Contributors, Lurkers and Loudmouths

Contributors, lurkers and Loudmouths

How you define active or inactive by what measure

Mozilla - mailing lists and IRC, Wiki is written,

Wordpress - comments, contributing, work done?, chatting, how to measure it, suggestions, IRC. There are few OS groups who can figure out how to measure

Google - GSOC and help OS community.

Does commenting or 'online forum' count as contributing?

Libre Office - it can be subjective, useful or not

National Novel Writing Month - nanorima - how to build contributors to build back starting the process

Mozilla - bugmaster, workflow to help with bugzilla, lots of contributors, don't know who they are and to what extent. been approaching via data sources, expose last activity, people can get bogged down in minimum viable contribution

talking...contribution...- metrics and expose it

OpenHE - here to listen, global scale tracking hard to do

ushahidi - we have diverse community - some developers, but across topics, locations and skills, git, wiki, social platforms, some are not technical at all but want to use open source

Joomla - some contributors, some talkers

OpenMRS - global scope, cultural barriers, give voice to all , dabbled in quantitative, hard to do. uses mixed methods, case studies with contributors to help lead the path for others.

MOZ - site, gamefication points system, platforms, community active everywhere, active on site, there are people who read our content, use free tools, don't deeply participate (comment, ask question etc)

Oreilly - influencers, vocal, books, may not know conferences and events

Building offline communities in the physical world, environmental world.

What kinds of ideas do you have for levels of activity and contribution:

mozilla - level of commitment (users, supports, contributors, casual contributors, feedback providers, active contributors (community of in support forums, filing bugs etc), core (leadership, time devoted)

Community and wordpress - "community" but interests vary. Money - plugins and bloggers are different types of community members

Constellations of communities, care levels may change

Tension - "the one true way to contribute" vs make a good attempt

translators are valuable contributors - more clarification, helps guide the project

"you know it would be really helpful..." (guide to good behaviour)

be clear on how you can get involved more.

track, what you are working on, started and finished.

What are some of the ways you intice someone to participate

identify who might lead

mentoring, 101 and beyond

lots of inquiries, tracking,give levels of steps,

What are the levels (Liz, Mozilla) of conversion -

inquiries

answer

do next steps, have an account, tier them up

Hard to balance both of those.

Build training missions - courera

Could we come together - openhatch - make some backend training courses. is it generic enough, could we across projects come up with lists.

Data missions - OKFN has data expeditions to help build the knowledge sets. Mozilla has missions, Open Hatch does these too.

http://blog.okfn.org/2013/05/20/data-expedition-mapping-the-garment-factories/

http://schoolofdata.org/

Simple things to do, training wheels, we want people who can absorb and synthesize

activity streams can help - see what is happening with all the channels. get it auto- aggregated to run reports. it may not be full of richness. can help with surfacing

Sometimes different email addresses or usernames by tools, hard to view.

Wordpress strategy:

Small tasks

drive by edits

handholding, want self starters, trying to build training to help with self -serve, not focusing at super beginner or super expert

Made broken plugins and do exercises to teach how to fix it, "break fix" training  breakfix.elf.... need the rest to view

threshold places to fix, and help folks level up - middle ground

Experienced - tools, stuff, people doing stuff, ask for help

Mozilla - built a directory for the community, want to hook up to other systems to show what they are doing, linked - humans, maybe they won't tag

wordpress has profiles, activity streams, has a GSOC project to help build out this space, wordpress summit - split sites, not always visible into it.

oreilly - sometimes hard to reach community as they don't know about the community. reads books, active, well known, but don't know about the other resources