I have some quiet time today to work on what I’m (currently) calling Participation Personas. For some of our goals around education it seems key that we know who our audience is, at every stage. This comes from a few conversations talking about participation ladders and ‘entry points’.
For context: a ladder is a way to envision the progression of participation from one task to the next. This works really well when you’re talking about code contributors (setup your environment locally, take a bug, submit a pull request etc), but it’s a little trickier when you’re talking about pathways for something like Market Research where ‘steps’ on the ladder can also be both entry points and specializations. (I’ll expand on this soon with a blog post)
In preparation for designing those ladders/pathway ‘steps’ and entry points I wanted to think more deliberately about the audience for each. On our Education call today we had a great chat about this - and have two link examples:
Goal: Real life contributors are complex and always changing, but these personas will more easily let us enter the headspace of the individuals and their unique perspectives. As we contemplate participation and learning pathways, we can refer to our personas by name.
Would it be appropriate to add skills to these personas at this stage? I think at Mozilla we spend too much time assuming and designing for code contributors. I think we need to be a lot more thoughtful about where people of other skills can fit.
The way I am thinking of it is skills as meta. It’s something we will think about when designing for specific pathways, but not at this level.
Let me say that a goal of this is to not be specific to any skill, but rather ‘time and place’ . So if you see places where it feels otherwise, I would appreciate those comments!
This may sound odd but as a contributor I see a lot of areas that are rather well rounded and have a lot of work put into them… but then I know of at least one that there is next to nothing for contributors that want to learn in that area. I personally love doing QA with the B2G platform (Fire fox OS) but i have found next to nothing for that area. The most I have been able to get is from a QA or two… such as Naoki Hirata and Peter Bylenga… I think there is some areas in which there should be some more expansion. There is plenty for add-ons… plenty for web development… but I think that Mozilla should look closer into the areas for participation and see what it lacks. QA is a rather important part of development and working towards the future… how do you have a grand company with no quality. If there is a lacking section for QA what else is there could be improved to draw in a better crowd of people that want to learn and help.
@charja13 I am going to ping @Ioana for feedback on this - I know there are some really excellent pathways in Q/A but perhaps that work doesn’t touch all areas. I’m sure Ioana can say more.
Your comments also have me thinking a lot today, about intersection of participation and designing pathways/ladders that expose opportunities across Mozilla vrs the single-project focus. (horizontal and vertical)
I’m writing out something about participation pathways/ladders right now, and your comments are super-helpful. I’ll share my first draft here for feedback as well. Thanks again!
@emma_irwin Thank you, It just seems from what i can find that there is not much for that area which is my favorite and hope to someday be employed doing so. I enjoy seeing that Mozilla seems to greatly care about its contributors, and strives to keep them. Also to hopefully gain even more over the years.
Would be curious if this a ) make sense and b) it would help you to think of opportunities between projects vrs there being only one path in a project.
@emma_irwin I like that model quite a bit, I think that makes a lot of sense, also i like that you show that it can be transferred and makes it quite obvious that they are not stuck on one path and will lose progress if they switch. I personally don’t care so much for the recognition but there is little to no recognition for people in QA which may lead to deterring people from QA due to it seems to be more rewarding to do patching and writing of code. I personally am still climbing my ladder of QA which the top of it is to get a job working for Mozilla, but I know many people will not have that far of an outlook or not plan that far to have something to strive for. That was meant as an example, I think we need to take a look at the recognition system and look at the different branches and try to make sure each has their own achievements and goals. Please tell me if i am off topic or seem to be rambling.
I’m glad you see his value in this early proposal - thank you. Your comments about recognition match what the David Eaves study of last year indicated - that “recognition had little to no effect on motivation”. But although recognition isn’t why we came here, it’s not to say we don’t appreciate kind words, or acknowledgement of our accomplishments. I know I do. So I do get what you’re saying about QA. And I think that ‘working fo Mozilla’ is the top of many personal ladders - that’s an important point as well.
You are not off topic OR rambling, this is wonderful feedback
there is no ONE QA TEAM and his is making super difficult to get data about QA in general
we do have several way to recognize contributors depending on the team: online badges, devices, blog posts about it and invitations to several mozilla events.
firefox os qa at the moment is split into official one on flame ( both employees and contributors), experiments ( keon,tablet).
the Firefox OS tablet program was run by @asa but unfortunately he has some health issues lately so was out and the program stopped. Also the changes in Firefox OS did not include Fx OS Tablet so the development there kind of stagnated.
we did not have an assigned person for community - so employees had to do it from their work time -as we are outnumbered in work ( we need more qa) you can imagine people did not had much time for this.
we do have some some paths and we are trying to get the stronger and more visible…
I hope I did reply to all of the points - If I missed any please let me know.
PS: I am not an employee so I might not have access to all decisions/knowledge.
Regarding QA, until recently QA has not had someone focused on Community Management. I am in that role now, but my role at the moment doesn’t span all the areas of QA (Services/WebQA/FX OS QA). The other programs you cite (Addons, Web Development) have established community managers in place for several years, and they have had much more time to be able to build and train community in their respective areas.
FX OS has had some challenges to community getting involved (Devices/Builds) that have been resolved now by having a Flame reference device and builds and base images publicly available.
I am big proponent of training, but to date there hasn’t really been an event where we could work with community and teach them about the various aspects of QA. Virtual events are great, but with everyone in different time zones it is often challenging for us to be able to participate. Also, there are some areas such as Crash Analysis and Device debugging that might be easier to be taught in person to start. The BuddyUp Pilot we recently launched is an example of bringing community together to train them and have them take ownership of the testing long term. This project is still underway, and we welcome participation by those that are interested in FX OS app testing.
If possible and or wanted i would like to help with setting stuff up for the firefox os QA or anything to that effect. I work just about everyday on firefox os and I am always looping in new contributors to firefox os, and would like to help set up an easy way to help bring in and introduce new contributors to the platform.
I am updating these slowly, in-between higher priority work to support the thinking we do teaching community. Your feedback so far has been a huge help - and hope you’ll continue with your thoughts as you see these come to life. I’ll post again as full bios are completed.