As a longtime contributor, I’m also concerned about the current situation. The
contribution starting point (or Mozilla’s information architecture in general)
is a total mess.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/signup/
https://codetribute.mozilla.org/
https://activate.mozilla.community/
https://campus.mozilla.community/
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/participate/
https://mozilla.github.io/webdev/
https://www.whatcanidoformozilla.org/
and that’s not all. The Participation team should be doing a much better job
here.
Speaking to Bugzilla where I’m volunteering as a UX designer, improving the
onboarding experience for both contributors and new Mozilla employees is one of
my goals in 2019 [1], but it will be possible only when stakeholders are
involved.
[1] https://github.com/bugzilla/bugzilla-ux/wiki/Bugzilla-7-Roadmap#even-more
-Kohei
On 2018-10-04 8:41 PM, Mike Hommey wrote:
On Thu, Oct 04, 2018 at 05:14:47PM -0700, fantasai wrote:
On 10/04/2018 04:26 PM, Steve Fink wrote:
On 10/04/2018 03:45 PM, fantasai wrote:
Start here, at Mozilla's home page:
https://www.mozilla.org/
Give me steps to reproduce to find instructions for filing
a bug against Firefox. Ditto for up-to-date instructions
for building the source and submitting a patch.
(Don't send me links to the instructions; I'm cheating by
asking here already. Walk me through the process of
discovering how I can contribute to Mozilla and make the
world a better place. I wouldn't be here if I hadn't
already walked that path 19 years ago, but I can't find it
anymore so I need some help.)
I tried it out, and did better than I expected on my first run-through:
[...]
I'm impressed! Want to take a stab at finding patch-submission
instructions? :D
I agree that a nice path from www.mozilla.org would be beneficial,
especially for promoting the volunteer aspect of the project.
We've got a lot of highly-produced (read: expensive) material
promoting the volunteer aspect of Mozilla:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/
But afaict none of it actually leads to a viable path towards
actually becoming a technical contributor...
From my discussions with staff at Mozilla, the people actually
working with volunteers (like QA and l10n) find this very
frustrating, but the people whose job it is to connect volunteers
to opportunities to contribute don't think it's useful, important,
or in some cases even a good idea to fix this problem. I don't
know how to break through that resistance, and I find it very
demoralizing that there even is any. :(
I'm also disconnected enough from Mozilla the last few years
that I've no idea where up-to-date documentation on this stuff
would live. If I ever manage to dig myself out of the backlog
of spec work enough to write a patch, I'd like to know where
to look!
Fwiw, here's how I arrived at becoming a technical contributor:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000125153750/http://www.mozilla.org:80/
https://web.archive.org/web/20000301043132/http://www.mozilla.org:80/get-involved.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20000302035824/http://www.mozilla.org:80/quality/bug-writing-guidelines.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20000304015940/http://www.mozilla.org:80/newlayout/bugathon.html
I gave a shot at a generic "I want to contribute" approach of the web
site.
Starting from https://www.mozilla.org, there's a "Get Involved" link at
the top, which leads to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/, which
has another "Get Involved" button... which leads to
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/signup/, a disappointing list of
3 simple items, 3 "more challenging" items, and ... nothing else.
And what items:
- simple
- Connect with Mozilla on Twitter
- Use Firefox on your phone
- Discover why we can't live without encryption
- more challenging:
- watch someone live hack on Firefox
- Learn a bit about coding (which is disappointingly a link to
developer tools challenger)
- Start using the Mozilla Sumbler app
Why there's no link to https://codetribute.mozilla.org/ is beyond me
(and it does not help to get to filing new bugs, though)
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