On 11/27/2013 05:52 AM, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
About the goal: we're approaching it the wrong way. It seems like
we're saying we want a million people, so we need to define how we
measure that goal, and go get some people and find work for them. This
is dangerously backwards. If we want a million people, it's because we
already know that we've got a million people's worth of work to do.
It's clear that we're never going to get anywhere close to a million
people writing code for all of our current projects and products put
together: Brook's law makes that basically impossible, even if we had
a million able volunteers. So we need to start out deciding why we
think we need a million Mozillians, what projects could actually use
more help and what kind of help they need, and only then set the
measurable goals for each project. Maybe that means radically growing
the webmaker movement, which can probably scale to that size quite
well. Maybe that means we need more projects, or we need to redesign
the participation opportunities in existing projects. But we
absolutely be starting out with by figuring out what we're trying to
accomplish, how many people we need to accomplish each thing, and then
figuring out whether that means 10 thousand mozillians or 10 million.
I propose that we stop trying to define Mozillian, and return to the
project defining contribution pathways and commitment/responsibility
"levels" for each part of the project.
Yes, this. I've been vaguely uneasy about these threads but haven't had
a chance to sit down and understand why. I think Bsmedberg just
clarified it well. We've had a lot of community discussion and talk, but
I see many teams trying to build community and not starting with the
basics of what it is they want to accomplish, how to bring contributors
online to accomplish those goals, and building the systems for how to
ensure that those contributors have a clear path of increasing
participation and responsibility. And I think the quantification to
understand whether you are hitting your project's community goals have
to be tied to those in-project systems and not to some giant
over-reaching definition that is never going to be specific enough to be
useful to a given project.
Clint
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