Websites/Mozilla.org/Archive/Contribute/Feedback

How to facilitate the way people get involved with the Mozilla project

URL: http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/

comments from audience members: Ideas on how to improve this page: Copy:

• text here is too dense; too many options are presented, it is overwhelming
• Janet: Phrase as actions/verbs
• Jane: Show options by skills e.g. I speak another language, I can code, I like to X etc...
• Only show 3-5 options to segment skills / interests, then show more options as selections are made
• Dave Eaves: Segment page by people + skills.
• Get Involved --> Do you want to help? Also, might sound like it requires a commitment
• Add language or country to put people in touch with local community members.

• Marcia: suggested http://www.meetup.com/everywhere/

• Why don't we call it MozCafe or something and use a simple page for scheduling events. Another website will be confusing: Bogo

• We should keep in mind that this isn't necessarily the page that a user will find if they want to volunteer. For instance, they may instead really like a particular project and post a message on a forum--but if that message never gets responded to, they may assume that their contributions aren't wanted and leave (similar to David Eaves' story of how his first bug was immediately responded to with a comment of "this is a dup").

• One idea: a "welcome wagon" community/team that is notified of new community members--e.g. someone's first bug on bugzilla or their first forum post on AMO--and reaches out to them and greets them, potentially even mentors them, etc. at an implementation level, we can implement this w/ mozilla pulse: http://pulse.mozilla.org/ This could even be combined w/ a badg e/leadership ladder type system to provide incentives for greeting peeps.

• The form on the contribute page gets tons of submissions but we're simply overloaded w/ emails. we need to pull a group of people behind it to respond to the emails. while mitchell baker says that every mozilla community member (including employees) is responsible for being a community organizer, this is hard to achieve in practice.

• Dmose: Approach people with volunteering/contributing when we give them something of value.

• David Eaves: a lot of the words in the contribute page scare him; it would be much better to ask "what kind of person are you? are you a casual browser? do you fix the VCR at home?" etc. to segment people, at which point we can offer specific things to allow folks to volunteer.

• Marcia Knous: use "meetup everwhere", a website, to have moz meetups where people help each other out at a local level.

• David Boswell: We should mine the 8 months of data we have on ... some site.
• David Eaves and Atul Varma: we could actually do stuff on the client-side to do segmentation and figure out what kinds of volunteer opportunities you might be interested in. For instance, a "Volunteer" option in the "Help" menu could mine their browsing history, installed add-ons, etc. and suggest things they could be interested in doing.

• David Eaves: lots of orgs design their volunteer opps based on their internal structure rather than what makes sense to potential volunteers. for instance, we may think it makes perfect sense for QA/Tools and Drumbeat to be separate, but a potential volunteer may not think so at all.

• Mozilla could reaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllyyyy use a volunteer coordinator.

mailing list: contribute@mozilla.org irc: #siteplanning

Localization:

• 1st impression - the page in your language
• For some of these "tasks", contributor "should" understand English to help (like create patch, you have to communicate with others on Bugzilla.)
• Some local community has their own tasks (say, help on local events?)

• Bob: Would like to know if any local community has their own Get Involved page, and what's the concern when create the pages.
• MozTW: http://moztw.org/contribute/ -- we didn't think too much on this actually :/ just list the tasks which need help, and have people join the general discussion if they what to help but don't know what/how to do. Can't say "works well" but it actually bring some new friends join the community.