Websites/Mozilla.org/Archive/Contribute/AllHandsCodingSession: Difference between revisions

===Mintues===

Mozilla All-Hands Coding Contributor Engagement Notes

- We want to go from where we are currently, where contributors are few outside of Mozilla's core, to getting more community contributors. 

- People in attendance:

• Axel, on board of Mozilla Europe, wants more international contribution

  • Jonas Sickling, wants contributors

• Janet Swisher, works on developer documentation

• Pat McBenice, works on networking, wants efficiency

• khuey, wants more peers

• David Boswell, engagement, wants to help contributors get information

• Jeff, automation and testing team, interested in leveraging community, interested in play between add-ons and core

• People to look for and help mentors - Andrew said he could own half of that.  jdm and David Boswell say they can help with this also.

• Curate peer/owner list - talk to gerv, who's worked on this before, but it's too big a task for one person

- provide info people need

- put people in touch with people they can help  

- Once the connection is established, we want people to feel a part of the community, ask questions, start a mentor relationship.

- We want to build a self-helping community, where older people help the newer ones.  Often, the person who mentors does not need expertise in the field.  One can help someone find answers even if it's not specifically the area they work in.  We have Mozilla context knowledge that's not written down.  The information on wikis is out of date. (Gandalf)

- Key is giving people specific tasks (Andrew)

    - Good First Bugs are good, but even figuring out how to fix a trivial bug requires large amounts of commitment from new contributors

    - If everyone had one contributor that they could feel free to ask stupid questions, it would be very valuable (Paul).  Asking stupid questions in dev channel is a waste of everyone's time, asking a mentor is appropriate (Gandalf)

    - Infomonkey is a stack overflow instance for Spidermonkey - it's a Q&A site.  We need that across coding at Mozilla so you can ask a stupid question or see that someone has already answered it (Paul).

    - We need a new channel where developers can just go to ask stupid questions (humph)

    - We need someone to look for and help mentors.  Andrew said he could own half of that.  jdm and David Boswell say they can help with this also.

    - Good First Bugs (GFB) has serious problems.  It's either simple things that would be good first bugs, or a dumping ground for things the filer doesn't have time for. (khuey) It has some that are out of date or not for Firefox. (jdm)  GFB is sometimes used as an excuse to not help people - just send someone a link if they ask what they can do.  A lot don't make it through.  (Gandalf) Some contributors want to be left alone and figure things out, but others want lots of help. (Paul)  A big group is developers who just want to scratch their own itch. (Wes)

- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=student-project is another good resource for new contributors.  It's meant to allow classes to pick up bugs.

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRebjdMabao Showing first dashboard which looks at commits in Mercurial.  In the video, the histogram and table shows usernames and the commits they did.  We should be embracing people who just did their first patch.  We're working on metrics now to show how long patches wait for review.  Community metrics mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/moz-community-metrics The Phonebook project will help us keep current emails of people. (Daniel) Existing dashboard: https://metrics.mozilla.com/pentaho/content/pentaho-cdf-dd/Render?solution=community&path=%2Fdashboards&file=contributorMap.wcdf

- Don't tell module owners to declare peers.  They are too busy.  (timeless)   

- A barrier to contributions is helping first contributors find someone to review their first patch.  We need to provide info on who can review. (Paul)  Our new dashboards are more leader-oriented. (Andrew)  

Documentation:

- There's no good documentation for newbies telling them how to get to first patch (Paul)

End of meeting:

We ran out of time, and didn't discuss many things, and didn't get owners for something things. Paul will create a newsgroup on which to continue this discussion.