2019 Mozilla Communities & Contributors Survey and State of the Rebel Alliance Report

Mozillians
#1

Hello everyone,

Mozilla is built upon openness and transparency as our core values, both in the products we make and in how we operate. We rely upon open, collaborative practices to bring in external perspectives, knowledge, creativity and contribution to many of our products, technologies, and operations. And this is only possible because of you: skilled, passionate contributors and communities with various backgrounds, disciplines, and motivations. Together with like-minded organizations and companies, universities and NGOs you form what we have started to call our “Rebel Alliance” - underlining that we can achieve collaboratively is more than a single organization could ever do alone.

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As many of you might remember, in 2017 the Open Innovation Team conducted a first-of-its kind research project, in which we surveyed over 1,000 volunteers and ran a quantitative study looking at 16 years of contribution data in Bugzilla, GitHub, on email lists and elsewhere to help inform the organization about how we could ‘revitalize participation’ at Mozilla. The results not only provided invaluable insights into our communities but also informed our Open by Design strategy, which we have been steadily implementing.

Now, we plan to repeat this comprehensive “pulse check” of our contributor communities and hope for as stellar survey completion rates as 2017! We will need 10 minutes of your time to help us better understand Mozilla’s relationships with volunteers and collaborators.We have added a few new questions related to contributor community diversity and inclusion, issues in which we invest quite a lot of our hearts and time.

The survey is localized in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic and can be found in the links below:

Please note that it will be open until May 3rd. We aim to publish the results together with the findings of the contribution data analysis this Summer and will communicate progress steps along the way.

In all of this work, we are handling data in line with our Mozilla Privacy Policy and in close consultation with Mozilla’s legal and trust teams.

Many thanks to everyone in advance for their participation!

Mozilla Open Innovation

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#2

Hello,

I am a long time QA and translator. I’d love to answer this survey!!! So please contact me whenever it’s available!!!

Regards,
Gabriela

#3

Thank you, Gabriela! I will add the link to the survey to this article as soon as I have it in a final format, for sure in the next couple of days. I’ll also drop you a line when this is done.

#4

Thank you so much! I’ll be looking forward to answer it!

#5

Hey Gabriela,

As promised, I am letting you know that Ive just added the survey links - you can take it whenever you have a moment:) Thanks so much!

#6

I think this is a bug and should say “last” instead of “first”?

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Edit: and if not, this is a duplicate question as there is also:

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#7

You’re right - It should say last. Thanks a lot for catching that - I modified. And thanks for taking the survey!

#8

I was quite unsure when answering whether developing (Firefox) WebExtensions also counts as contributing (especially as they are often available for other browsers, too), If so, answers may be very different. (But on the other hand, one could often select “WebExtensions” or so there.)

Also some questions were somehow asked twice (like what you contributed and when was your first contribution IIRC). I am not sure whether this was intended.

#9

Hey, thanks a lot for taking the time to send us feedback! On your second point - yes, it was intended like this. We had run a very similar survey 1.5 years ago and would like to be able to understand how contribution changed during the period between this year’s survey and 2017 - that’s why you saw questions like where did you contribute to Mozilla in general vs where did you contribute to Mozilla in the last year.

#10

Hi

When does the survey close?

#11

Hey, May 3rd. Thanks!

Next community meeting: April 24, 2019
#12

@leo We might want to have this as a discourse banner until May 3rd.

2 Likes
#13

I was linked to the survey from BMO. I filled it in, but I was surprised there was no way to point out that I am (currently) paid to work fulltime on a Mozilla project (Firefox, in my case). I used to be a volunteer, and I still subscribe to the broad definition of “contributor” (ie, everyone who contributes anything to Mozilla is a contributor, and some of them are volunteers and some are employees (some MoCo, some others like Red Hat or whatever)). I don’t know if that’s my mistake and if I missed that we decided those definitions no longer made sense, or if it was an oversight that there was no way to indicate anything about this, or something else, but I figured I’d flag it up.

1 Like
#14

Gjis: that appears to be the very first question on the survey. Unless they just fixed that in the last 4 hours.

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#15

And if you answer that you’re an employee it says “thanks for participating” and you’re done. Guess they mostly want to hear from non-employees.

#16

Hello Gjis and justdave,

Thank you both for your input!

Indeed, through this survey we want to hear from our non paid contributors - that’s why the first question has that logic applied.

Gjis, from your description you are currently a paid Mozilla employee , hence, if you selected that option, it’s expected behavior for you to land directly at the end of the survey. Hope my answer clarifies things.

Hermina

#17

Well, more fool me - I read the first answer, the second answer, and then assumed the answers were sorted and so selected the first answer without reading the rest of the list


#18
#19

It’s not clear what “contribute” means, so I’m stuck on the first question. I’ve never contributed code in any way. I’ve “contributed” bug reports, forum replies, survey answers, etc.

#20

Hey,

‘Contribution’ doesn’t refer only to code contributions, but to any type of input - bug reports, forum replies, localization, writing articles etc.
I hope this clarifies and thank you for taking this survey!:slight_smile:

Hermina