On 6/20/14 11:46 PM, [email protected] wrote:
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
I don't think that preaching to your own choir is the answer here.
Also, it's been emphasized that everybody should be working with
contributors, not just the people on that call.
Please address the comments you receive on this forum here.
Axel
_______________________________________________
governance mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
