Contribute/Documentation
Steward
Janet Swisher
Identify Community
Q: Can you identify all of the contributors on your team (both paid-staff and volunteer-staff)?
A:
Suggestion: Use the mozillians.org contributor directory to help. Communicate through your team's channels and encourage people to sign up and group themselves with a common team tag.
Define Contribution Opportunities
Q: Can you point someone interested in contributing to your project to a list of available contribution opportunities?
A:
Suggestion: Look at what your team's needs are and what gaps you have in staffing to come up with a list of contribution opportunities. Capture those on a wiki page, in bugs, as role descriptions in Jobvite or whatever makes sense for your community.
Map Contribution Paths
Q: Are there clearly understood steps someone can follow to go from knowing nothing about your project to successfully contributing?
A:
Note: If you're interested in contributing to end-user documentation for Firefox, look under the Support area.
- Create an account on MDN. Don't use a valuable password, because it will be emailed to you (platform limitation, sorry!).
- See How to help and Getting started for starting points.
- Edit articles that need help. Look for tags like NeedsTechnicalReview or NeedsExample. Once the page is fixed, remove the tag.
- Join the dev-mdc forum (as a mailing list, Usenet group or Google group) for news and announcements, and drop into the #devmo channel on irc.mozilla.org for real-time help.
Establish Goals and Metrics
Q: What goals does your team have for bringing in new contributors and how can you measure if you are successful?
A:
Suggestion: Write down what you think would be helpful to track even if it isn't possible to get that data today. We'll work on implementing dashboards when we know what data we want.