Comments on: Connecting with contributors everywhere

By: OSCON Report – Mozilla Reps, Mayors, Community and Change | Pogovor

OSCON Report – Mozilla Reps, Mayors, Community and Change | Pogovor — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 12:27:28 +0000

[...] contributors can more easily become involved via the Mozilla Web pages. One of these efforts is connecting with people all over the world by filtering potential contributors to their local Mozilla [...]

By: A Brief History of the Are We Growing Yet Dashboard « davidwboswell

A Brief History of the Are We Growing Yet Dashboard « davidwboswell — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 16:54:59 +0000

[...] the next few weeks, we’ll be launching the very first localized version of the Get Involved page and I think we’ll see another rise in activity as we give people a way to find out how to [...]

By: davidwboswell

davidwboswell — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 15:32:41 +0000

Tomer, thanks for your comments. You raise some good points.

I agree that we could be making it more clear that you don’t have to be an expert and there are all sorts of ways to contribute. I’ve been wanting to do some A/B tests of the Get Involved page to figure out the best messages to use and it would be great if you wanted to help figure out what to try out.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=748500

I also agree with you about the potential of using wizards to help get people connected to the right opportunities. I think we can improve the form on the Get Involved page (see tracking bug for ideas) and also have other tools that can help with this, like Josh’s whatcanidoformozilla.org.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=685675

David

By: Tomer Cohen

Tomer Cohen — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 22:11:50 +0000

Most of the times I ask people if they want to join us, or they are coming to me, we lost them because we don’t let them feel that we want them and how we can use their knowledge efficiently.

If a person is an high school student or even less, and doesn’t have good programming knowledge, they feel that they are worth nothing to us. Sometimes we can tell them that we need localizers, but not everyone have good enough knowledge in English or even their native language to supply good enough translations, and if they know it in advance they won’t even bother to ask if we need some help.

In order to use people more efficiently, we need to know what they know best and what are the most interesting position we can have for them. You see, people won’t contribute if they don’t find it fun enough, and most of them think that a “a company who creates browsers” doesn’t need people who are good in graphics, for example, and if they don’t have professional degree in that subject, they think they worth nothing to us, which is wrong, and we can find a use for everyone, even if they are in the age of our parents or grandparents and they like the Mozilla principals, we have a space for them.

I think we don’t need just to connect new contributers with others based on a common language or a geographical region. Someone who good in working with kids might be useful the WebMakers project even without direct contact with their neighbors who already part of Mozilla. We need a more comprehensive webpage, wizard style, who would help us map the abilities of everyone and help them connect with already established teams who have something in common, as well as others who need help from a person who have the abilities they are missing.