Contribute/Pilots

The plans for community building have been informed by a number of pilot projects that were put in place to test ideas about how to increase participation. This page documents some of the more interesting pilot projects and discusses what was learned from those efforts.

Community Builders

Hypothesis: Teams need Community Builders to drive their participation efforts. Without someone focused on participation, communities either don't form or they don't scale.

Pilot: Dedicating someone to ramp up an existing community
- Summary: Margaret Leibovic was one of the first people to get actively involved in the Stewards program and she dedicated time to applying a number of best practices from the community building group to the Fennec project.
- Outcome: "Over the past year, the Firefox for Android team has really seen increased volunteer participation."

Pilot: Dedicating someone to create a new community
- Summary: Dia Bondi became a Steward for the People team and was supported in her efforts to understand how to design projects for participation and was provided mentoring on how to work effectively with volunteers.
- Outcome: The People team hasn't had a history of participation, but after becoming a Steward Dia brought on two volunteers to the team and has plans for working with a Human Resources department at a local university to connect with additional contributors.

Finding: Having someone drive participation matters and we are able to intentionally deepen existing communities as well as broaden participation opportunities to new areas.

Contribution Pathways

Hypothesis: At the scale of Mozilla today, it is no longer feasible to expect volunteers to be able to connect with appropriate contribution opportunities without guidance.

Pilot: Localizing the Get Involved page in Spanish
- Summary: Ruben Martin was interested in working on how we could localize the Get Involved page (which had always been English only) so that it could be a useful resource for connecting non-English speakers to opportunities with local communities.
- Outcome: The Mozilla Hispano community evolved their workflow (post one and post two) and are seeing early successes with finding new contributors (although they are also running into scaling problems with their mentorship program handling an increase in volume).

Pilot: Creating a contribution path for Webdev
- Summary: The Webdev Stewards created a clear series of steps that contributors could follow to understand how to successfully contribute to a Mozilla web site.
- Outcome: Creating a pathway provided clarity to new contributors as well as to people internally who wanted to understand where there were roadblocks to new contributors. Having a documented pathway also allowed us to create a set of badges that could be automatically issued as people progressed through the pathway.

Pilot: Running a campaign to get people onto contribution pathways
- Summary: As part of the 15 years of Mozilla campaign, we talked about how Mozilla was a place for participation and encouraged them to sign up on the Get Involved page.
- Outcome: We saw a huge spike in the overall numbers of people wanting to contribute to Mozilla and particularly large increases in new types of contribution opportunities, like Education.

Finding: Having clear contribution pathways and visibility into the health of those pathways matters and this becomes more important as we grow bigger.