“I am a sound designer and musical composer and I could help create some cool sound designs for your projects.” — from message posted on Get Involved page

Are you interested in helping people get involved with Mozilla, like this person who wants to help contribute in a way where we haven’t traditionally had volunteers? Then join us to discuss community building at Mozilla.

• Meeting time: Thursday, May 31 at 10:00 AM Pacific
• Topics: Community building with Mozilla Spaces and localizing Get Involved page
• Video: David Boswell’s vidyo room (link for guest access is on agenda)
• Audio: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 9634#
• Room: Get to do Choppa in Mountain View 3rd floor
• Back channel: irc.mozilla.org#mozillians

If you have a question you’d like to ask the group, please feel free to edit the agenda on the wiki.

We were originally thinking of this as a way to reach out to webdev volunteers, but it became clear that there are many others ways to contribute to a page including translating, designing, writing and testing.

Inviting people to participate on every page could be very powerful. Many people don’t know they can contribute to Mozilla so they wouldn’t think to look for our Get Involved page.

We’ll be able to use the Get Involved dashboard that the Metrics team recently created to see if this help us connect with more potential volunteers. If so, we could look at adding this invitation to participate on every page of every site in the Mozilla universe.

“I’m a professional product manager and if you need help I would be delighted to join.” — from message posted on Get Involved page

Are you interested in helping people get involved with Mozilla, like this person who wants to help with product management? Then join us to discuss community building at Mozilla.

• Meeting time: Thursday, May 17 at 10:00 AM Pacific
• Topics: Localizing Get Involved page and increasing community building skills with Mozilla Brain Builders
• Video: David Boswell’s vidyo room (link for guest access is on agenda)
• Audio: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 9634#
• Room: Get to do Choppa in Mountain View 3rd floor
• Back channel: irc.mozilla.org#mozillians

Note that the video and audio information has changed from previous meetings.

If you have a question you’d like to ask the group, please feel free to edit the agenda on the wiki.

If we can identify different steps people take to contribute to a project, we can look at each of those and see how many people take that step and move on to the next one. As an example, at the Coding Contribute Group we came up with this path for coding contributors.

I think this could be really powerful in a number of ways.

You can fix roadblocks. The Coding Stewards recently had Bugzilla send out email to anyone who had their first patch approved to help them figure out what to do next. We felt this might be a hurdle and with a conversion report we can see if this made moving to the next step easier.

You can identify superstar volunteers. I’ve color-coded this path to match with casual, active and core contributor levels. If you could identify every core volunteer in your project, you could invite them to work weeks, send them swag or ask them to help with new opportunities they may be interested in.

I imagine there would be many other ways to make use of this information to help us grow Mozilla. What would a contribution path look like for your project? What would you do to make contributing to your project easier with this information?

Hat tip to Jessilyn Davis for the idea for the Superstar Radar name.

“I’ve been using Firefox since it came out and nothing compares to it. That’s why I would be interested in testing new things you produce.” — from message posted on Get Involved page

Are you interested in helping people get involved with Mozilla, like this Firefox user who wants to help test our new products? Then join us for this week’s Grow Mozilla meeting.

• Meeting time: Thursday, May 3 at 10:00 AM Pacific
• Video: David Boswell’s vidyo room (link for guest access is on agenda)
• Audio: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 99296#
• Room: Get to do Choppa in Mountain View 3rd floor
• Back channel: irc.mozilla.org#mozillians

Note that the video and audio information has changed from previous meetings.

If you have a question you’d like to ask the group, please feel free to edit the agenda on the wiki.

“I’ve been using Firefox for about 7 years and have decided it’s finally time that I want to try and give back.” — from message posted on Get Involved page

Are you interested in helping people get involved with Mozilla, like this Firefox user who wants to find a way to contribute? Then join us for this week’s Grow Mozilla meeting.

• Meeting time: Thursday, April 19 at 10:00 AM Pacific
• Audio: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 634
• Room: Get to do Choppa in Mountain View 3rd floor (note this is a room change from earlier meetings)
• Back channel: irc.mozilla.org#mozillians

If you have a question you’d like to ask the group, please feel free to edit the agenda on the wiki.

You could do something similar for your own project by using the mediawiki-bugzilla extension and the mentored bug flag.

Take a look at the source for this wiki page to see how the mentored bugs are being called up and modify it to work for your own project.

“For several years now I have wanted to become a Mozilla software beta tester. I don’t know any computer programing language, but would still love to help.” — from message posted on Get Involved page

Are you interested in helping people get involved with Mozilla, like this person who wants to help with our testing efforts? Then join us for this week’s Contribute Group meeting.

• Meeting time: Thursday, March 22 at 10:00 AM Pacfic / 17:00 GMT
• Audio: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 634
• Room: ORLY in Mountain View 3rd floor (note this is a room change from earlier meetings)
• Back channel: irc.mozilla.org#mozillians

If you have a question you’d like to ask the group, please feel free to edit the agenda on the wiki.

Her talk was a mix of why we need to focus on community building and how we can do that. The why was straight-forward—we’re not going to win if we don’t bring in more people to work with us on our mission.

There were a couple of quotes that really stood out for me about how we can all help with community building.

“Each one of us should be the core of another one or two or three or five or ten or a hundred people. That means each one of us needs to look at what are the things we know how to do, do well, do comfortably. Can I train somebody else to do those?”

“As you are successful, the amount of stuff that comes in should be growing and you should be starting to feel uncomfortable. Like there are too many demands, there’s too much work, I can’t get it done. Too much work coming at you is a sign of success. The way to handle it though, especially at Mozilla where we have unlimited opportunity, is to take what you really understand well enough to explain and pass it on and empower other people to do things.”

I’ve been working recently on the redesign of the Get Involved page and it has highlighted for me that we really do have an unlimited opportunity. I see dozens a people every day who say they want to get involved and help us.

Helping those people is what excites me about Mozilla and I’m glad to be part of the Contributor Engagement team that exists to help all Mozillians achieve crazy and ambitious goals by bringing in volunteers to their teams.

To make it easier for people to work with us, we’ve rolled up everything we’re doing into one simple initiative we’re calling Grow Mozilla. This brings together the tools, channels and expertise from our team and from other parts of the project into one place.

If you’d like to talk to us about how to find volunteers for your team, come to our regular real life discussion forums or join our online discussion forum. We’ll also hold a Grow Mozilla brown bag soon.