Contribute

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If you'd like to volunteer for Mozilla, please visit our Get Involved page or consider becoming a Mozilla rep. This page is for Mozillians who want to help more people contribute to the project.

	Contribute Wiki
	Owner: Community Building Team	Updated: Frequently
	Whether you've been building a community for a long time or you are just getting started, these pages will help you find the information you are looking for to build vibrant, supportive communities that will have impact on your project.

I want to build a community around my project!

We're here to help. Learn more about all of the resources that are available.

I want to help create shared participation resources!

Learn more about how you can join a Working Group to collaborate with other community builders.

How to get started and find resources

There are a number of resources available to help you build a community around your project. The Community Building Team is also here to help you make use of these resources and to create additional resources that are needed by teams across the project.

The Contributor Lifecycle

Each project can fit into a contributor lifecycle, and onboarding volunteers begins by making contact with the CBT team.

• The contributor lifecycle page can tell you more about the process, from starting to sustaining.
• David Boswell's blog post from November 2013 details some resources relating to the contributor lifecycle

The four steps of the contributor lifecycle are:

1. Starting Your project doesn't have volunteers yet and you're interested in building a community around what you're doing. 2. Learning You're in charge of community management/engagement for your group. You're the person volunteers always seem to come to.

3. Scaling You have volunteers involved in your project and you'd like to turn up the dial on participation. 4. Sustaining You have a healthy and active community and you're interested in keeping that momentum and retaining your key contributors.

Starting: Communication Channels

A great place to get started is to join one of these communication channels where other people involved with community building are available to help. Feel free to join one of the following and introduce yourself.

• Grow Mozilla discussions every other Thursday at 10 am pacific
• Community Building mailing list
• #cbt IRC channel
• Community Building Meetups

Learning: Examples and guides for successful community builidng

Finding a pathway to increase volunteer contribution can sometimes be the most difficult step. We want to make the contribution lifecycle easy to understand using best practices for pathway finding.

• Margaret Leibovic explains the five steps her team utilized to onboard volunteers
• Just say yes to contributors is a special on Air Mozilla about contributor onboarding
• SUMO has an amazing contributor process that is worth considering when building processes!
• Nukeador's blog posts on organizing a Mozilla community
• A site search of "community building" or "I am a Mozillian" on Planet Mozilla can also provide important community links

Learning: Workshops

We have created some workshops that will help you walk through the process of designing your project for participation. These are available in a variety of formats to fit with your needs—you can interact with this through a series of short videos or you can set up an exercise for your whole team to work through this content together.

• Designing projects for participation
• Identifying contributors
• Metrics for growth

Scaling: Dashboards

Getting visibility into the growth and health of our communities is vital to bringing more volunteers into Mozilla and to have all contributors working to support Mozilla's goals. We are building dashboards to give us this insight.

• List of contribution dashboards

Frequently Asked Questions

We've compiled a list of some common questions about getting started with community building that may address some of the questions you have.

• How will volunteers reduce my workload instead of add to it?
• What skills do volunteers have?
• How can I rely on volunteers to do things I need to get done?
• How does adding volunteers compare with adding employees, interns, or contractors?
• How long will volunteers stay involved?
• Does my team need a full time community builder? If not, would it be useful to have someone spend part of their time on community building?
• Are there ways for me to learn more about volunteer management and community building?
• Can you define some of the crazy language you use? Can I define it, too?

Other resources

Here are a list of links to other useful resources.

• Contributions Madlibs template (hit Remix to make your own)
• Videos created by community builders for community builders
• Articles and books recommended by community builders
• Mozilla offers a free subscription to Safari Books to contributors Safari Books is a digital library that includes books on a wide rage of technical and professional development needs, video content, short form content and evolving manuscripts. If you want to gain access to this service, please follow the steps on this page.

Working Groups

Working groups are where we create the participation resources that teams use to build communities. Each working group includes stakeholders from across the project that are interested in collaborating on a specific topic. Please feel free to join a group to help us build the resources you need.

Pathways

Description: This group is focused on contribution pathways for functional and regional areas as a way to identify, qualify and onboard new volunteers.

Main Page: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Pathways

Meetings and how to join: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Pathways/meetings

Meeting times and dates: | Pathways meets every other Thursday at 19:00 UTC

Discussion Forum: Discussions are held on Discourse #pathwaysworkinggroup or on the CBT email listserv.

Leadership: Co-leads of the Pathways Working Group are Larissa Shapiro and Rubén Martín

Systems and Data

Description: This group is focused on systems and data that are needed to handle the volume of potential volunteers and to provide visibility into the operations of contribution pathways.

Main Page: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Systems

Discussion Forum: Coming soon

Meetings: Systems meets on Fridays at 20:00 UTC

I want to join this meeting!

Education and Culture

Description: This group is focused on capturing and spreading information about how volunteering works and how all Mozillians can acquire new skills to have a deeper impact on the project.

Main Page: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Culture

Meetings:

• Every other Friday at 17:00 UTC / 9:00 PT
• Vidyo room CBT Culture (direct room link to come)
• Meeting calendar: ics | html

Discussion Forum:

• cbt-education@lists.mozilla.org
• subscription page (subscribe via email)
• google groups page
• archives
• newsgroup

Recognition

Description: This group is focused on how to recognize volunteers for their contributions in order to deepen and extend relationships.

Main Page: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Recognition

Meetings: Tuesdays at 16:00 UTC

Discussion Forum: Coming soon

Research

Description: This group is currently researching the following central questions:

• How are people (new volunteers) finding us?
• New volunteers' motivations: What do new volunteers believe their involvement with Mozilla might include?
• Staff expectations: What do staff members believe their roles are in contributor interactions?

Main Page: https://openbadges.etherpad.mozilla.org/get-involved-process

Blog Posts:

• What Motivates a Million?
• Getting to Know 1,000,000

Filter: [research] -- please add this to the subject line of any emails about this working group that you send to the community building list to help people filter discussions.

Research doesn't have a regularly scheduled meeting, but feel free to reach out on the list if you want to be involved.

Discussion Forum: Coming soon

Events

Description: This group is focused at collecting best practices for how to run effective events that help connect people to Mozilla contribution opportunities.

Main Page: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Events

Meetings: Coming soon

Discussion Forum: Coming soon