Participation/Projects/Activate mozilla/Best Practices

This page documents best practices about how to make the MozActivate campaign in your region, a success !

Choose one activity

The MozActivate campaign currently includes the following teams

• WebCompat
• Test Pilot
• Rust
• e10s
• WebVR

Focusing on any one of these activities will not only help the volunteers to get involved more deeply with their respective topics and understand them better but also help them master it in a short time and guide others with contributions.

Start a communication channel

If you don't already have a communication channel in place, set up one for your local community, specific to the particular activity you chose. This will be useful for certain internal discussions and announcements. It will also serve as a support group in case the new contributors are stuck with something.

A communication channel can be in one or more of the following ways, depending on what's best in your local community:

• Telegram Channel
• Mailing List
• Slack Channel
• Facebook Group

If you are not sure of which channel to use, conduct a small survey asking the volunteers of your region about the most comfortable option that works for them.

Start a discourse thread

Consider having a Discourse thread dedicated to your activity. A discourse channel ensures that some important data embedded in the conversations is not lost and can be revisited easily. A discourse thread is also beneficial for making annoucements that can be checked upon by the volunteers regularly. Additionally, Discourse also enables asynchronous conversations.

Track all the contributions in your local community

A local community could be either be your region or your country, depending on how you usually operate.

Make sure that the volunteers report all kind of contributions i.e. projects, talks, blogs, tweets, etc. This could be done by maintaining a centralised repository such as an organisation on GitHub or a MozillaWiki page just like this one.

Provide Recognition

Based on the contributions tracked, announce monthly or weekly "star" contributors. The contributions can be evaluated based on "most commits" or other similar criteria. Other kind of recognitions may include the following:

• Tweeting the shout outs for the weekly/monthly "star" contributors.
• Reacting to the contributions submitted by the contributors on the GitHub organisation.
• Giving some additional leadership responsibilities to best performing contributors.

Conduct friendly competitions

Conduct a friendly competition, once a week or once a month which would focus on the contributors' learning and application of that knowledge in a way that's best for the particular activity. For example, for a WebVR activity, you could have a competition which asks the volunteers to create 5 VR scenes each using different primitives.

This creates some kind of a push among the volunteers to schedule and learn new stuff. Offer some additional swag to the winners that could be useful to the contributors to write better code. For example, for a WebVR activity, this could be a Google Cardboard.

Teach

Identify one or more contributors who have acquired some good hands-on knowledge on the particular activity (This could be you !) and ask them to conduct learning calls/ recorded sessions that explain "How to get started" with writing the code and submit/report their contributions.