Thanks to everyone for the feedback and suggested edits. To provide more clarity on the goal of this document, my goal is to allow us to scale the community by making implicit information explicit. The Get Involved page is one good spot to communicate with new contributors and we should look at others (perhaps we invite people to an onboarding portal after they've earned their first badge?)
The need for us to be clear about norms, rules, expectations, etc. keeps going up as the size of the community goes up. I feel strongly that there are limits to growth if we rely only on informal methods to share tacit information. I've been reaching out to people involved with other large volunteer communities to learn more about best practices and it has been fascinating. For instance, I've made friends with someone at the Red Cross and she's amazed at how far we've managed to come without documenting and providing some basic information to new community members. For comparison, the Red Cross has millions of volunteers and they've found it useful to document many aspects of what it means to be involved in Red Cross activites. You can see an example of a 50-page handbook for new volunteers from a Red Cross chapter in Connecticut at: http://www.redcross.org/images/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m20164344_volunteer_handbook_1_30_13_rev__2013_08_14_sm.pdf I'm not suggesting we go to that length, but there are things that new contributors would find useful. Part of that information includes the fact that there are legal entities in the Mozilla community that new contributors will be interacting with and there are rules that those organizations need to follow. For next steps, I do agree that we should take a look again at the tone and make it more welcoming and also change language that makes this seem like it is a signed document. I'll post an updated version of this soon. Thanks, David _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
