QA/Community/Growth/Q42007Strategy

I. Community Outreach

Although we now have millions of Firefox users, a very small fraction of them contribute to the Mozilla project. Helping people make the connection between what Firefox is and the people that make it possible is a critical piece in maintaining a healthy Mozilla project and continuing our mission.

QA is the easiest entry point for volunteers to get involved in the Mozilla community. We need to find new channels to explore and help educate potential community leaders and enable volunteers to contribute in any way they can. Leveraging the community for QA tasks will help us get better testing coverage, provide the Mozilla QA team a support system as they focus on short-term goals, and allow us to take on new projects and initiatives that will help us accomplish our long-term goals.

A. Identify leaders in emerging markets

In order to better understand cultural differences, local economies, and our users in new regions, we need to find leaders that can be advisors to, and liaisons between, the Mozilla QA team and those communities. We have opportunities in a few countries right now:

• India
  • FOSS.IN project day (Dec 2007)
  • Work with Dr. Nagarjuna G (President of India's Free Software Foundation)
• China
  • Get involved with Li's Mozilla China organization
• South America
  • Tim and Asa have contents in Brazil and Argentina?

B. Improve QA communities in existing markets

Developer and marketing/evangelism communities seem to be doing well in Europe and Japan, but it's been a challenge to engage QA contributors. We need to find out how we can better work with our affiliates to improve communication and processes that will allow for more collaboration on QA related activities.

• Mozilla Japan
  • Litmus and QMO translation
  • Bug Day and Test Day "training" or collaboration.

• Mozilla Europe
  • Find Bugzilla contributors and/or localizers that are willing to become community leads for their locales.
  • Figure out a way to centralize mozilla-europe.org site testing with l10n browser testing.

C. Campus recruiting and Mozilla University

Many of our interns and new contributors have come straight out of school, but we don't actively "recruit" enough. Seneca College has been a great example of what can happen if Mozilla invests some resources to help educate and inspire students and faculty to learn more about open source and get involved with the Mozilla project.

With some knowledge sharing and support, we can build a strong Mozilla presence at other schools... and bring in new interns and contributors (and hopefully a few new hires).

• Campus Reps
  • "Stay Ahead of the Curve" flyers for recruiting students/faculty and promoting Mozilla University.
  • Identify Campus Reps that are interested in starting a Mozilla Club.
    • Work with them to get their organization established and help them integrate into the QMO work flow.
• Mozilla University
  • Website live at https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/university/
  • Track site traffic and gather user feedback
  • Add new relevant content as needed/requested by the Mozilla community
  • Localize site for target markets/locales and promote at international universities

II. Building the Nightly Tester Community

Most of our nightly testers are long time Mozilla contributors that are fairly active in Bugzilla... but we need to find ways to grow that community. Although the QA team gets a few new people to help out during our Bug/Test Days, we have not been successful in converting those volunteers into regular nightly testers.

There are a few things we can do to bring in new contributors and encourage them to stick around longer:

• A. Create better participation channels
  • Integrate QMO extension into nightly builds
  • Improve Minefield/Gran Paradiso pages

• B. Centralize important QA documentation at QMO
  • Update well organized pages on mozilla.org and link to them from QMO
  • Migrate orphan pages from mozilla.org to QMO
  • Redirect mozillaZine blog to QMO

QA Projects

• QMO redesign with focus on "user activity flow"
  • Identify 3-4 types of contributors
  • Highly visible sections on front page for each type (Goal: 4 sections)
  • Create "user activity flow" for each type (Goal: 2 flows)
• QA "wish-lists" and engaging the team with the community
  • Generate a list of tasks/projects QA team needs community help with. (Goal: 3 projects)
  • Help them formalize their ideas into project plans/pages on QMO
  • Recruit community members to sign up for projects and work with QA team "mentor" (Goal: 1 recruit)