Contribute/L10n

Steward

Zbigniew Braniecki (Gandalf) and Jeff Beatty

Identify Community

Q: Can you identify all of the contributors on your team (both paid-staff and volunteer-staff)?

A: Paid staff = Yes, since there are only eight of us. Volunteer staff = There is no way :-) We have hundreds of volunteer contributors that are working on L10n. Searching the L10n tag using Mozillians only returns a hanful of results. We could do better at promoting signing up on Mozillians and using the L10n tag. The Mozillians directory really isn't the best way to understand our community. With that said, I should mention that while it's dificult to identify all individuals participating in L10n, we've been able to identify their general background profiles, which we've been able to do from various surveys and which we use when tailoring campaigns, projects, or documentation to the communities as a whole.

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: We've placed a more concerted effort on identifying contribution opportunities and lowering the bar for entry. We created this contribute wiki to point to specific ways people can contribute. We've been working on re-writing our wiki doc as well to clarify the actions that new contributors should take to join in the effort.

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: This wiki page is meant to accomplish just that. It outlines a technical, task-oriented workflow for anyone interested in getting involved to follow. Unfortunately, it can be a bit daunting due to the large amount of information that a new contributor needs to know in order to get involved. I think we could improve in working to simplify the introdctory process. Ultimately, that's what we hope this new guide will help to accomplish. In addition, the World Ready program Stas has recently launched is meant identify potential mentors. As this program progresses we'll find points in the process in which to add a mentor for individual contributors. Currently, Arky is filling the mentor role for new contributors who are starting an entirely new localization.

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: Right now we have multiple dashboards for tracking each localization team's progress on a per project basis but not for individual contributors. The high volume of contributors makes it very difficult to track each individual contributor's efforts. It's especially difficult because of the diverse manners in which an individual contributor is able to contribute to the project. Some dashboards (e.g., for wb parts) can be modified to track some individual contributions, but that metric wouldn't be representative of all individual contributions. To put it simply, yes, we have the tools to measure a team's contributions but not an individuals.

Our main focus/goal in this next quarter, in terms of engagement, is to increase the size of each L10n community. We're attempting to do that by lowering the bar to entry (through new tools development and clearer doc), creating a mentoring program (like World Ready), and providing a more centralized and clear platform for project tracking and joining the communities (elmo project).

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.