Contribute/Addons

Steward

Amy Tsay and Jeff Griffiths

Identify Community

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

A: Yes on paid staff. We can identify volunteers, but not in an easily accessible or meaningful way. We have a record of their names and email addresses but we don't know where they live, for example. Also, there isn't an easy way for them to contact each other. We are interested in doing a push to get them to sign up at Mozillians.

Note: There are several different locations where add-on developers talk -- official AMO forum, mozillazine, mozdev and stack overflow. Haven't been previous efforts to reach out to channels other than the AMO forum. Can also reach out to companies in ecosystem that build add-ons as a business.

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: AMO Editors page
Jobvite
AMO blog

Note: the audience for potential AMO editors is existing Mozillians who already have some experience with add-ons and community. For instance, the Jobvite posting brought in responses but none that were qualified since it was an audience of people not yet in the community. Focus should be on internal recruiting.

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: For editors, we have this page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/AMO:Editors
For personas creation, we have this page: http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/demo_create

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: For editors, we are measuring success by the review queues. There is an internal dashboard of this information available for editors only.

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.