> Frankly one reason we probably have more volunteers than the Red Cross is > because of the lack of formalities.
As Janet pointed out, the Red Cross has many more volunteers than Mozilla. Since we're intentionally growing the size of our community to approach the size of their volunteer base and since we have a range of contribution opportunities that go beyond coding, I think the Red Cross is a more useful model for us to be looking at than open source projects. Mozilla certainly started with a focus on producing open source code and we still create open source code to advance the mission, but we've grown beyond being 'just' an open source project -- we're a global volunteer-based mission-driven project and organization. This evolution in the project is why we're having this discussion about a volunteer agreement now. There was a time when the growth and health of the community happened organically without support from any organization and we're now moving into having Mozilla invest in a more intentional, systematic way to connect people to the project and keep them involved. I'm very excited that we're moving into a place where we're being more intentional and there will be great things about this -- see the recent community Town Hall for more details. One of the things we need to be intentional about now is making sure that potential new volunteers have a basic understanding of how Mozilla operates and that they know about the rules that exist. And we want to be able to make sure potential new volunteers have seen that information and we're all on the same page. > With Mozilla, it can be unclear when someone's connection and participation > with Mozilla crosses the line into volunteering. We need to clearly define > what set of people or activities this applies to. We're doing the work now to be very clear about when someone crosses a threshold into becoming a volunteer. You can see how we're documenting active contributor levels for every part of the organization at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute/Areas#SmartSheet_version The audience for this proposed new volunteer agreement is people who are about to become active contributors. The Get Involved page is the place where we can reach those people as they set out on the contribution pathways we're building for the different parts of the project. We've compared this document to other similar documents in other volunteer based organizations and it seems very friendly and light weight to me (compare this to the 50-page Red Cross document referenced earlier in the thread). In terms of next steps, I propose putting this on the agenda at the next Grow Mozilla meeting and anyone here who still has questions, comments or concerns should go there. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Grow/Meeting_06_26_14 We've had this on the agenda there three times already recently and the people working directly with new volunteers in functional and regional areas across the project have been supportive of the language and proposed method of adding it to the Get Involved page. Thanks, David _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
