So I was asked to work on developing a proposal for how participation can involve volunteers.
I looked at that from the opposite direction, and thought about how volunteers like to be intergrated. I came up with interesting summaries of different types of Mozillian I’ve encountered at Mozilla.
Note that while the document focuses on volunteers, the three groups can probably be applied to employees too.
Then it hit me. It’s been nearly 3 years since anybody researched the state of our community, and more particularly, the people within it. And even then, when we did publish a document about different types of ‘contributors’, I don’t feel as if a wide enough range of people had some influence on how that document was written.
If we want to plan for participation, would it not make sense that we learn from the people we already have?
My current experiment is talking to mozillians from all contexts and backgrounds from Mozilla to try and build a report on different categories of volunteers, and best practices for working with them.
Before I do that, is anybody else doing something similar, or have any thoughts?