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.
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.
Communication
Join the discussion about the Stewards program on the Mozillians forum. Feel free to post questions, suggestions, ideas or whatever else you'd like to talk about.
Or you are welcome to send any comments or questions about Stewards directly to David Boswell.
Goals
This program is just getting started, so the goals for Q4 2011 are to set ourselves up for driving contributor growth across the project in 2012. Specifically the goals are:
- Select someone from each project area to be a steward responsible for helping contributors get involved.
- Publish contributor growth and health targets for each team.
- Add all core and active contributors for each project area to the Contributor Directory (read more about using the Mozillians Dashboard to tag and count contributors to your project).
- Make time for the steward to work with the Contributor Engagement team to improve the process for contributing to each project area.
Collectives
Functional Areas
Geographic Areas
Mozilla Spaces
These stewards are based in the different Mozilla Spaces around the world.
| Area | Steward | Template Completed |
|---|---|---|
| Auckland | ||
| Beijing | ||
| Berlin | William Quiviger and Michelle Thorne | |
| London | ||
| Mountain View | ||
| Paris | ||
| San Francisco | Lukas Blakk | |
| Taipei | ||
| Toronto | ||
| Vancouver | Karen Esterly and Andy McKay |
Other Areas
These Stewards are focused on other cities and regions around the world.
| Area | Steward | Template Completed |
|---|---|---|
| Asia (exc. China and Japan) | Gen Kanai | |
| Brazil | Reuben Morais | |
| Minneapolis/St. Paul | Scott Johnson | |
| The Netherlands | Ludovic Hirlimann | |
| Portland | Christie Koehler |
Activities
Each team has unique needs that will require creating specific plans, but there are some general activities that apply to all areas. We recommend that all Stewards start with these initial steps:
- Step 1: Identify current community and get them in the mozillians.org contributor directory
- Step 2: Evaluate gaps in your staffing and add contributor growth targets to your goals
- Step 3: Define and scope contribution opportunities
- Step 4: Assess and map contribution paths
- Step 5: Establish metrics to measure health and to optimize paths
The section above this has links to pages for each functional and regional area where this information can be added.
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 500,000 visitors a month
- Want to help? form: over 2,000 inquiries a month
- about:mozilla newsletter: over 6,000 subscribers
- Volunteer matching sites (such as volunteermatch.org)
- Mozillians YouTube channel: over 40 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.
Mozilla Reps
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.
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:
Dashboards
You can measure the growth and health of your community by using metrics dashboards. Creating a dashboard specifically for your project area is worth considering. There are also community wide dashboards that may be helpful.
- Contributor Directory dashboard (available through LDAP only now, will be public soon)
Note: If you assign a group tag to all contributors on your project, this 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.
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
- Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel
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.
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.
Presentations
For more information about Stewards, take a look at these presentations about the program.