Building Participation Resources

Mozillians
#1

I am reworking and improving on the Playbook we used to run participation sessions in Whistler, which got me thinking about how to better expose this content, and invite others to both use this material in their own areas, and improve if they see the need.

My preference is to avoid keeping things like this in Google Docs, and instead making it findable in a Github repository as I do the community curriculum. My reasons are:

  1. Github makes it easy for community to contribute improvements.
  2. Standard for content would be Markdown which makes content modular - and super-easy to export (including cut & paste to a wiki). It’s also what we use for community curriculum, so it’s been tested.
  3. It ties into our Heartbeat platform.
  4. People can propose improvements, or report issues via Github issues.

I have loosely (meaning I am not super-attached to this) proposed a Participation (github.com/mozilla/participation) repository for resources we are building vrs a single repo for each resource. The directory might look something like this:

Workshops

  • Play Book
  • Leadership Training
  • Mentor Training
  • Community Onboarding
    Design Resources
  • Participation Personas
  • Designing Participation ‘Steps’ and Ladders
    And So On
  • Something
    And So Forth
  • Another Something

Wondering people’s thoughts on this. I will 100% admit I like using the Wiki for documentation but not for living, and dynamic documents - or what I feel is a project like building resources for participation. Alternate approaches might be to have one repo for each category ie: participation-workshops or that each resource have it’s own repo entirely (which is where I think things start getting lost)

#2

I’ve been toying with the idea that some documentation projects should actually be product-oriented projects that just happen to be documentation. I love what Webmaker did with http://book.webmaker.org/ because it feels like a discrete product and can possibly improve over time like a product unlike more casual feeling forms of documentation which often seem to fall by the wayside.

The tooling they used for the Webmaker playbook is discussed here: http://book.webmaker.org/about.html

#3

Hey @CaptainCalliope I was going to mention gitbook but then decided not to braindump everything - so thanks for mentioning it :slight_smile: I think actually gitbook is what the heartbeat UI is built on anyway? (could be wrong, I need time to play with it)

https://www.gitbook.com/

I’m not sure I would use the word product, but definitely a resource that could be leveraged by other communities would be cool.

+1 to making this not feel like documentation.