Mobilizer experiment - Rust (India)
Hello Mozillians,
A couple of months back I started to work on the mobilizer experiment pilot project with the following goals in mind:
- Understand the current state of Rust India community
- Analyze the roadblocks of enthusiastic participants
- Figure out solutions which will drive people into Rust projects
PFB the summary of the different stage of the project,
Research phase
What did you do?
- Identified and created profiles of a group of active Rust devs & community members representing diverse backgrounds such as region, age, gender, and profession
- Curated a list of questions for conducting interviews to understand the involvement and problems faced by sample survey group
What did you learn about the technology in your area?
- Rust was advocated well across students and mozillians as a state of art system programming language through various Mozilla projects like Servo
- Most of the non-mozillian survey group knew about Rust success via the stack over developer survey results
- Professionals saw opportunities to develop Rust libraries for their domain
- Students were excited about Servo project due to internship opportunities like GSOC
What did you learn in terms of mobilizing the community?
- Not many Rust mentors in the Indian community
- Majority of the group felt there aren’t many active Rust events happening
- People felt there is no proper pathways for contributing to active Mozilla’s Rust projects
First iteration
What did you do?
- Setup proper communication channel which included a telegram channel for Rust India community discussion and github repo for working collaboratively to collect all the event details & teaching kits
- Released slides and blogpost focussed on helping beginners to get started
What did you learn about the technology in your area?
- People conducting Rust events felt there are no Rust kits available which produces a tangible output at end of an event
What did you learn in terms of mobilizing the community?
- Github repo contents helped Rust event organizer to understand the important event metrics and correct contents
Second iteration
What did you do?
- Curated 3 Rust kits with proper documentation focusing on beginners and intermediate Rust developers
- Created trackable link for the Rust kit to evaluate outreach
- Rust kit was reviewed by couple of experienced Rust developers and the community team
- Communicated about the Kit via RainOfRust campaign
What did you learn about the technology in your area?
- People felt comfortable and happy using the Rust Kits as it was short, easy and application oriented
- Only a few startup in India are currently using Rust at production
- There are not many Rust developer jobs in India
What did you learn in terms of mobilizing the community?
- Keeping simple documentation helps in easier understanding of the concepts and helps in decreasing the learning curve associated with RustLang
- Kits provide people opportunities to try out materials that match their expertise in Rust
- Application specific kits help in accelerating learning of the concepts and builds confidence in developer
Third iteration
What did you do?
- Analyze community response of Rust development kit
- Collected feedbacks from participants who tried the Rust Kits and made corresponding changes
- Started mail thread with Rust community team to drive people into Rust projects
What did you learn about the technology in your area?
- Rust kits help in driving self-learning and increase participation across the groups
- Rust has many crates openly available whose utilities/methods can be advocated through RustKits
What did you learn in terms of mobilizing the community?
- Constantly encourage members to use Github repo for asking issues and submitting content, this helps in scaling and better interactions
- Github is a great platform for monitoring interaction, supporting issues and tracking growth of the initiative
On a personal note, it has been great learning opportunity and journey to know more about my community.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank @nukeador for his continuous support and mentorship throughout the project and also the Rust India community members who actively took part in my surveys and activities.
Looking forward to grow Rust India community and Kits via #RainOfRust campaign medium.
Thanks.
@dvigneshwer
