Contribute

The Contributor Stewards program is a scalable way to bring in new people to all areas of the Mozilla community by having members of different teams be responsible for driving contributor growth for each project area. There are three parts to the program:

• Select someone on your team to be a steward responsible for helping contributors get involved in your activities.

• Add contributor growth and health targets to your quarterly goals.

• Make time for the steward to work with the Contributor Engagement team to improve the process for contributing to your project.

Teams that make this investment in contributor recruiting will become more effective at bringing people into their project and will be able to accomplish more as their team grows.

Anyone interested in community building would make a great Steward. We expect that Stewards will spend up to 5 hours a week on activities related to this role. This also doesn't need to be a long-term commitment and it is fine to have different people on a team rotate through this role.

See the Steward Program slides from the September 2011 All Hands for more details.

Areas

Functional Areas

Area	Steward
Accessibility	David Bolter
Coding	Dietrich Ayala, Kyle Huey, Brian Bondy and Josh Matthews
Developer Documentation	Janet Swisher
Engineering Program Management	Lawrence Mandel
Grants	Geoffrey MacDougall
Graphics	Benoit Jacob, Benoit Girard
Labs	Desigan (Dees) Chinniah and Havi Hoffman
Localization	Zbigniew Braniecki (Gandalf)
Market Insights	Margaret Schroeder
Mobile	Lucas Rocha
Privacy	Stacy Martin
Product Marketing	Gregory Jost
Public Relations	Shannon Prior
Research and B2G	Vivien Nicolas
Support	Michelle Luna and Michael Verdi
Systems Administration	Matthew Zeier and Corey Shields
Thunderbird	Ludovic Hirlimann, Roland Tanglao and Jennifer Zickerman
Tools and Automation	Clint Talbert and Lukas Blakk
Quality Assurance	Anthony Hughes, Marcia Knous, Juan Becerra and Naoki Hirata
User Engagement	Chelsea Novak and Jessilyn Davis
User Research	Diane Loviglio
Web Development	Christie Koehler, Andy McKay, Rob Helmer, Dave Dash, Tim Watts, Les Orchard and Luke Crouch
WebFWD	Diane Bisgeier
UX	Alex Limi

Geographic Areas

Area	Steward
Berlin	William Quiviger and Michelle Thorne
Brazil	Reuben Morais
Minneapolis/St. Paul	Scott Johnson
The Netherlands	Ludovic Hirlimann
Portland	Christie Koehler
Toronto	Armen Zambrano Gasparnian
Vancouver	Karen Esterly and Andy McKay
San Francisco	Lukas Blakk

Activities

Each team has unique needs that will require creating specific plans for improvement, but there are some general activities that apply to most project areas, such as:

• Assisting with the Contributor Life Cycle Audit

• Helping get contributors signed up to the phonebook

• Reviewing responses to inquiries from Get Involved page

• Writing up volunteer role descriptions (eg, Newsletter Coordinator)

• Working with Mozilla Representatives to promote your project

Resources

Contributor Channels

There are a number of channels you can use to get information out to existing and potential contributors about how to get involved in your project:

• Get Involved pages: over 300,000 visitors a month

• Want to help? form: over 2,000 inquiries a month

• about:mozilla newsletter: over 6,000 subscribers

• Mozillians YouTube channel: over 20 subscribers (just starting to grow this channel)

If you have any questions about any of these or would you to make use of them, let us know.

Peer Support

One of the best ways to learn more about Mozilla and get help is to talk with other people in the community. There are many ways to do this, but the following options are great forums for discussions about helping people get involved in the project.

• Contribute Group: a group that meets every other Thursday at 10 pacific to discuss issues related to helping people get involved in Mozilla.

• Community events: there are many Mozilla events run by volunteers all around the world and they can be very energizing experiences if you haven't been to one before. For example, read Matthew Zeier's post about an amazing experience he had attending community events in Argentina.

• Contributor Stories: reading about how someone got involved or how someone helped bring a new contributor into the community can give you ideas about methods that have worked (or not worked) in the past.

Documentation

The following documentation has information and tips for how to build community around your project. There is a mix of Mozilla-specific and general open source community building material.

• Best Practices by various Mozillians

• How To Be A Mozillian; How To Work In Community (video) by Gerv Markham

• Community Management Presentation by Dave Eaves

• The Art of Community by Jono Bacon

Skill Development

We are currently looking into what sort of community building skills we could help people develop. Let us know what we could add that would be useful.

Special Interest Groups

The Mozilla Reps (ReMo) program aims to empower and support volunteer Mozillians who want to become official representatives of Mozilla. Tapping into this group of people can be a great way to spread the word about contribution opportunities for your project and to get more people involved.

• Mozilla Reps Special Interest Groups

Local Groups

There may be groups near you that aren't necessarily related to Mozilla, but can be good places to go to meet others interested in community building or who have an interest in Mozilla's mission. If you know of one of these groups, add it to this list.

• Vancouver Community Experience Group

Web Tools

Community building online would not be possible without tools to help with the process. The community is full of a number of tools, but there has been a lack of some key pieces of volunteer management infrastructure that the Contributor Engagement team is now putting in place. Learn more about what's coming:

• Phonebook
• TaskBoard
• Events Manager

Communication

Instead of going with yet another mailing list for discussions among Stewards, let's try a more social option and see if that works.

• Yammer Contribute Group forum

If you have thoughts (positive or negative) about going with Yammer, either let us know on that forum or on the Mozillians forum if you just don't want to sign up on Yammer, or can't for some reason.

• http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.mozillians/topics

To Do

• Add link to phonebook profiles for each Steward when phonebook goes live.

• Add advice/best-practices in reaching out to local communities and events like this VanCX.