Running an Idea By You - Github Contribution Bazaar

Community Ops
#1

Hey Community Ops People!!

I have had an idea! As we all know a perpetual challenge at Mozilla is
being able to connect the right people with the right projects. There are
many excellent and exciting projects all around Mozilla being run by staff
and contributors a like that are looking for new collaborators and
contributors.

For some time I have been thinking about creating a GitHub repo, at first
for participation related project driven by contributors, but now
potentially more broadly for any contributors looking for a place to post
and manage their projects.

Simultaneously I have staff looking for ways to connect with contributors
for support on specific projects.

Therefore My proposal is this:

I create (and then turn over to you fine people) a repo call
github.com/mozilla/contribute
http://github.com/mozilla/contribute that acts like an online
marketplace for contribution opportunities.

It is a place where contributors can look for collaborators, and staff can
post projects and/or tasks where they are looking for community
contribution.

We would set up a series of labels like:

  • Collaborators Needed
  • Coders Needed

as well as tags for the functional area to which it does or might relate
i.e.

  • Add-ons
  • Participation

etc.

Advantages:

  • We would get to see how many issues come through and are successfully
    closed from this marketplace (huzzah!).
  • It would be a one-stop shop for contribution (double-huzzah!)

Cons:

  • GitHub might freak some people out (people won’t know how to use it)
  • It might get to crowded to be useful

Anyways I think it would make sense to run this initially as a one or two
month experiment and I think it will need some management (clearing out
things that don’t fit, are innapropriate etc.) and some nurturing at the
start (getting people to use the repo, help pairing people with projects
and stuff manually at the beginning) and I know from experience this job is
too much for one lady!

Therefore I bring my idea to you fine people.

What do you think?

Is this a project you might be willing to experiment on with me?

Cheers,
Lucy

1 Like
#2

I think this is a great idea. We (Mozilla) have wanted something like this for ages, and Github seems like a great platform to prototype this on.

Have you talked to Josh Matthews? He’s done previous work in this space as I assume you already know.

We would need to think about what skills are involved in managing this and which tasks would be specifically ops, etc. As a group we have ended up doing more than just Ops, we’re trying to be a bit more clear on which things belong under which label, and then intentionally set up “sister” spaces and process for those tasks. For example, for Discourse, leo’s really been doing webdev, so we’re trying to stop referring to that work as Ops work. We’re still sorting out the right labels and of course the groups must work together, perhaps under an umbrella label for the collection of groups, perhaps not.

#3

Hey Kensie!!

Excellent! Let the experiment begin! Josh and I have chatted loads about contribution over the past year. He’s stellar and I’ll let him know about this experiment too.

First thing is to make all of you community-ops people who’d like to help manage this collaborators so you can assign things etc.

Secondly I think there are a few steps to getting this started.

  1. Figuring out if there are a few people from community-ops who’d like to be involved
  2. Figuring out what “success” of this would look like and setting up a testing time-line
  3. Deciding on some initial labels (we can always add more later once we see how it’s being used)
  4. Promotion

Tasks within this:

  • Some people to help with promotion
  • Some people who are willing to regularly check in with the repo, curate it, bring the right people in and help initial issues get rolling (generally give it some loooove)

I would say we keep it quick and dirty run it for a few months with some low criteria for success (like 10 issues created, 100 views, 3 issues close) and see what we think.

Thoughts? Should I bring it to the next community ops meeting? How would you like to proceed!

Lucy

#4

Ok, so this doesn’t appeal specifically to ops skills, but more to the fact that we have projects we’re trying to recruit for?

I would be interested in helping with curating, that’s the kind of task my brain processes easily, as is trying to put things into buckets and come up with names for those buckets.

I’d also highly encourage @leo to use it for trying to recruit people to help with Discourse development.

#5

Hey Kensie,

No worries if this isn’t totally a community ops piece. I was thinking it fit as a potentially cool new tool for communities who are looking for collaborators/supporters/help or new projects to work on.

If you can help me find some community-building type people that would be great! I’d love to find some people with a bit of time to help nurture this project off the ground!

Cheers,
Lucy

#6

FWIW, I had explored using volunteermatch.org a couple years ago for all of the reasons you listed.

1 Like
#7

Cool! I will be the first to admit this is many in a long line of tools that have attempted to do just this such as oneanddone, whatcanidoformozilla, bugsahoy each which has strengths and weaknesses.

What I hope will be an advantage of this is how easy it is for people to add issues to this, and that hopefully it ends up facilitating a direct connection between two people in a way that some of those other tools don’t.

Looking forward to seeing how this performs in comparison to some of those other tools!
-L

#8

Right, I think one of the strengths here is that it doesn’t require web dev or ops, github has that covered. Means all the work on putting up issues and managing them doesn’t have to wait for back-end work.

But you’re right, it does match what we’ve been working on in terms of it being a tool for empowering communities.

Let’s have a meeting to see how we can help, even if it’s as individuals, but maybe we can figure out the right umbrella as well.

1 Like
#9

@lucyeoh This is a great idea :smiley: It would be easy to know which are the new projects where new coders/contributors are needed…

#10

The Contribution Bazaar is up and running!! I need YOUR help creating some starter issues to get the ball rolling!

Please add issues in here that have a specific call to action that follow the issues template listed on the Read Me. Hopefully these will model the kind of things we want here!