Contribute/Engineering Program Management

Steward

Lawrence Mandel

Identify Community

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

A: Martin Best (mbest), Erin Lancaster (elancaster), Lawrence Mandel (lmandel), Sheila Mooney (smooney)

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: There are a number of projects for which project management can make a contribution. Some examples are Firefox integration of Persona (BrowserId) and Sync, Memshrink, New UI, and various feature work however there are many opportunities to engage and assist the dev team. New contributors will be onboarded gently in order to gain an understanding of the Mozilla way and what it means to manage a project at Mozilla.

Map Contribution Paths

Q: Are there clearly understood steps someone can follow to go from knowing nothing about your project to successfully contributing?

A: 1. Review the information on the program management wiki page including the active programs and projects and the way in which they're being managed.

2. Identify a program or project that interests you. You can work off of the programs and projects listed on the program management wiki page or suggest a new initiative.

3. Due to the nature of program management the team of program managers is in close contact. Get in touch with the community of program managers to introduce yourself on the dev-planning mailing list or on irc channel #pm.

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: The program management team is working to engage the community in the management of various Firefox initiatives. This is a great opportunity for community members to:

• understand the overall Firefox project
• get involved with senior leadership of the Firefox project
• broaden your skill set - program management requires skills to bridge the gap between the technical and business sides of a 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.