Steward

Geoffrey MacDougall

Identify Community

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

A: Directly, there's just me. Mark - the Executive Director - spends half his time on development (in a bizdev sense), of course. And my colleague Ben Simon leads broad-based engagement/fundraising through the Join Mozilla program.

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: It starts with the Join program. But there's no opportunity past that at the moment. See next answer for what I'm hoping we can achieve.

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: Not yet. What I'm hoping to do is find a way to (i) have contributors identify partnership / grants / funding opportunities for Mozilla, (ii) have other contributors share insights into those opportunities, and (iii) have other contributors offer introductions from their professional networks to people working within the organizations with which we'd like to partner. Basically, help the Mozilla community build our institutional partnerships the same way they help build our software.

Ideas for 5-minute tasks would be (i) submitting / e-mailing new funding opportunities to us, (ii) providing comments or feedback to help us prioritize, and (iii) making an introduction on our behalf to someone they know who has connections to the potential partner organization.

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: There's really only one metric: the obvious one. Where the conversation started is an indicator of whether this part of the strategy was successful.

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.