Contribute/Web Engineering/2014-09-09

WebDev Web Engineering Community Building

9 September 2014 - First Meeting

Let's get oriented!

I'm here to help you generate ideas for community building and to help you implement them.

A model of community building is documented here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Lifecycle

Some guiding questions:

• Scope of projects?
  • crash reporter  <-- this is the primary one.
  • l10n tools: elmo (dashbord), rhelmer lead for l10n tools
  • misc tiny projects (doctor, bonzai)
  • air mozilla; peterbe lead
  • bouncer (figures out where to download ff from)
  • phonebook
• What's does the community look like now?
  • trying to figure this out
  • internal focus of tools limits interest from outside contributors
  • documentation edits, small changes to deploy scripts, most work contributed are done at beginning with system is setup (socorro)
  • developers who would like to contribute but it's so hard to setup so by the time they are done, they don't have any energy for contributing (socorro)
  • an intern has been setting up a proper package (socorro)
  • most contributors doing work on the clock, don't work on things on volunteer basis
  • external companies are thinking about either paying Mozilla or paying contributors to work on projects (as contractors)
  • debate around whether or not product should be mozilla-agnostic so as to be friendlier to outside use and contributors
    
    
• How do folks get involved?
  • https://github.com/mozilla/socorro/blob/master/README.md
  • docs: http://socorro.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
  • active community steward: rhelmer
  • mailing list: https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/tools-socorro
  • wiki page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Socorro
  • irc channel (irc://irc.mozilla.org/#breakpad)
  • should be listed in whatcanIdofor mozilla https://github.com/jdm/asknot/blob/master/index.html#L376 -- mediawiki, 
  • 
    
    • 
      
• What do you feel are the greatest pain points or areas to improve?
  • one: acquiring contributors
  • two: retaining them
    • someone will come to the community and be really, really active for a week and then never come back, don't know why
    • in general, pretty responsive to pull requests, questions, etc.
• What do you want to accomplish this year?
  • settle the corp community debate. are we project or product? <-- this.
  • answering this would settle questions we have about how much time should be dedicating to community. etc. 
  • stakeholders in that decision: module ownership
  • having it be easier to install and update, then will drive contribution
  • frequency of updates might also scare off contributors
  • 
    
    
    

contribute.json (https://github.com/mozilla/contribute.json) standard for indicating how to contribute. root in web property that contains structured, machine-readable json file that has info for documentation, requirements, etc. goal is to be able to automate processes based on this file.


== Action Items ==