TL;DR

Guide on helping brand new contributors find first tasks and match their skills/interests to projects/teams.

Vocabulary

• Contribution area: An area of the Mozilla project open to contribution
• Pathway: A set of steps for building skills and responsibility in a contribution area.
• Guide: A person who helps a potential contributor find the contribution area that's right for them and start them along that area's pathway
• Manual: A document which a Guide uses to help match a contributor up with a contribution area
• Choose Your Own Adventure: A set of books in which the reader is the protagonist.

Guides

• Need to know the contribution areas
• Need to know the pathway entry points for each contribution area
• Need to be know how to use the Manual as a tool
• Need training?

Manual

• Lists contribution areas, and for each...
  • Keywords
  • Skills
  • Contacts
  • Pathway entry points
  • Passive communication channels
  • Inter/active communication channels
• Model user types with "I want to..."
  • "I want to write code in <language>."
  • "I want to find a way to help but I don't know what and I have no skills."
  • "I want to add a feature to Firefox."
• How to turn ambiguity into contributions
  • "I want to know when Firefox OS is available in my country."
  • "I want to get some stickers to give out at my school."
  • "I use Chrome and I think Firefox tabs look like poop."

Accepting a Guide - Steps

• Send Acceptance Letter.
• Accept to Guides Mozillian, and promote to moderator on Discourse.

Discourse Functional Area Setup

• Create '<functional area> Guide Introductions!' Topic, and pin it.
• Create '<function area> FAQ ' Topic, and pin it.

Project

• Supports CBT Pathways goal #3 - Support brand new contributors and the projects they join by building a community of mentors and a system to support them.
• Stakeholders/dependencies
  • Contribution area experts
  • Bedrock team - and decisions about Get Involved page.

Roadmap

• Thursday, August 21, 2014
  • This wiki page.
  • Outline of what we want in the wiki.
  • Definition of what it means to be a helper/guide.
• End Q3
  • Reach out to all contribution areas
  • Fully document one contribution area
• End Q4
  • Program description is complete
  • All contribution areas are documented
  • 1-2 first contributions per "bucket" are well documented
  • How to add more areas and tasks
• End of 2014
  • Documentation for the guides for 2-3 starter tasks for each of the eight areas of Get Involved.
• End of 2015
  • Human guides have been replaced by a bot written in Inform7 that converses with contributors and shepherds them into the right contribution area pathway.