Drumbeat/Bongo/Notes

Mozilla Bongo: Online community and campaigns component of Drumbeat

these are development notes for Bongo. Content is still a work in progress

What is it?

A part of Mozilla Drumbeat, Bongo is an online community for people who want to promote, protect and improve the web as a global public resource. It serves two primary purposes -- helping people organize local Drumbeat community events and acting as a hub for Drumbeat online campaigns. It is the core online hub where Mozilla Drumbeat work happens.

Why do we need it? (goals)

Drumbeat needs a space where people participating can connect with each other and facilitate participation in Drumbeat campaigns. It must include:

• A way for people who just want to be 'informed' to get involved.
  • Happens through a series of enewsletters.
• A place for people participating in Drumbeat to find each other and to organize local events.
• Launchpad and tool set for running online campaigns.
  • Including ability for community members to start, track, measure and promote their own campaigns in decentralized way.
• Place where new community members can come to get involved.
• Method to communicate on large scale to people participating in Drumbeat.
• Tools for fundraising that include "how to" guides for local campaign events as well as a FAQ on holding a Drumbeat event (like personal event pages that can track individual or group efforts - may be a module available in CiviCRM)

How will it work?

• As an engagement ladder with how we touch them depends on their level of engagement – An easy place to start is with an e-mail newsletter with really simple, basic advice with a soft level interaction
• A person joins the Drumbeat community, they can identify/connect themselves in a variety of ways (geographically, area of interest, etc) to get information sent to their Drumbeat homepage on campaigns or events that are relevant to what they've chosen (some content would be Drumbeat-wide and would be sent to all homepages regardless of area of interest indicated).
• People can sign up for campaigns, register their own events (to get things like swag, etc), create personal fundraising pages, etc.
• The system would be set up to encourage sharing/reporting of campaigns/events through photos, tweets, etc - this could be aggregated into some cool visualization that would reward people for participating
• As people participate more they could earn reputation within the CRM and get increased access/responsibility within it (The idea of rewarding participation is positive, but there may be problems in creating something exclusive -- Note: Creative Collective is doing something like this with badges so we can see how that is working)

Community

• Organize meetups and local events
• Aggregate and push out content from local events and global campaigns
  • Blogs, tweets, photos -- a dashboard and visualization of what's going on and what's happened in the past
• Connect w/ people of similar interests, but not your locality
• Collaborate on content creation including presentations for use at local level
• Find and contact people of similar interests
• Get support for local events and campaigns, including swag

Campaigns

• Host campaigns where people can go through a set of action steps
  • Do this flexibly / simple CMS to allow quick deployment
  • Include ability for people to organize simple campaigns on own, in decentralized way
• Invite people who have taken actions to join the community
  • ... or at least to indicate if they'd like Mozilla to contact about future campaigns
• Communicate with people on large scale - email, twitter, facebook, etc.
  • Make sure people who want to know about campaigns find out
• Give people opportunity to donate to Drumbeat as part of their actions

Who will use it?

• Anyone who wants to learn about the open web / casual Drumbeaters -> enewsletter
• Core Drumbeat community organizers
• Local Drumbeat leads and active community members
• Anyone participating in a Drumbeat campaign

Tools

Mapping out tools already available inside and outside of the Mozilla community will help us answer the question of how much Bongo is about threading together existing infrastructure (a shallow hub model) versus creating new tools (a deep webapp model).

• NationBuilder -- priority tracking and organizing tool

• content based on level of engagement: informational engagement, action-oriented engagement, organizer engagement
  • different tools to engage: e-mail, blog, RSS, mailchimp, CiviMail, etc

• Editorial direction to for the newletters
  • calling public benefit content out of the blogs, etc and putting that in the newsletter
  • do we need an editorial board or something like that if we're generating content on our own?

• Other social networks
  • If we are using them how much of the campaign activity happen on the network and how much do we move off and if so, where to and what does that look like?

• Better metrics tracking
  • Need to be able to track things like unique visitors, completed transactions, people signing up, etc.

• Social bookmarking/sharing

• Mozillians/CiviCRM

• What are the tools that the organic groups would use and it is up to us to create them for them or it better left to them?

Questions

• Is Bongo a place, or a strategy?
  • Bongo is primarily a strategy, but have to have a place where it's activities can be shared, executed and celebrated
  • Using the e-mail, blog, idea we would pepper our sites with opportunities to sign up
• How does Bongo relate to other Mozilla sites?
• Is Bongo the same as Mozillians.org?
  • Bongo should be connected to Mozillians.org, as an additional feature that people can opt in to. People are not going to register/connect with two Mozilla "social networks." Not only is it a waste of their time to ask them to go to two places (and very unlikely for them to do so), but it makes us look like the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
• How much can we simply thread together existing infrastructure on the net?
  • Perhaps a conversation with Trellon/CiviCRM to help map this out.
  • Threading together existing resources that people are already using (such as meetup.com) could ramp things up much more quickly than creating parallel resources and getting people to change their processes.