One of Mozilla’s goals for 2014 is to grow the number of active contributors by 10x. For the first half of the year, the Community Building team has been supporting other teams as they connect more new contributors to their projects.
Everyone on the team recently blogged about their experience supporting projects. The stories below show different stages in the lifecycle of communities and show how we’re helping projects progress through the phases of starting, learning, scaling and then sustaining communities.
- Mozilla Location Services – A story of intentionality and growth
- Spaces and Community Building
- The Web We Want is Private: Building a global community of Privacy Contributors and Advocates through Mozilla
- Meet them where they are, not where you want them to be
- Driving Project-wide Community Growth by Improving the Mozilla Wiki
- about:Mozilla: more than just a newsletter
We’ve learned a lot from these experiences that will help us complete the goal in the second half of the year. For example, the Geolocation pilot event in Bangalore will be a template for more events that will connect more people to the Location Services project.
These are just a few of the stories of community building though. There are many other blog posts to check out and even a video Dia made about how contributors made the Web We Want video available in 29 different languages.
I’d love to hear what you’ve been doing to connect with more contributors and to hear about what you’ve learned. Feel free to leave links to your stories in the comments below.
davidwboswell 
As part of the Firefox 29 celebration, the Swedish Mozilla community hosted a public face painting event where we reached out to future potential Firefox users and Mozilla contributors.
This was a way for target a audience who do not typically attend techevents but the general public.
What we noticed was that Firefox is a widely recognized and loved brand but the general public don’t necessarily associate the logo with the browser or Mozilla. Once we began to spoke about Mozilla our mission and goals people become very positive and in some cases interested and yeah the children loved the face paintings, pictures from the event are available [1]
Without taking to much pride I must that the event was a huge success and would love to do similar events in the future and aslo think it would be good if Mozilla could do this type of outreached events in a casual setting.
1 http://500px.com/oliverpropst/sets/latest_firefox_celebration
Oliver — thanks for sharing. Sounds like it was a great event and the pictures look great too 🙂