Project Process Flow:

This page describes how projects within Mozilla Drumbeat will evolve. The first part is public facing copy which had Drumbeat community members in mind as its audience. It explains how to create and how they should expect their project, to grow. The second part of the page repeats this "workflow" in greater detail and was written with Drumbeat organizers as the audience.

Public Copy

Understanding Mozilla Drumbeat!

The goal of of Mozilla Drumbeat is to help make the web better and more open. To achieve that goal, Mozilla is going to do what is has always done - find ways to help everyone who wants to participate and contribute. Consequently, the most important part of Mozilla Drumbeat is that anyone is allowed to start a project.

That said, projects that do well, attract more contributors and are tightly aligned with Mozilla's mission could find their conveners invited to the Drumbeat Festival taking place next summer in Amsterdam. The road to the Drumbeat Festival is simple – there are only three steps!

Step 1: Create a project

To create a project you need to fill out the “create a project” form. This means you will essentially need a project title, description, objective and if, you’d like, a video explaining your idea to others.

Once you have a project created you can invite friends or colleagues to come help you work on it.

Step 2: Complete the Project Profile

To become a featured project on the Drumbeat Website, your project must have a completed project profile. A completed profile demonstrates that your project has been thought through, has a leadership group driving it and has a community of people (large or small) contributing to it.

Step 3: Featured Projects

If your project has a completed profiles and is strongly aligned with the values and mission of Mozilla it may be selected by the Mozila Foundation to become a featured project. These projects will get featured on the Drumbeat home page and in community newsletters. This will give you access to more volunteers, enable you to raise money through donations and promote your project more effectively.

A handful of the more successful featured projects will have their organizers and contributors invited to the Mozilla Festival taking place in Amsterdam in the summer of 2010.

Assumptions

A. ‘'Promise: People, helping people, make the web better.

B. Tools: For Contributors

1. Effective project locator – open web “source forge”
2. Clear and concise asks

For Projects

1. ’’a web hub for your project’’
2. ’’ability to attract volunteers’’
3. ’’traffic, promotion and donations for featured projects’’

C. Bargain:

1. All projects get a fair shake at doing well
2. All projects align with Mozilla values/open web
3. Good projects will gain greater access to community members, web famous consultants, possibly Mozilla resources

Website Project Flow

A brief overview of the process is as follows:

Phase 1: Basic Project Setup =>
Phase 2: Complete Project Profile =>
Phase 3: Featured Project =>

Phase 1: Project Setup

In this phase, an idea is shared. It may or may not mature into a project.

Web based Actions:

• Click Submit a project and submit:
  • Title
  • Brief Description
  • Answer: How does this make the web better
  • Some tags
  • (Optional) Make a video pitching your idea to fellow drumbeaters

Mozilla/Drumbeat Actions

• none

Mozilla objectives:

• Low barrier to entry (Anyone should be allowed to write up an open web project).
• Get ideas out into the community
• Drive action by creating work spaces where project leads can start marshaling people & refining the idea

Project Objective:

• Exist
• have space to refine idea
• attract friends and colleagues to help shape idea

Questions:

• Is there a difference between drumbeats internal logic and the logic of the website
• Do we need capacity to host video locally? Do we enable people to embed youtube videos? Slidecasts? Or only links?
• Can you vote on projects that are not 100% scoped?
• Do we need to vet new challenges for alignment with Mozilla values? (or let voting, crowdsourcing take care of it?)

Phase 2: Working Project

Working projects are any project that has been created. They may be struggling, thriving or abandoned. But they exist.

Web based Actions:

• Project teams flesh out project profiles, including:
  • A clear, measurable outcome – be it an individual action or a new software program
  • A clear ask(s) of community members
  • Create project icon
  • Outline Alignment with Mozilla values/goals
  • A goal - with completion date (or a Amsterdam goal? A place in the project in which a final code sprint will complete the project?)
  • If an external organization - charitable number of strategy for handling donations
• Project team is making use of either the Drumbeat provided tool chest or is using some external tools (Github, googledocs, etc...)
• The Team is setting timelines/to do's/milestones/thermostat
• Project has some capacity to update its drumbeat project page about progress (e.g. notes from the project leader, a twitter feed, etc...)

• note to Drumbeat web developers. It would be nice to have a twitter or facebook update status bar on a project page where progress could be "tweeted" and recent progress "tweets" could be surveyed. This would allow newbies to see recent progress and might provide a metric/insight into how active a project is. (Alternatively, a project could just have a hashtag and all tagged tweets could be syndicated into the project page).

Mozilla/Drumbeat Actions

• none

Mozilla Objectives:

• Use the community to identify and separate viable from non-viable projects
• ?

Project Objectives:

• Create a nascent community
• Refine, scope and narrow the project's goals

Questions:

• In SpreadFirefox there are 'invite only' groups - should drumbeat have private groups? (My sense is yes)
• Should group leaders be able to cap the size of a project (# of participants)?
• Should a geographic descriptor be part of a challenge/project?
• Is not in conflict with Mozilla too low a bar at this stage?
• Can a project become inactive?
• Should we assume that most of the ‘work’ on a project is going on elsewhere – be it github, a google group, or wherever.
• If ‘work’ on the project is going on elsewhere how do we best keep excitement/engagement in the drumbeat website? (Is this a concern?)

Step 3: Featured Projects

Featured Projects are vibrant projects that are aligned with Mozilla values & goals. These projects will get featured on the Drumbeat home page and in community newsletters.

Web Based Actions

• update drumbeat project page regularly
  • Public copy for Drumbeat Homepage completed, including:
    • Short Project Description
    • Three Simple “asks”
    • The Problem, Solution, Challenge Statements
    • Project Icon/Logo (if not already in existence)

Additional Note: One key driver of success at this stage will be the ability of the project lead to ensure the Drumbeat project page is updated regarding progress (All the more essential of the project 'work' is taking place on another service or site).

Mozilla/Drumbeat Actions

• Assess if a project should become a featured project by looking at:
  • community of collaborators
  • Fleshed out project profile
  • Some meaningful demonstration of progress
  • Is there project leadership (someone or a group, driving decisions)
  • Alignment with Mozilla values

• Featured projects are those towards which Mozilla Drumbeat Staff will offer some limited support. Including:
  • Working with the project leader to help develop a fund-raising strategy
  • Bring in experienced Mozilla resources and Web Celebrities to provide advice on project specific challenges
  • Higher rotation as a featured project on the Drumbeat homepage
  • Have Mozilla staff on hand to answer project specific questions via email or phone

Mozilla Objectives:

• Identify projects that are most closely aligned with Mozilla's values & goals
• Identify projects that are likely to be successful & need support
• Leverage Mozilla brand and encourage community members to contribute

Project Objectives:

• Achieving project goals & product
• Growing the community of contributors
• Keep Drumbeat community abreast of progress/successes

People

Overview'

Drumbeat community members should be recognized by their peers, by organizers and by observers for contributions to drumbeat projects.

The path of participation could look something like this:

Step 1: Observer

Step 2: Member

Step 3: Contributor

Step 4: Peer recognized

Step 5: Festival invitee

Step 6: Expensed Festival invitee

Member

Similar to the Spread Firefox website people who wish to ‘join’ the community need to register (which should – in my mind, actually port over the members of the Spread Firefox website and send them all an email inviting them to Drumbeat).

Create a profile General user – creates a profile. See above regarding SpreadFirefox process and import user list.

Some thoughts on the profile:

• Should require minimal input (people do not want to create another facebook profile
• link in with OpenID?
• Users should be allowed to "tag" themselves by geography and skill set (but that's about it)
• Ideally all other info would be tracked - number of votes, comments, projects created, projects joined, project progress (step) etc... - which would impact their karma

Contributor

Below is a list of different possible ways to contribute - the goal is to give people with a variety of skill sets an opportunity to be recognized and earn an invite to the Drumbeat Festival.

Bongo Wrangler: (Project leads)

• karma could be assigned based on how "high" a project progresses (step 1-5)
• karma could also be assigned for completing a project (no matter how small)
• karma could also be assigned based on the number of people involved in the project
• A Bongo Wrangler's path to fame probably maps against the project path - a successful or more advanced project makes one more "famous" within the Drumbeat community.

Base Drummer: (Project contributors)

• People who aren't project leads but who contribute significantly to one or a few projects
• unclear how this karma could be measured (especially if work takes place off the drumbeat website
• Base drummers will be hard to automatically track. Drumbeat organizers will likely have to rely on recommendations from Project Leads and community members for nominations of people who are making significant and repeated contributions.

Highhat Ninja: (specialist contributors)

• People with a specific talent who contribute to numerous projects
• Karma could be assigned based on frequency and value of contribution (again - how does one measure?)
• Highhat Ninja's will be hard to automatically track. Drumbeat organizers will likely have to rely on recommendations from Project Leads and community members for nominations of people who are making an important contribution.

Hosts: (?) (facilitators)

• people willing to do Q&A, manage info wikis and try to help people find projects
• karma could be accrued based on number of questions answered (perhaps on a get satisfaction page?)
• Drumbeat organizers will probably be most familiar with this group.
• Is having different types of contributors too complicated?

Peer Recognized

Once a contributor has been recognized by their peers for their contributions their profile would then move into the queue to be highlighted on the drumbeat home page.

This would increase their fame within the community and might cause others to step forward and recognize their contributions - further increasing their karma.

Question:

• If we wanted people to have more robust profiles - this might be the point where we prompt them for it. The nice thing about this, is that they only get asked to fill in a profile piece when it becomes relevant (and has a personal benefit to them).

Festival Invitee

Contributors who have been recognized by the community may also be invited to the Drumbeat festival.

Again, an advantage of having different types of contributors is that a mix of people may be invited - not simply project leaders or coders.

It might be interesting to say that Festival Invitee's must be peer recognized AND satisfy some other criteria. These may include: Critical:

• Geographic distribution?
• Project distribution?

Non-Essential but worth considering?:

• Participation on at least two projects

Expensed Invitee

Finally, a select group of contributors will be invited and have their expenses paid for the Drumbeat Festival. This group will need to satisfy several criteria:

• peer recognition
• essential to their project
• alignment with Mozilla values & goals
• geographic distribution

Other Questions:

• Should projects be sortable by geography? by number of participants?
• How is a member to gauge the 'activity' level of a group if many of its actions are taking place on another site?
• Does asking the community to track good contributors create a level of overhead and management that is too great?

Web Celebrity

Web celebrities sit outside the drumbeat people and project process. If they can be coaxed into participating in Step 5 (or even 4) projects that will be a bonus. The main goal of Web Celebrities is to have them offer coaching, advice and support to projects at the Drumbeat festival.

Web Celebrities will need to be managed to ensure their involvement:

• Ushered around Drumbeat website by a MoFo sherpa
• Sherpa can point the celebrity to specific project that could use their advice

Questions/Thoughts:

• A relationship handoff between the person who knows the web celebrity and the sherpa will need to happen at some point

Old notes deaves did not want to purge:

• Why: One sentence on why you care about this project (include?)
• Member Request: What is the ‘ask’ being made? (e.g. help me scope this idea out, come to this website, etc...)

Has demonstrated uptake by the community? (Spread firefox actually does not have voting – it simply has community size as a proxy for popularity)

To continue to be successful a Drumbeat Project must demonstrate that it has been thought through, that there are people interested in driving it and that there is a community of people (however small) interested in contributing to it.