebook of active community members at mozillians.org. Doing this will allow us to complete the circle and identify how the process is working (how many people who were interested in contributing actually did so? how long does it take sense to onboard into the community? etc.)

Keeping Members Active

The metrics.mozilla.com site will provide us information that can be used to keep contributors active. For instance, they are putting dashboards in place now that will show when the last time someone committed to Hg or used Bugzilla. We could take that data and follow up with people and find out why they become inactive and if there was something that could re-engage them with the project. There are many other ways data could be useful.

Engagement Path

Proposal

We propose organizing stakeholders into a group that is focused on our all of our contributor infrastructure. This would be a complement to the existing procedures that exist around managing the individual sites. Members of the group would include people involved in the project-specific contributor sites as well as people with a new role dedicated to the community-wide sites.

As a group, these people will coordinate to make sure the contributor experience works for people who want to contribute (can a designer easily find their way to the latest design challenge) as well as people already actively involved in a project (can the localization team easily find out who is contributing today and can they easily bring in new contributors).